Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American “Obesity Epidemic”NatalieBoero. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American Epidemic Natalie Boero. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.Warnings about the dangers of being fat abound in contemporary US society. In Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American Epidemic, Natalie Boero takes a two-fold approach to the topic of obesity. She deftly charts how it has become defined as an epidemic over the past two decades and also describes the motivations of people who are members of popular weight-related support groups or who have undergone bariatric surgery. Many of these individuals have lost weight to escape the stigma of being labeled fat and not necessarily to improve their health. Throughout the book, Boero returns to the dichotomy that public pronouncements about obesity do not necessarily match up with individual motivations and lived experience.In 2000, the US Department of Health and Human Services produced a report, Flealthy People 2010, which, for the first time, listed obesity/overweight as one of the Department's ten high-priority focus areas. Its inclusion in this list was achieved only through continued lobbying efforts, especially by the American Obesity Association and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. Along with this official governmental endorsement of the problem of obesity, the unceasing attention that fat and obesity have received in the media has truly cemented the obesity epidemic as an American social problem. As one example of the way that media has overemphasized the topic, Boero writes that The New York Times published more articles on obesity from 1990-2001 than it did on the AIDS crisis or on pollution. In effect, the deluge of media attention, which combines expert pronouncements along with apparently common-sense admonitions (such as right and exercising), consistently reinforces people's fear of fat, thus helping to create a sense of chaos or urgency (45) about obesity as an uncontrollable disease that can sneak up on the unwary through eating as little as an extra mouthful of food a day.In the second half of the book, Boero focuses on individuals trying to lose weight. She interviewed members of Weight Watchers and Over eaters Anonymous, as well as people undertaking weight-loss surgery, to get a sense of their reasons for wanting to lose (or control) their weight. Although Weight Watchers and Over eaters Anonymous approach obesity from different philosophical viewpoints, both suggest that people can work to fix themselves through behavioral change. …