As St. Augustine put it: “In the midst of these temptations I struggle daily against greed for food and drink. This is not an evil which I can decide once and for all to repudiate and never to embrace again, as I was able to do with fornication.”
So, are we getting too fat? What does “too fat” mean in terms of individual happiness and health? Why — if, indeed, we are — are we getting fatter?
If there is a public health question here, it may well be a series of problems rooted in a faulty assumption: the growth of girth and its absolute relationship to ill health. This is not to say that there are no health problems associated with fat, but we have created a moral panic about the impact of increased weight on society, on the family and on our happiness. To see a worldwide epidemic of fat caused by a conspiracy of fast-food producers and our genes strikes one as weird, but the dieting culture relies on the sense that we must control this epidemic.
Each age, culture and tradition defines what is an unacceptable body weight. We must understand this as a process of creating ideal or normal bodies — those bodies that we desire to inhabit, but almost certainly will not.
Sander L. Gilman is a professor at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
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