What's Wrong With Fat? (40 page)

65. Nicky Hart, “Famine, Maternal Nutrition and Infant Mortality: A Re-Examination
of the Dutch Hunger Winter,”
Population Studies
47 (1993): 27–46.

66. Gian-Paolo Ravelli, Zena A. Stein, and Mervyn Susser, “Obesity in Young Men
after Famine Exposure in Utero and Early Infancy,”
New England Journal of
Medicine
295 (1976): 349–53.

67. Anita C. J. Ravelli et al., “Obesity at the Age of 50 Y in Men and Women Exposed
to Famine Prenatally,”
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
70 (1999): 811.

68. Richard L. Atkinson, “Viruses as Etiology of Obesity,”
Mayo Clinic Proceedings
82,
no. 10 (2007): 1192–98.

69. Lauren Zima, “Obesity Could Be Contagious, Study Says,”
Newsy: Multisource
Video News
, February 8, 2012.

70. Paula J. Caplan, “Elephant in the Living Room: Obesity Epidemic and Psychiatric
Drugs,” Science Isn’t Golden: Matters of the Mind and Heart,
Psychology Today
,
May 13, 2011, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201105/
elephant-in-the-living-room-obesity-epidemic-and-psychiatric-drugs; Crina Frincu-
Mallos, “Psychotropic Medications Linked to Increased Rates of Obesity,”
Medscape
Medical News
, March 8, 2010.

71. David A. Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes, Microbilization, and Movement
Participation,”
American Sociological Review
51, no. 4 (1986): 464–81.

72. Serena Mayeri,
Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

73. LeBesco,
Revolting Bodies
, 114.

74. Ibid., 116.

75. The Biggest Loser Couples Week 3, http://www.nbc.com/the-biggest-loser/video/
week-3/1270402 (accessed on March 4, 2011).

76. Cathryn M. Delude, “Time to Take a Vacation from Television as School Ends,
Keep Kids Healthy by Limiting TV Time,”
Boston Globe,
June 10, 2003, cited in
Abigail C. Saguy and Rene Almeling, “Fat in the Fire? Science, the News Media,
and the ‘Obesity Epidemic.’”
Sociological Forum
23, no. 1 (2008): 53–83

77. Claudia Kalb and Karen Springen, “Pump up the Family,”
Newsweek
, April 25,
2005, 62.

78. Ibid. The source of the reference to declining life expectancy is based on a widely
cited 2005 back-of-the-envelope calculation that this generation of children will
die at a younger age than their parents, if rates of obesity continued to increase
unabated, which has since been discredited but continues to be repeated. S. Jay
Olshansky et al., “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in
the 21st Century,”
New England Journal of Medicine
352, no. 11 (2005): 1138–45;
Wayt Gibbs, “Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?”
Scientific American
, June 2005,
72–77.

79. Kalb and Springen, “Pump up the Family,” 62.

80. Dale Buss, “Is the Food Industry the Problem or the Solution?”
New York Times
,
August 29, 2004.

81. Ibid.

82.
Newsweek
, “Mail Call,” July 24, 2000, 14.

83. Karen Hsu, “As US Obesity Rises, Scientists See Health Crisis,”
Boston Globe
,
October 27, 1999.

84. Marie McCullough, “Time for New Approaches to Weight Loss,”
Philadelphia
Inquirer
October 27, 1999, cited in Saguy and Almeling, “Fat in the Fire?”

85. John Fauber and Mark Johnson, “Losing Weight, Regaining Lives: More Obese
People Are Choosing Surgery as a Last Result,”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, July 8,
2003.

