Category Diet Practices:

The Ninety-Five Percent: Fighting Neoliberalism and Fatphobia Together

Posted on by Anna Mollow

Eighteen years ago, in an article titled “Losing Weight: An Ill-Fated New Year’s Resolution,” the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine took the US American medical establishment to task for its promotion of weight loss dieting. The editorial noted that, for most people, permanent weight loss is not possible; and, they observed, evidence suggesting that dieting confers health benefits is “limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous.” When this editorial was published in 1998, it was already old news that diets don’t work. For decades, fat activists had been pointing out that the medical literature shows diets to have a failure rate of 95% or higher. What’s more, diets make people fatter over the long term, and repeated attempts to…

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The Fat Acceptance Movement, Food and Dieting

Posted on by Kathleen Robinson

In the current anti-obesity climate of the U.S., a bevy of health messages are aimed at the “obese,” exhorting the portly to lose weight, get in shape, and put down the fork. But what have fat people, or at least a subset of fat people, had to say about the relationship between food, body habitus, and eating? According to self-proclaimed fat activists, society forces fat people to diet, leading to a distorted and damaging relationship with food. As an alternative, fat activists advocate “intuitive eating,” relying on ones’ internal sensations of hunger, pleasure, and satiety to guide food consumption. This ideology, implying balance, harmony, health, and pleasure is vastly appealing – but perhaps flawed. The fat acceptance movement began in…

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Babyfood and the American “Industrial Palate”

Posted on by Amy Bentley

While scientists, academics, and activists often differ over the causes and consequences of obesity, nearly all can agree that people benefit greatly from a diet rich in a wide variety of fruits and vegetables—ideally minimally processed so as to retain their nutritional benefits as well as integrity of flavors and textures. Yet Americans, with an overabundant array and quantity of food available, don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, and what produce they do consume tends to be top-heavy with fried potatoes. Instead, Americans are consuming fat and sugar: the highest percentage of solid fats and added sugars in the world, some 37 percent of daily calories consumed (compared to the world average of 20 percent), largely in the form of…

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