A recent study investigating weight bias in the courtroom has apparently concluded that both the “weight and gender of a defendant may affect juror perceptions of guilt and responsibility.” N. A. Schvey, et al., “The influence of a defendant’s body weight on perceptions of guilt,” International Journal of Obesity, January 2013. The study relied on responses from 471 lean and overweight adults “who read a vignette describing a case of check fraud while viewing one of four images (a lean male, a lean female, an obese male or an obese female)” and then “rated the defendant’s culpability on a 5-point Likert scale and completed measures of anti-fat attitudes.” According to the study, “male participants judged the obese female defendant as significantly guiltier than the lean female defendant,” although female respondents “judged the two female defendants equally regardless of body weight.” Lean male participants also apparently believed that “the obese female defendant…
Tag Archives obesity
Wall Street Journal columnist Carl Bialik recently authored two related articles questioning whether body mass index (BMI) is a reliable data point insofar as it “lumps together all body mass, including bone, muscle and beneficial fat, rather than singling out the more dangerous abdominal fat, which most researchers see as the real threat to health.” In particular, Bialik focuses on a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report finding that out of 2.9 million people involved in 97 studies, those participants whose BMI classified them as overweight had a 6 percent lower risk of death than those classified as normal weight. But Bialik notes that several scientists have since criticized the results of CDC’s report, partly because threshold BMIs in the mid-to-high 20s tend to paint “a wide range of body types… with the same brush.” He adds that Pennington Biomedical Research Center Executive Director Steven Heymsfield,…
A recent survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC) indicates that even though Americans apparently understand many of the reasons behind increasing rates of obesity and the alleged link between obesity and chronic health conditions, people are split on their support for government policies that would affect consumers’ food and beverage choices. “The American public has clearly gotten the message about obesity as a major public health issue, including its connection to other major health problems,” said Trevor Tompson, director of the AP-NORC Center. “What is less clear is consensus about how to address the issue and a surprising number of overweight people who are not told by their physicians that it is an issue that needs attention.” For example, one-third of those surveyed said the government should be deeply involved in finding ways to curb obesity, while a similar proportion wanted little or no…
In a University of Oxford Press (UOP) blog post titled “From cigarettes to obesity, public health at risk,” University of Florida Psychiatry Professor Mark Gold advances his food addiction hypothesis and suggests, “If overeating is due to food acquiring drug-like or tobacco-like brain reinforcement properties, then the current globesity and overeating-related health crisis might have lessons to learn from tobacco.” Gold recently co-edited a book of essays, Food and Addiction, and claims that taxes on soft drinks, like taxes on cigarettes, could reduce consumption. According to Gold, animal tests show “that sucrose and fructose corn syrup are self-administered as if they were drugs and that an opiate-like abstinence syndrome could be produced by detoxification or antagonist administration.” He claims that new treatments based on the addiction hypothesis should address food preferences “and not just appetite.” He concludes, “New approaches, evidence-based approaches, like those that have been used successfully to develop…
Science Writer Gary Taubes, who authored Why We Get Fat, writes in Nature magazine that obesity is not a matter of energy in-energy out, but is rather a “hormonal, regulatory defect.” In his December 13, 2012, article titled “Treat obesity as physiology, not physics,” Taubes bases this conclusion on endocrinology and calls for better research into hormonal theories about why we get fat. To that end, he has co-founded the Nutrition Science Initiative, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to reducing the economic and social burden of obesity and obesity-related chronic disease by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research.” Among other matters, the initiative will “fund and facilitate the trials necessary to rigorously test the competing hypotheses, beginning with inpatient feeding studies that will rigorously control dietary interventions for participants so that we know unambiguously the effects of macronutrients— protein, fat and carbohydrates—on weight and body fat.” Taubes…
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has introduced a bill to deny federal tax deductions to companies marketing “junk food” to children. The Stop Subsidizing Childhood Obesity Act (H.R. 6599) would “amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to protect children’s health by denying any deduction for advertising and marketing directed at children to promote the consumption of food at fast food restaurants or of food of poor nutritional quality.” In a recent press release, Kucinich contends that Congress—with [citizens’] tax dollars—has subsidized the marketing efforts of fast food and junk food companies by as much as $19 billion over the past 10 years. “In 2004 alone, $10 billion was spent on food advertising directed at children. It is effective because a child’s brain is unable to distinguish fact from fiction at a time they are developing life-long taste allegiance. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. According to The Journal…
The Obesity Policy Coalition (OPC) has sent a report to Australian officials on the country’s current self-regulatory system for food marketing, which OPC has described as “seriously flawed.” According to the coalition, the codes developed by the food industry to govern marketing to children “are extremely complex,” resulting in “a litany of loopholes” that companies have allegedly exploited “to promote their products despite childhood obesity sitting at record levels.” In particular, the report claims that self-regulatory codes (i) do not apply to all food advertisers or all age-groups of children, (ii) “only cover advertising that is ‘directed primarily to children,’” (iii) fail to cover many forms of promotion and media, and (iv) rely on “unclear” criteria for determining what is healthy or unhealthy. It also finds the administration and enforcement of these codes “grossly inadequate” since “the scheme relies entirely on complaints from the public.” Faulting the Advertising Standards Board…
Two health experts who recently appeared on Australia’s ABC Lateline have reportedly called for additional government regulation to help combat rising obesity levels. University of Melbourne Professor Rob Moodie, who previously chaired Australia’s Preventative Health Taskforce, reportedly suggested that because voluntary programs have failed to curb obesity and diabetes rates, the government should step in with mandatory policies designed to tackle “the junk food industry the same way it confronted the tobacco industry.” “What they’ve failed to do is bring in the policies to reduce the obesigenic food environment,” Deakin University Professor Boyd Swinburn told Lateline’s Margot O’Neill. “Restrict marketing of junk foods to children, take fiscal policies, taxes, subsidies to make healthy foods cheaper and so on. That’s where the failure is: not addressing the unhealthy food environment.” But a representative from the Australian Food and Grocery Council countered that childhood obesity rates have already stopped increasing thanks, in…
A Reuters special report has claimed that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO), has accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from food and beverage companies to combat obesity. According to journalists Duff Wilson and Adam Kerlin, WHO and five of its regional offices already prohibit industry funding, but PAHO—“founded 46 years before it was affiliated with WHO in 1948—had different standards allowing the business donations.” In particular, the report cites contributions from Nestlé and Unilever as evidence that PAHO and other WHO entities are partnering with industry out of necessity since the international agency “cut its own funding for chronic disease by 20 percent since 2010—an even bigger decline than for the agency as a whole.” “The recent infusion of corporate cash is the most pointed example to date of how WHO is approaching its battle against chronic disease. Increasingly, it…
Researchers with McGill University have reportedly identified a genetic mutation linked to the development of mood disorders and obesity in humans.Carl Ernst, et al., “Highly Penetrant Alterations of a Critical Region Including BDNF in Human Psychopathology and Obesity,”Archives of General Psychiatry,October 2012. After screening more than 35,000 people referred for genetic testing and comparing the results with data from approximately 30,000 control subjects, scientists found five participants with a rare genomic deletion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), “a nervous system growth factor that plays a critical role in brain development.” These participants all exhibited obesity and “mild-moderate intellectual impairment” as well as a mood disorder. “The consensus phenotype for individuals with a deletion in BDNF suggests that young children are hyperactive and have an intolerance to change. As subjects age, they likely develop more pronounced anxiety and mood disorders, exemplified by the 16-year-old and 21-year-old subjects with major depressive disorder and…
