In my previous post about Michelle Obama’s “war on obesity” I asked “what do you think all this media attention about obesity is doing to people who are obese?” And proposed that maybe they’re not doing a good job and that maybe they are fueling a cycle of insults.
This makes me feel somehow vindicated. Harriet Brown, the author the article I tagged, says,
Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful…Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator….Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity.
I’m totally fascinated by this. However, the media keeps pumping out stories that investigate weight issues and the ‘problems of obesity’.
Here is a recent article about doctors who do not talk about their patients' weight problems.
Here is an article about how to behave properly around the obese.
This is crazy. First, doctors are expert on how to fix things that go wrong with your bodies. This doesn’t mean they are experts on how to live your life or can adequately explain how to live a healthier lifestyle. Second, act around obese people like you’d act around anyone else.
Here is my new theory on why the media is giving so much attention to this: it sells (at least a little). In case you haven’t been paying attention, published media is dying. Instead of having investigative reports on things that are happening around the world and breaking news, they have people sit and write articles that are nothing more than blog postings. They do this because it is cheap to do so. Instead of spending thousands of dollars funding a journalist’s investigation, they can pay must less to someone to write 500 words on…well…anything. Here’s the kicker: the more people comment on a story, the more ad revenue the post can generate. The article isn’t why companies are paying to advertise. Companies are paying to advertise when there is a lot of chatter following a post (if you are actually interested, ads track how often you post on something and what those topics are so that the ads that you see are specifically tailored to the topic that you often respond to). If something is contentious or if it is an issue where there will be many differing (and hopefully heated) discussion about, it will sell more.
So why does the media keep posting about the obesity epidemic? Because there are people who will comment on the story: those who have been hurt because others see them as ugly or irresponsible, those who are in the medical profession that will give their professional advice, those who think…
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