Weighing on us all? Quantification and cultural responses to obesity in NHS Britain.

Roberta Bivins

doi:10.1177/0073275319842965

Abstract

How do cultures of self-quantification intersect with the modern state, particularly in relation to medical provision and health promotion? Here I explore the ways in which British practices and representations of body weight and weight management ignored or interacted with the National Health Service between 1948 and 2004. Through the lens of overweight, I examine health citizenship in the context of universal health provision funded from general taxation, and track attitudes toward “overweight” once its health implications and medical costs affected a public service as well as individual bodies and households. Looking at professional and popular discourses of overweight and obesity, I map the persistence of a highly individual culture of dietary and weight self-management in postwar Britain, and assess the degree to which it was challenged by a new measure of “obesity” – the body mass index – and by visions of an NHS burdened and even threatened by the increasing overweight of the citizens it was created to serve.

Highlights

In the last twenty years, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have paid increasing attention to the “quantified self” movement
By 1979, state and professional concerns about rising levels of diet-linked chronic illness prompted the establishment of the National Advisory Committee for Nutrition Education, while wider economic retrenchment and political changes favoring markets and individual consumerism drove a reconsideration and re-evaluation of preventive medicine as a cost-saving device for the hard-hit National Health Service (NHS).78
Hewing very closely to this line, early publicity and health campaigns around Britain’s new NHS stressed the “simple” “Seven Rules of Health,” and straightforward, quanta-free messages related to diet and nutrition