Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

UPDATE: Within hours of our posting below, Medscape posted the following retraction notice. While we welcome thought-provoking and even controversial points of view in our commentaries and in comments from our readers, we do not endorse weight bias, nor bias towards any group. After careful review, the editors at Medscape have decided to retract this […]

UPDATE: Within days of our posting below, Medscape posted the following retraction notice. While we welcome thought-provoking and even controversial points of view in our commentaries and in comments from our readers, we do not endorse weight bias, nor bias towards any group. After careful review, the editors at Medscape have decided to retract this […]

We like to be optimistic. In many, many ways, things are getting better for dealing with obesity. Science is giving us a much better understanding of the physiology of this disease. AMA and medical organizations all over the world recognize it a chronic disease, not evidence of some sort of character flaw. And treatment options […]

People who live in large bodies find themselves the target of fat-phobic and body shaming messages on a daily basis. Ellen Maud Bennett died of cancer on May 11, 2018, and she used her obituary to ask the medical profession to stop fat-shaming the ill. She is not alone. Weight bias is everywhere in our […]

New research in PLOS Genetics provides deeper insight than ever into the role that skinny genes may play in protecting an individual from obesity. Senior investigator Sadaf Farooqi sums it up: This research shows for the first time that healthy thin people are generally thin because they have a lower burden of genes that increase a […]

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Friday revoked all of the honorary titles of James Watson, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for describing the structure of DNA. Why? Because in a new PBS documentary, he restated abhorrent views on ethnicity and genetics. Racism can lead people to shun you. Weight bias […]

Talk is cheap. And a new study in Psychological Science tells us that when it comes to talk about weight bias, we’re making slow progress. Explicit bias is down a bit over the last decade. But when it comes to action, this same study shows that implicit weight bias is growing, not shrinking. This new data comes […]

Euphemisms. We hear them in when people talk about their health. My sugar is a little high. I’d like to lose a few pounds, but it’s not a big deal. I just need to watch what I’m eating. Fine. But there comes a time when you can’t fake it anymore. The Royal College of Physicians in London […]

No doubt, the intentions behind this headline were good. “Obesity is too dangerous to normalize,” said a letter to the editor on Sunday in the Washington Post. That letter came in response to a commentary about plus-size fashion that pleaded for clothes that will let bigger women simply be themselves. And feel good about it, […]

Plus fashion is growing up and perhaps moving into the mainstream. It’s inevitable. In a world where roughly 75 percent of the population is living at a high BMI, fashion that focuses only on stick-thin models can’t survive. But growing up is hard. So plus fashion is in its awkward phase, as Washington Post fashion […]