Stigmatization of fatness is globalizing rapidly, with Western negative attitudes toward overweight people spreading even to countries where large bodies have traditionally been valued, according to a cross-cultural study of attitudes to obesity to be published in the April issue of Current Anthropology.
For the study, researchers from Arizona State University surveyed 680 adults living in urban areas in 10 countries and territories around the world, including Argentina, Iceland, Mexico, Paraguay, New Zealand, the UK and the US. They also surveyed respondents in American Samoa, Puerto Rico and Tanzania, cultures that have traditionally been regarded as having positive attitudes towards fatness.
The survey was done mostly via in-person interviews, supplemented with questions posed over the Internet.
It looked for cultural variation in how people viewed and stigmatized excess weight and obesity by asking questions about whether they agreed or disagreed with a range of statements about body size. Some of the statements were negative about fatness (eg “Fat people are lazy”) and some of them were positive (eg “A big woman is a beautiful woman”).
The researchers found negative attitudes toward fat bodies in every location they surveyed; overweight people are increasingly regarded as lazy, ugly, undesirable, or lacking in self control, they said.
While the US and other Western countries have idealized slimness and stigmatized fatness for decades, in other parts of the world, this has not been the case, until now.
Study author Dr Alexandra Brewis, a biological anthropologist at Arizona State, told the press that:
“Previously, a wide range of ethnographic studies have shown that many human societies preferred larger, plumper bodies.”
“Plump bodies represented success, generosity, fertility, wealth, and beauty,” she added.
But in their survey, Brewis and colleagues found that the responses across the diverse cultures were largely congruent with Western attitudes.
In fact they were surprised that the highest scores for fat stigma were not in the US or the UK “but rather Mexico, Paraguay, and – perhaps most surprisingly – in American Samoa,” they wrote.
Brewis said the speed of change in American Samoa’s attitudes to obesity is remarkable.
When Brewis was doing research in the Samoas in the 1990s, she found people were starting to idealize slimmer bodies, but they did not have negative attitudes toward larger bodies.
“But that appears to be changing very quickly,” she added.
Co-author and cultural anthropologist Amber Wutich said that respondents from the locations that have taken on negative attitudes to fatness more recently seem to be more strident in their views:
“The late adopters were more likely to agree with the most judgmental statements like ‘fat people are lazy’ ,” said Wutich.
While the survey did not look into what might be behind this rapid shift in cultural attitude toward fatness, the researchers nevertheless suggest that newer types of educational media and global public health messages could be responsible.
Brewis said as there are now more overweight than underweight people in the world, the study shows we should care not only about the public health effects of obesity, but also about the “profound emotional suffering” caused by these rapidly spreading prejudicial ideas about big bodies.
She told the New York Times that a lot more research now needs to be done to investigate how fat stigma is affecting everyday life. For instance, we need to find out if people are being discriminated against, either at work or in social contexts, because of their body size.
The next “big question”, said Brewis, is whether the growing fat stigma is “going to create a lot of new suffering where suffering didn’t exist before”.
She said it was important to think about this, when constructing public health messages about obesity, so they don’t make the problem worse.
“Body Norms and Fat Stigma in Global Perspective.”
Alexandra A. Brewis, Amber Wutich, Ashlan Falletta-Cowden, Isa Rodriguez-Soto
Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 2, April 2011 (pp. 269-276)
DOI: 10.1086/659309
Additional sources: University of Chicago Press Journals (28 Mar 2011), New York Times, (31 Mar 2011).
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD