The obsession with calculating the "cost of ob*sity" to society reflects our troubling tendency to commodify human life and health. In this rather ragey and explosive episode, I expose how a widely-cited figure of £98 billion was manufactured by pharmaceutical interests to sell weight loss drugs.
I challenge the notion that we "owe" society a debt of health and explore how weight stigma, not weight itself, drives depression and poor health outcomes. Through a rather provocative thought experiment, I reveal the absurdity of reducing human experience to economic calculations and argue that tackling stigma, not eradicating fatness, is the real path forward.
Today's journal article was: Stevens, Serena D et al. “Adult and childhood weight influence body image and depression through weight stigmatization.” Journal of health psychology vol. 22,8 (2017): 1084-1093. doi:10.1177/1359105315624749
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