86. Glenn Gaesser,
Big Fat Lies: Th
e Truth about Your Weight and Your Health
(Carlsbad,
CA: Gurze Books, 2002), 165.

87. Ibid., 124.

88. Regina G. Lawrence, “Framing Obesity: The Evolution of News Discourse on a
Public Health Issue,”
Press/Politics
9, no. 3 (2004): 56–75 ; Natalie Boero, “All the
News That’s Fat to Print: The American ‘Obesity Epidemic’ and the Media,”
Qualitative Sociology
30, no. 1 (2007): 41–60 ; Saguy and Almeling, “Fat in the
Fire?” ; Saguy and Gruys, “Morality and Health” ; Saguy, Gruys, and Gong, “Social
Problem Construction and National Context” ; Katherine W. Hawkins and Darren
L. Linvill, “Public Health Framing of News Regarding Childhood Obesity in the
United States,”
Health Communication
25 (2010): 709–17.

89. Herbert Gans,
Deciding What’s News
(New York: Patheon, 1979).

90. Deana A. Rohlinger, “American Media and Deliberative Democratic Processes,”
Sociological Th
eory
25, no. 2 (2007): 122–48.

91. Details about the coding are provided in the appendix.

92. Colleen L. Barry et al., “News Media Framing of Childhood Obesity in the United
States from 2000 to 2009,”
Pediatrics
128, no. 1 (2011): 132–45.

93. See also Saguy, Gruys, and Gong, “Social Problem Construction and National
Context” ; Lawrence, “Framing Obesity.”

94. Chi-square tests showed these differences (in the frequency of sociocultural
factors and policy solutions) between the two samples to be statistically significant
at p<0.05 or better, meaning there is a very low probability they were a product of
sampling error.

95. Kathryn Winiarski, “Over Half of South Carolina Adults Are Overweight, Health
Department,”
Th
e State,
November 23, 1999.

96. Jennifer Barrett Ozols, “Generation XL,”
Newsweek
, January 6, 2005.

97. Jane E. Brody, “Health Watch,”
New York Times
, March 26, 1997.

98. Giancario Mola, “En Italie, la Thérapie du Centre d’Atri Commence Par
l’Lmplication de la Famille,”
Le Monde
, April 11, 2004. I translated this and all
French excerpts.

99. The next three sections draw from Saguy and Gruys, “Morality and Health.”

100. For a discussion of the sampling and coding strategy, see the methodological
appendix.

101. In this discussion, we discuss differences between the overweight/obesity and
anorexia/bulimia samples
as differences
only when the chi-square (in cases in
which cell sizes were 10 or more) or Fisher exact test (in cases in which cell sizes
were less than 10) were statistically significant at a level of p<0.05.

102. With the exception of individual and biological causes, all cross-issue differences
are statistically significant (p<0.05).

103. Charles Isherwood, “A Happy Family Is Stalked by Heartbreak as a Daughter
Wastes Herself Away,”
New York Times
, November 1, 2005.

104. Mark Whitaker, “The Editor’s Desk,”
Newsweek
, December 5, 2005, 4.

105. Peg Tyre, “Fighting Anorexia: No-one to Blame,”
Newsweek
, December 5, 2005,
50.

106. Ibid.

107. Erica Goode, “Anorexia Strategy: Family as Doctor,”
New York Times
, June 11,
2002.

108. Claudia Kalb, “When Weight Loss Goes Awry,”
Newsweek
, July 3, 2000, 46.

109. Ibid.

110. Tyre, “Fighting Anorexia,” 50 (emphasis added).

111. Kalb, “When Weight Loss Goes Awry,” 46.

112
.
Jane E. Brody, “Exposing the Perils of Eating Disorders,”
New York Times
,
December 12, 2000.

113. Bonnie Rothman Morris, “Older Women, Too, Struggle with a Dangerous Secret,”
New York Times
, July 6, 2004.

114. Brody, “Exposing the Perils of Eating Disorders,” 8.

115. Tyre, “Fighting Anorexia,” 50.

116. All cross-issue differences are statistically significant (p<0.05).

117. Nancy S. Hochman, “Eating Disorders Strike Younger Girls and Men,”
New York
Times
, April 28, 1996.

118. Tyre, “Fighting Anorexia.”

119. Jarret Liotta, “Searching for a New Way to Treat Bulimia,”
New York Times
, June
6, 1999.

120. American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-IV)
, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association,
1994).

