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  • Writer's pictureSasha Borissenko

EPISODE 10: Where to from here?


The final episode of the Chewing the Facts podcast investigates why people are fixated with the idea of personal choice over facts, and what can be done about it.


When *Cath goes on a bus, she feels both visible and invisible.


“There can be a perfectly serviceable seat beside me, but a person won’t sit there because ‘they might be too close to the fat lady,’ she told Chewing the Facts.


Assumptions are made that she takes up more space than she actually does, and the same assumptions aren’t made for tall or broad-shouldered people, she says.


“There’s this whole underlying thing that ‘you chose to be fat and you did this to yourself’. I’ve tried to do a lot of things to not be fat in my life, but I’ve never tried to actively do anything to be fat. It’s just how I am.”


A 2018 meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies found more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years. By five years, more than 80 per cent was regained.


Contrary to popular belief, studies show food digestion accounts for 8-15 per cent of total energy output, metabolic rate can account for 60-80 per cent, and physical activity accounts for just 15-30 per cent.


Specific genes inform the way hormones and metabolism are expressed. Genetic influence varies between 25 and 80 per cent of the factors behind how some people gain weight.


The World Health Organisation classified o*esity as a disease in 1999, citing genetic disposition and a change in food and work environment.


Public narrative researcher Jess Berentson Shaw says despite decades worth of research debunking the idea of personal choice, it’s embedded in Aotearoa’s cultural environment.


“There’s a type of thinking, which we call meritocracy, which is if you work hard, you will succeed and do well. You see it in health, and poverty - ‘people can pull themselves out of poverty because everyone gets the same opportunities’.”


The human brain is designed to process information subconsciously through set values, which are driven by media, government policy, and education messaging, she says.


In a 2016 study, more than 2000 participants were given news articles portraying fatness as a health concern resulting from poor choices, and articles detailing the opposite.


Links were found between negative articles and greater fat discrimination. Positive, stereotype-free images led to a decline in prejudice. Multiple studies have produced similar findings.


Berentson Shaw also says confirmation bias means any scientific or factual information that contradicts embedded values may be subconsciously rejected.


“There’s a whole cognitive chain of events, which now sit in people’s heads and facts just really bounce off these mindsets and narratives that people are already holding.”


Cath says even though people may see it’s wrong to discriminate against people, fat people are not included in the equation.


“There’s always some sort of caveat - what about your health? What about how much you’re costing the taxpayer?’ I’ve been a taxpayer for 38 years and I’m certainly not getting back what I’ve paid in tax.”


In fact, studies show fat discrimination has been linked with high blood pressure, inflammation, and cholesterol, sleep disturbance, alcohol use, mental health conditions, suicidality, disordered eating, weight gain, and death.


Size discrimination isn’t included in the Human Rights Act, meaning it’s legal to discriminate against people in health, education, goods and services, and public settings.


Berentson-Shaw says policy-makers and media need to move away from an individual focus in favour of research-driven messaging to promote more nuanced, complex ways of thinking.


“When you ask people in these situations, you will hear what we call ‘less dominant’ or often suppressed ways of thinking.


“And you will start to hear people reason that [the food] environment matters. You will hear people reason, that ‘actually, there is a [hereditary] element. You will hear, ‘maybe it is more complex than this, and when I tried to lose weight that time, it was really hard’.”


*Not her real name


Chewing the Facts - new episodes out every Sunday. Produced with the NZ Herald, with support from NZ On Air. Show notes and research are available via chewingthefacts.com.


You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.


This article was originally published via the NZHerald here.


RESEARCH AND SOURCES:

- The relationship between emotional abilities and right-wing and prejudiced attitudes

- A dual-process cognitive-motivational theory of ideology and prejudice

- Implicit and explicit ethnocentrism: revisiting the ideologies of prejudice

- Allport’s prejudiced personality today: Need for closure as the motivated cognitive basis of prejudice

- Obesity stigma: Causes, consequences, and potential solutions

- How obesity became a disease

- Fat phobia and its racist past and present

- Stigma in practice: Barriers to health for fat women

- When body size blocks a diagnosis

- In obesity research, fatphobia is always the x factor

- The racist roots of fighting obesity

- How mindset and narrative shifts can enable change: A briefing paper

- Publicly fat: Narratives of fatphobia, diet culture, and intersectional feminism

- Fat activism information and resources

- Fat as a neoliberal epidemic: Analyzing fat bodies through the lens of political epidemiology

- Fat phobia: measuring, understanding, and changing anti-fat attitudes

- Tversky and Kahneman’s cognitive illusions: Who can solve them, and why?

- Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia

- Life in this fat body: Exploring the multiple realities of fat embodiment

- Headless fatties

- Explainer: What is fat studies?

- Revisiting the Fat Liberation Manifesto 46 years later

- How the use of BMI fetishizes white embodiment and racializes fat phobia

- The obesity myth: Why America's obsession with weight is hazardous to your health

- America's moral panic over obesity

- It's time to drop the moral panic about fatness

- The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic?

- Trust, trustworthiness, and relationships: Ontological reflections on public trust in science

- U.S. adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets

- Social media, body image and food choices in healthy young adults: A mixed methods systematic review

- Influence and effects of weight stigmatisation in media: A systematic review

- Healthy food on Instagram social network: Vegan, homemade and clean eating

- Fitspiration on social media: Body-image and other psychopathological risks among young adults. A narrative review

- Body figure idealization and body appearance pressure in fitness instructors

- Public health messages and weight-related beliefs: Implications for well-being and stigma

- A call to shift the public health focus away from weight

- Experiences of reframing during self‐directed weight loss and weight loss maintenance: systematic review of qualitative studies

- Addressing the complexity of equitable care for larger patients: A critical realist framework

- Becoming and fostering allies and accomplices through authentic relationships: Choosing justice over comfort

- Patterns of implicit and explicit attitudes: I. Long-term change and stability from 2007 to 2016

- Study: Bias drops dramatically for sexual orientation and race - but not weight

- Fat activism: Fat Liberation Manifesto

- Maintenance of lost weight and long-term management of obesity

- Increases in physical activity result in diminishing increments in daily energy expenditure in mice

- Information processing

- Headless bodies found in shameless media

- Weight bias in the media: A review of recent research

- Positive media portrayals of obese persons: Impact on attitudes and image preferences

- Effects of competing news media frames of weight on antifat stigma, beliefs about weight and support for obesity-related public policies

- Narrative ads: The effect of argument strength and story format

- Comment: Obesity as a disease - some implications for the World Obesity Federation's advocacy and public health activities

- International human-rights treaties

- Principles of Cabinet decision-making

- The potential role of the Edmonton Obesity Stating System in determining indications for bariatric surgery

- Weight bias among health care professionals: A systematic review and meta-analysis

- Addressing the complexity of equitable care for larger patients: A critical realist framework

- Fat but fit: Can we please reframe this debate already?

- Obese women’s barriers to mammography and Pap smear: The possible role of personality

- Weight stigma as a risk factor for suicidality

- Weight stigma and health behaviors: evidence from the Eating in America Study

- Perceived weight discrimination mediates the prospective association between obesity and physiological dysregulation: Evidence from a population-based cohort

- Media and its influence on obesity

- The cost of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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