Obesity and Stigma: Important Issues in Women's Health

Across the United States and Europe, obesity among women has climbed to levels that qualify as an epidemic, and the trend is no longer confined to wealthy nations. Rates are rising fast in developing regions as well. The fallout reaches past physical health. There are economic, social, and psychological prices attached, and they land on individuals and on the communities around them.

This paper by Judy M. Price and Vid Pecjak takes up the question of where obesity comes from, reviewing the leading etiological theories, and it surveys the weight loss treatments that currently draw the most attention. Price works in the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University; Pecjak is based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Ljubljana.

The authors also look at how the stigma attached to obesity shifts depending on culture and gender. What counts as a judgment in one setting may play out differently in another, and the burden does not fall evenly on men and women. As researchers learn more about the mechanisms behind how obesity starts and persists, one point becomes hard to avoid: holding obese people personally at fault for their weight rests on a mistaken reading of the evidence.