Is Obesity A Disease Or A Moral Failing?

And what are we to make of the fact that an affliction of the rich is now predominantly a problem of the poor?

Obesity – being very fat – is a condition that is at the much disputed border between medicine and moral weakness. No one doubts that being very fat is bad for you, that is to say has deleterious consequences as far as pathology and life expectancy are concerned, to say nothing of aesthetics, but is it a disease in itself, and are doctors their patients’ keepers? To this no final answer can be returned, for it lies not in the realm of physic but of metaphysic. One answers as much according to one’s philosophical predilections and presuppositions as to empirical evidence.

Many people take obesity as a mass phenomenon (if I may be allowed a little pun of doubtful taste), not just among the American but among the world population, as evidence that people are not really responsible as individuals for what they put into their mouths, chew, and swallow, but rather victims of something beyond their control. If they are not so responsible, of course, it is rather difficult to see what they are or even might be responsible for. But the impersonal-forces point of view is well expressed in an editorial in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine by a public health doctor and an expert in “communication,” by which I suppose is meant advertising and propaganda.

The concern [about the increasing obesity of the population] prompted the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, “Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation.” The groundbreaking report and accompanying HBO documentary, “The Weight of the Nation,” present a forceful case that the obesity epidemic has been driven by structural changes in our environment, rather than embrace the reductionist view that the cause is poor decision making by individuals.

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