The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality, and Ideology

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 2005 - Health & Fitness - 218 pages

Increasing obesity levels are currently big news but do we think carefully enough about what this trend actually means? Everybody - including doctors, parents, teachers, sports clubs, businesses and governments - has a role to play in the 'war on obesity'. But is talk of an obesity 'crisis' justified? Is it the product of measured scientific reasoning or age-old 'habits of mind'? Why is it happening now? And are there potential risks associated with talking about obesity as an 'epidemic'?

The Obesity Epidemic proposes that obesity science and the popular media present a complex mix of ambiguous knowledge, familiar (yet unstated) moral agendas and ideological assumptions.

 

Contents

Science and fatness
1
The war on obesity
16
The ghost of a machine
37
Modernitys scourge a brief history of obesity science
68
Fat or fiction weighing the obesity epidemic
86
The search for a cause
107
Obesity science for the people
126
Feminism and the obesity epidemic
153
Interrogating expert knowledge risk and the ethics of body weight
168
Beyond body weight
187
References
191
Index
210
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