Reading the chapters on structural approaches to public health reminded me of a discussion that recently took place in another one of my classes. Even though the class is called Writing for the Social Sciences, we got into a little debate yesterday about health care and obesity because two essays in our handbook-thing focused on them. One of them, by David Zinczenko, made sense to me and lines up (though less radically) with the chapters we read for today: it’s called Don’t Blame the Eater, and explores factors that make it difficult for people to make healthy choices. The other one, though, was a bit of an adventure (ahem) to read. It was written by Radley Balko (a pretty hardcore libertarian, I think) who was going on about “personal responsibility” and how he doesn’t want other people’s “choices” to affect the cost of his healthcare. I put those in scare quotes because I find them to be inaccurate and incomplete understandings of the real situation. Balko repeatedly used scary rhetoric and made lots of sociological errors (mostly, failing to account for factors besides “personal choice” in food decisions).
On the note of obesity, though, here’s an interesting (short) article that presents the other side of the issue, namely that fat stigma is more of a problem than fat itself: http://healthateverysizeblog.org/2011/08/19/the-haes-files-fat-stigma-not-fat-%E2%80%93-is-the-real-enemy/. Definitely worth some thought if we’re going to be continuing our conversations about obesity.
