What's Wrong With Fat? (7 page)

The International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), International Association for the Study of Obesity (IASO), and National American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO), which have been at the forefront of promoting a public health crisis frame, are featured high on this graph and toward the middle, reflecting the high volume of both economic and symbolic capital they possess.
Generous funding from pharmaceutical companies that produce weight-loss products has provided high levels of economic capital to these groups, while their ability to recruit doctors and researchers with prestigious educational credentials has given them high levels of symbolic capital as well. 7 The placement of the pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche, who has directly promoted a public health crisis frame, at the top right-hand corner reflects its high levels of mostly economic capital, valued in 2007 at $153.55 billion. 8 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and National Institutes of Health (NIH), who have promoted a public health crisis frame, are on the top left because they have high levels of capital that is weighted more heavily toward symbolic capital.

Figure 2.1:
The Fat Field

Weight Watchers is shown close to the center line in the top right-hand corner, reflecting both its considerable economic capital ($1.4 billion in revenue and $177 million in net income in 2009) and the symbolic capital it enjoys due to its status as a more “healthy”/medically sound approach to weight loss, compared to the various fad diets available. Its main competitors, not shown in the figure, include Nestle, the company that owns Jenny Craig and Lean Cuisine brands, NutriSystem, and LA Weight Loss. In Britain, Slimming World is bigger than Weight Watchers. 9 The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a food- and restaurant-industry-funded nonprofit organization founded in 1996 as an advocacy group with a mission to conduct research and education on food, beverage, and lifestyle issues, challenged the “hype” about the obesity epidemic in a 2004 report and a related advertisement. The CCF is backed by considerable economic resources and had an operating budget of almost $9 billion in 2009, according to the organization’s 2009 Form 990. 10 The fact that the CCF is essentially a lobbying group of the food industry, however, is discrediting and undermines its cultural authority.

Dove, a subsidiary of Unilever, has resisted the mainstream fashion idea that only excruciatingly thin women can be beautiful in its “Real Beauty” campaign. Valued at $79.32 billion in 2007, it has high levels of economic capital, although not, as measured in terms of wealth, as much as, say, Hoffman-La Roche. 11 The aesthetic and symbolic skills it deploys in its advertisement campaigns also confer considerable symbolic capital.
Bariatric doctors, who have been strong proponents of a medical frame, are shown in the top left quadrant, toward the middle of the vertical access.
This represents that, while they do not have as much cultural authority as the CDC, NIH, or WHO, and while bariatric medicine is not especially highly regarded within the medical field, medicine nonetheless has considerable cultural authority and is associated with high earnings (economic capital). 12
As doctors, bariatric doctors are imbued with more economic and cultural authority than the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH), which is comprised overwhelmingly of women in the less prestigious and lower-paying fields of psychology, nutrition, social work, education, and art. 13

Thanks to the advanced degrees of its members, ASDAH has more symbolic authority as well as greater overall volume of capital, however, than fat acceptance organizations, including the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), which is also highly feminized. Fat pornography is featured in the bottom right quadrant, reflecting that it has little capital within the fat field, and, in contrast to NAAFA, higher-brow magazines, or fat acceptance blogs, its power is skewed toward economic, rather than symbolic, capital.

Illustrating unequal power relations within the fat field, in response to a question about how the fat acceptance movement is different from the Health at Every Size or HAES(sm) movement, leading fat acceptance activist, Director of Medical Advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight AQ 1

Discrimination, and former member of Fat Underground (FU), Lynn McAfee explains, “I think [HAES researchers] have credibility and [fat acceptance activists] don’t. I think that’s really it in a word.” 14 McAfee says that because she does not have a medical degree, she is often dismissed out of hand: “People would say to me all the time when I come up with these studies [showing that 90 to 98 percent of people who lose weight in weight-loss diets gain it back in a year or more], ‘you don’t know what that means, you’re not a doctor.’ Well, I don’t have to be a damn doctor to know what a 98 percent failure rate is.” 15 McAfee admits that she is “not actually particularly that interested in [health]” and exclaims: “God, I hate science!”
However, she explains that she has been drawn into debates over the health risks associated with “obesity” because, as she puts it: “People get to discriminate against us because they’re just trying to help us with our health.”
As a result, she says that she “recognized very early on that if we are ever to succeed, we have to get a foothold in the medical world and make them understand [because] when it comes down to it, the last argument is, ‘oh but it’s so unhealthy for you.’”

Yet, as McAfee recognizes, people lacking in scientific credentials are more likely to be dismissed out of hand. This was made clear in in-depth interviews that I conducted with researchers. In these interviews, I asked researchers to respond to different claims, in order to see what sorts of arguments they used. In one such instance, I asked Theodore VanItallie what he thought of a statement made by a fat acceptance activist who said that reading reports on the number of excess annual deaths attributable to obesity feels, to her, like a death threat rather than as genuine concern. He replied: “When you listen to what people say, you have to think about what their qualifications are for saying it.” Other obesity researchers dismissed as anecdotal fat acceptance activists’ claims that their repeated dieting led to weight gain. For instance, James Hill said: “Well you really don’t have the control condition there, you really don’t know what would have happened to their weight if they hadn’t dieted do you?”

