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Author: Natalie Boero
ISBN : B00AAWGQY2
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Format: PDF
Direct download links available Free Download Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic" from with Mediafire Link Download Link
In the past decade, obesity has emerged as a major public health concern in the United States and abroad. At the federal, state, and local level, policy makers have begun drafting a range of policies to fight a war against fat, including body-mass index (BMI) report cards, “snack taxes,” and laws to control how fast food companies market to children. As an epidemic, obesity threatens to weaken the health, economy, and might of the most powerful nation in the world.
In Killer Fat, Natalie Boero examines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kind of disease.
Boero argues that obesity, like the traditional epidemics of biological contagion and mass death, now incites panic, a doomsday scenario that must be confronted in a struggle for social stability. The “war” on obesity, she concludes, is a form of social control. Killer Fat ultimately offers an alternate framing of the nation’s obesity problem based on the insights of the “Health at Every Size” movement.
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- File Size: 1402 KB
- Print Length: 192 pages
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press; 1 edition (August 8, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AAWGQY2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,571 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Download Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic"
What is fascinating about this book is the vivid and detailed information that San Jose State University sociology Associate Professor Natalie Boero provides about what it's like to be fat. Especially interesting is her experience with Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous in Chapter 3. She went to their meetings and conducted interviews. She analyzed and reported on the various degrees of success and failure experienced by clients. She compared and contrasted the two approaches and exposed the underlying assumptions. In short, Weight Watchers uses a diet-based, point-counting formula while Overeaters Anonymous follows the Alcoholic Anonymous approach.
Boero labels their differing approaches respectively as the "normative pathology model" and the "unique disease model." She thinks that Weight Watchers see women as "emotional eaters...prone to excess." In the Overeaters Anonymous mindset, obesity is a "chronic and incurable disease" best treated with a 12-step social program.
Also fascinating was Chapter 4 in which Boero looks into bariatric surgery and finds it wanting justification. She makes a strong case by showing that even after surgery many people were still obese and others became obese again. Even the successful clients were not home free since they had to maintain a strict diet lest they extend their stomachs making it likely that they would gain back the weight they lost. She argues that it is a serious question about whether "gastric bypass is more akin to a surgically enforced eating disorder than it is to a surgical cure for obesity." (p. 121)
I think the book would have reached more readers if Boero had begun with these chapters since they are eye-opening and interesting.