Small World/Big Bodies

Description:

Rates of obesity and overweight are ballooning globally: the World Health Organization recently estimated 1 in 3 adults to be overweight, and the rates are much higher than this in the more developed nations. Despite overweight becoming or being the norm in many countries, and the message from public health about the dangers and costs this is creating, we actually know very little about how cultural variation is shaping both the risk of obesity and our responses to it. We need more systematic, comparative studies that can allow us to test basic hypotheses about how cultural knowledge (“our beliefs”) about obesity shapes our risk for it and our responses to it. 

Understanding cultural knowledge about obesity is critical because the “real” cost of obesity to individuals, at least in the West, is tied to the cultural response of people to large bodies – specifically, there is profound stigma attached to fat. We can likely learn a lot from examining how other societies think differently about obesity, or have a different history of obesity (such as those places where obesity is just taking off). The Small World/Big Bodies project is collecting data in a number of diverse countries to test some basic theories about how attitudes toward overweight and obesity differ globally. Some core questions include: Do people understand the causative bases of obesity differently or similarly around the world (acknowledging that many of our views in the West about obesity are culture-bound not science-based)? Is the powerful stigma attached to obesity in the West globalizing as bodies grow bigger everywhere? If there is some globalization in the cultural messages, which ones tend to dominate globally? Or are some societies that are nonetheless undergoing large increases in rates of obesity thinking in quite different (more positive?) ways about the large bodies that are becoming a global norm? Are there really societies remaining that do not stigmatize fat in any way?

The project uses a fairly simple cultural survey tool and involves a number of students, as well as faculty collaborators, each managing data collection at different sites. The current activities include collecting samples from large, highly industrialized and globalized cities and in isolated rural locations (such as with indigenous groups). Places in which we are currently collecting data include the US, Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Egypt, Tanzania, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, London, American Samoa and New Zealand.