Science Quickly Why Weight May Not Be the Whole Story on Health
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Nov 8, 2024 Ragen Chastain, a writer and board-certified patient advocate, joins to challenge the traditional view on weight and health. They explore how weight stigma can harm individuals, often overshadowing crucial health indicators. Chastain critiques common misconceptions linking weight to health risks, emphasizing the need for a compassionate, evidence-based approach. The conversation also examines language's role in perpetuating stigma and calls for a focus on behaviors rather than body size as true indicators of health.
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Correlation Doesn’t Prove Causation
- Correlations between higher weight and health problems often ignore major confounders like stigma, weight cycling, and healthcare inequality.
- Those unmeasured factors can explain many outcomes attributed to body size.
Stigma Alone Correlates With Serious Harm
- Experiencing weight stigma independently correlates with serious harms like higher diabetes, hypertension, suicidality, and increased mortality.
- Stigma itself is a plausible causal pathway for many health disparities attributed to weight.
Public Health Focus Harms Higher-Weight People
- Public health has prioritized eradicating higher weight bodies rather than supporting health at any size, creating harmful systems.
- That prevention framing often disguises hostility and structural harm toward higher weight people.