More on Obesity

Guest-blogger extraordinaire Kelly Hills has a particularly insightful post up over at Women's Bioethics Blog regarding the release of several different studies regarding obesity.  After summarizing the findings, she notes,

So what's the point to all the fat talk? For some people, fatness, being overweight, obesity, is simply a medical issue. You are overweight for a reason, be it medical or psychological, it is bad for you, you should work on not being overweight, which is good for you. There are clear concepts of good and bad tied to this model of viewing weight, and it tends to be a part of the general medicalization of weight we see - to be thin (but not too thin) is healthy, to be fat is to be unhealthy. And within healthy/unhealthy there are specific moral and value-laden beliefs that tie into good and bad; to be healthy is to be good, to be fat is to be bad.

But there are people out there, often people who are overweight, that reject this sometimes value-laden, binary attitude towards weight. They are comfortable with their weight, and don't appreciate being "bullied" by society to adhere to an ideal they don't believe is accurate. These folks often espouse the motto "healthy regardless of weight", placing an emphasis on health outside of weight. After all, the reasoning goes, if someone is 65 lbs overweight, but perfectly healthy otherwise, what business is it of anyone just what that weight is? People come in all sizes, and as long as the individual is healthy, what that size is shouldn't matter to anyone. While this group, often known as fat activists, embrace the notion of being healthy, they reject the idea that healthy is thin is good, and unhealthy is fat is bad.

This is terrific, and I agree with just about every word.  What I find frustrating about the discourse on obesity and fatness is how much of the underlying premises are taken as axiomatic, value-neutral scientific "facts."  Gard and Wright and Oliver's books have neatly demonstrated that so much obesity science is contested and uncertain -- and, given the causal complexity of body weight, why would anyone suspect otherwise? -- and the hoary old notion of 'value-free science' has long since been disputed by scientists, philosophers, and humanists alike.