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Zusatztext "In Fat Politics, Eric Oliver examines America's ongoing search for weapons of body mass destruction and reveals that the emperors of the current fat hysteria aren't wearing any clothes. This is an essential book for understanding the leading moral panic of our time." --Paul Campos, Professor of Law, University of Colorado, and author of The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health Informationen zum Autor J. Eric Oliver is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Democracy in Suburbia and The Paradoxes of Segregation. Klappentext It seems almost daily we read newspaper articles and watch news reports exposing the growing epidemic of obesity in America. Our government tells we are experiencing a major health crisis, with sixty percent of Americans classified as overweight, and one in four as obese. But how valid arethese claims? In Fat Politics, J. Eric Oliver shows how a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats, and health researchers, with financial backing from the drug and weight-loss industries, have campaigned to create standards that mislead the public. They mislabel more than sixty million Americansas "overweight," inflate the health risks of being fat, and promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease. In reviewing the scientific evidence, Oliver shows there is little proof that obesity causes so much disease and death or that losing weight is what makes people healthier. Our concern with obesity, he writes, is fueled more by social prejudice, bureaucratic politics, and industry profit than byscientific fact. Misinformation pushes millions of Americans towards dangerous surgeries, crash diets, and harmful diet drugs, while we ignore other, more real health problems. Oliver goes on to examine why it is that Americans despise fatness and explores why, despite this revulsion, we continue togain weight. Fat Politics will topple your most basic assumptions about obesity and health. It is essential reading for anyone with a stake in the nation's--or their own--good health. Zusammenfassung Over the past twenty years, obesity has risen in the United States to epidemic proportions. Today, over sixty percent of Americans are overweight, and over one in four is obese. This book examines the cultural contradictions that underlie this massive transformation. Oliver's highly readable yet carefully documented book addresses the meaning of obesity in American life. At one level, the book outlines very straightforward issues such as controversies over the sources of obesity, its economic and social consequences, and its prospects for resolution. At another level, the book examines fatism, the last bastion of acceptable discrimination in the United States, particularly as it applies to women. Finally, the book makes a deeper argument about how obesity reflects a serious contradiction in American life. At no other time in human history has food been so easily available and survival so physically un-taxing. But rather than giving us greater freedom, our affluence has disempowered us. Most Americans continue to gain weight and fight a losing struggle to reduce their body sizes, and increasingly, the overweight are derided for their moral failure. As more people become obese, this cultural paradox will grow. In the book's conclusion, Oliver outlines how the contradiction surrounding America's obesity epidemic may be resolved and where the battle lines in the coming fat wars are likely to be drawn. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: A Big, Fat Problem 1: What Is Fat? 2: How Obesity Became an Epidemic Disease 3: Why We Hate Fat People 4: Women, Fat, and the Sexual Market 5: Fat Genes and the Obesity Blame Game 6: Food and Weight Gain: Super Sized Misperceptions 7: Sloth, Capitalism, and the Paradox of Freedom 8: Obesity Policy: The Fix Is In 9: Unmaking the Obes...