Bourdieu has shown that social and cultural capital are embodied, in that they shape mannerisms, posture, and what is generally thought of as personal style. However, body size and shape can also function as a specific form of
bodily capital
.
16 For instance, boxers discipline their bodies so that they can win boxing matches, thereby converting bodily capital into economic capital. To take a different example, fashion models rent their bodily capital—in their case, corresponding to culturally specific ideas of beauty, including body shape—for economic gain. Like boxers, models cultivate their bodily capital via exercise, diet, and plastic surgery, but their bodily capital is also shaped by factors beyond their personal control, including genetics and aging. 17 More generally, in many societies, being tall, especially for men, confers status, whereas being short is discrediting.
Similarly, being very thin—the proverbial 90-pound weakling—can be discrediting for men. In the contemporary United States and Europe, however, a thin, for women, and a muscularly toned, for men, body confers credibility. Hard bodies are seen as evidence of a disciplined character. 18
Thin women are more likely to “marry up” and attain a high-paying job, compared to heavier women, thereby converting bodily capital into economic capital. 19 Gender and ethnicity represented other embodied dimensions of social inequality.

In the debates over fat, fat rights activists and health at every size researchers are often dismissed as having an axe to grind if they are fat or are seen as being more credible if they are thin. For instance, science reporter and author of
Fat of the Land: Our Health Crisis and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves
,
Michael Fumento rejects the claim that one can be fat and fit, saying that such claims give “self-deceiving obese people something to hide behind, because they can (and do) assure themselves that while, yes, they burst through the ceiling of the height-weight charts long ago, they ‘feel like’ or ‘just know’ they’re in damned good condition.” 20

Regardless of how many advance degrees they have, researchers run the risk of being discredited if they themselves are fat, not only for all of the reasons that fatness is generally discrediting but also because they are perceived as being biased. For instance, when I asked an obesity researcher about Steven Blair’s research showing that one can be “fit and fat,” this researcher said of Blair: “He is fat, and he’s been exercising a lot, but he can’t lose weight. But he’s had a bypass himself, and he’s had a myocardial infarction.... He might have been better off with weight loss as well as fitness.”

In contrast, being thin (and, for men, tall) gives researchers more credibility. For instance, Glenn Gaesser, exercise physiologist and author of
Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health,
told me how his book agent asked him what his height and weight was. 21 When he told her that he was 6’4” and 185 pounds, she said “Oh, well that’s good.” When she then submitted the book to editors, she said they all wanted to know what his height and weight was. She told Gaesser that “the publisher would not have taken [the book project] if [he]
was fat because it would have been viewed as almost a rationalization for being fat, [as if he had] a personal axe to grind.” Indeed, Fumento laments that Gaesser’s weight status gives his book authority: “Gaesser’s book came out just before another fat acceptance book, Richard Klein’s
Eat Fat,
and half a year before yet another, Laura Fraser’s
Losing It.
But it has the potential to do much more damage because the Klein and Fraser books come across as written by fat people trying to justify their conditions rather than change them.... But Gaesser is thin!” 22

Similarly, Linda Bacon, a professor of nutrition and author of
Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight
,
comments in an essay on thin privilege: “My academic credentials, my thin body, and all sorts of other privileges team up to give me a ready audience for my material, and it is much less easy for [a fat woman without academic credentials] to find a forum to have her important message heard.” 23 I myself have also been told that being thin makes me more credible in my critical analysis of the dominant framing of obesity. At the 2001 NAAFA convention, NAAFA members told me that they were pleased that I was doing this research because, as a thin woman, I would be taken more seriously. A publicist at UCLA later saw fit to mention in a press release about one of my articles that I was a “petite mother of two small children.” When I protested, she explained that this would reduce the likelihood that I would be “dismissed as some crazy person,” and I sheepishly relented.

That a fat person is incapable of speaking objectively about weight seems to be readily accepted, while the idea that a thin person would be biased in a different but equally strong direction seems less intuitive. In other words, thinness functions as an
unmarked category
,
much as whiteness or maleness operate as unmarked categories for race and gender, respectively. Just as whites are often regarded as not having race and men as not possessing gender, thin people are seen as not having body size. In each case, this obscures how dominant groups are also affected, including via privilege, by systems of inequality. In this case, it forecloses discussions of how, say, a white, middle-class, thin, woman obesity researcher who spends enormous amounts of time, energy, and money in maintaining her slim physique may have a bias that leads her to assume that fatness is unhealthy.

However, the extent to which having academic credentials should automatically confer authority or being fat should be discrediting is precisely part of what is at stake in the fat field. Fat rights activists and health at every size researchers underscore the fact that many obesity researchers run weight-loss clinics or receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, either directly or indirectly via the IOTF, suggesting that they cannot be objective on the topic of weight loss. 24 They argue that being fat, rather than discrediting, represents a form of personal authority, in that they have firsthand experience with weight-based stigma and living in a fat body.

POSITIONALITY AND STRONG OBJECTIVITY

Philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that, while the ideal of value-free, impartial, dispassionate research is supposed to eliminate all social values from research, it tends only to identify and eliminate those social values and interests that are not shared by recognized scientific experts. This has allowed, she argues, those cultural assumptions and biases that are widely shared within the scientific community—such as ideas about the inferiority of women and people of color—to shape scientific research. The influence of these ideas is especially strong and unexamined in the formulation of hypotheses and identification of research questions, which are typically considered as prior to the actual scientific test. 25 Harding advocates replacing this “weak obectivity” with “strong objectivity,” in which there would be a “critical examination of historical values and interests that may be so shared within the scientific community, so invested in by the very constitution of this or that field of study, that they will not show up as a cultural bias between experimenters or between research communities.” 26 One powerful way to overcome such biases is to generate knowledge from the perspective of “the systematically oppressed, exploited, and dominated, those who have fewer interests in ignorance about how the social order actually works.” Taking this perspective “makes strange what had appeared familiar, which is the beginning of any scientific inquiry,” says Harding. 27 Drawing on Harding’s insight, one would expect those people who are categorized as obese to produce valuable and new kinds of knowledge.