121. Jane E. Brody, “Out of Control: A True Story of Binge Eating,”
New York Times,
February 20, 2007.

122. Joy Alter Hubel, “Studies Under Way in Fight against Binging Disorder,”
New
York Times,
August 3,1997.

123. Christy F. Telch and W. Stewart Agras, “Obesity, Binge Eating and Psychopathology:
Are They Related?”
International Journal of Eating Disorders
15, no. 1 (1994):
53–61.

124. Karen Springen, “Health: Battle of the Binge,”
Newsweek
, February 19, 2007, 62.

125. Becky W. Thompson,
A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women’s
Eating Problems
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 26 ; Nicholas
Bakalar, “Survey Puts New Focus on Binge Eating as a Diagnosis,”
New York
Times
, February 13, 2007.

126. Erica Goode, “Watching Volunteers, Experts Seek Clues to Eating Disorders,”
New York Times
, October 24, 2000.

127. Sabrina Strings, “Thin, White, and Saved: Fat Stigma and the Fear of the Big
Black Body” (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2012).

128. Ninety-four percent of eating disorder articles discuss women or girls, comp
ared to 47 percent that mention men or boys. By contrast, articles on over
weight mention women/girls and men/boys at similar rates (47 percent
compared to 42 percent). Thirteen percent of articles on eating disorders dis
cuss people from the upper or middle class, compared to the 4 percent that
discuss poor people, and 17 percent mention whites, compared to 13 percent
that discuss minority races, despite the tendency for “white” to function as an
unmarked category. In contrast, articles on overweight discuss nonwhites
(including black, Latino, Asian, and other race) more often than whites (13 per
cent versus 8 percent) and discuss the poor as frequently as the middle class or
rich (7 percent versus 5 percent).

129. Hilde Bruch,
Th
e Golden Cage: Th
e Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978) ; Ruth H. Striegel-Moore et al., “Eating Disorders
in White and Black Women,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
160, no. 7 (2003):
1326–31. However, new evidence suggests that bulimia—but not anorexia—
may be more
prevalent
among poor minority, compared to middle-class white
women and girls. Michelle Goeree, John C. Ham, and Daniela Iorio, “Caught in
the Bulimic Trap? Socioeconomic Status, State Dependence, and Unobserved
Heterogeneity,” in
Working Paper Series
(Zurich: Institute for Empirical Research
in Economics, 2009), 1–41.

130
.
Delia E. Smith et al., “Prevalence of Binge Eating Disorder, Obesity, and
Depression in a Biracial Cohort of Young Adults,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
20, no. 3 (1998): 227–32. Ruth H. Striegel-Moore et al., “Recurrent Binge Eating
in Black American Women,”
Archives of Family Medicine
9 (2000): 83–87.

131. Critser, Fat Land.

132. Ibid.

133. APA,
DSM-IV
.

134. Ibid.

135. Kathleen Ries Merikangas et al., “Prevalence and Treatment of Mental Disorders
among US Children in the 2001–2004 NHANES,”
Pediatrics
125, no. 1 (2010):
75–81 ; The Writing Group for the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth in the United
States, “Incidence of Diabetes in Youth in the United States,”
JAMA
297, no. 24
(2007): 2716–24.

136. Tyre, “Fighting Anorexia,” 50.

137. Ibid.

138. Joe Eaton, “The Battle over Heavy T.,”
Washington City Paper
, September 26,
2007.

139. Joan B. Wolf,
Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High
Stakes of Motherhood
(New York: New York University Press, 2010).

140. Victoria Rideout, Elizabeth Hamel, and Kaiser Family Foundation,
Th
e Media
Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers and Their
Parents
(Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2006), http://www
.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7500.pdf.

141.
New York Times
, “America’s Epidemic of Youth Obesity,” November 29, 2002.