Watch the video here: Too Fat to Work at Health Food Store?
“Come back when you lose 50 pounds and I’ll hire you,” says the health food store manager to the job applicant. When some patrons show disapproval of this attitude, he doesn’t back down. “I didn’t mean to offend her, I was just trying to save her time,” he defends himself, explaining that a health food store has an image that it has to keep up.
Most of the patrons of the store were outraged by the health food store manager’s treatment of the applicant, but not everyone.
“You can’t coddle people,” says one woman who agrees with him that ‘no one wants to see that’ i.e. fat, when walking into a health food store. “He has a right to be selective,” she declares, even as the applicant is reduced to tears.
Other customers rush to her defense, some telling the manager ‘you make me sick’ and ‘you’ve lost a customer’ and “No one should have to be treated like that.”
Fat stigma is on the rise around the world, according to a report in the New York Times “Spreading Fat Stigma Around the Globe“. The report details a study conducted by the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University in which strong negative attitudes about the overweight were found across more than 10 countries surveyed.
With the burgeoning negative attitudes comes opportunity not just for the multi-billion dollar diet and fitness industry, but also the health and medical professions, which are serving up surgical interventions for increasingly less invasive weight loss procedures and devices.
Now, in addition to the ‘gold standard’ RNY gastric bypass weight loss surgery procedure, there is the LAP-BAND, a non-invasive laparoscopic procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and typically results in 50% or more of excess weight loss in the first year post-procedure. As well, nonsurgical solutions such as the gastric pacemaker are also being tested.
Read about NFL players and coaches who have had weight loss surgery.
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And not a moment too soon. More than 60% of the 1 million plus cases of diabetes reported each year are due to obesity (defined as a BMI >30). Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the US, and is a major contributor to heart disease, kidney failure, and stroke, as well as being the leading cause of adult blindness and amputation.
In the meantime, certainly not everyone agrees that stigmatizing the overweight is OK. “It’s an antiquated attitude,” says one patron, attempting to soothe the distraught applicant.
“She might be healthy. People can be overweight for a lot of reasons,” says another man. “I mean, how do we know how healthy you are?”
“That made me lose my appetite,” says another male customer covered in tattoos, growing reflective. “It happens to me sometimes for the way *I* look. And it’s just not right to treat people that way.”
The numbers are with him; with 30% of the population morbidly obese and more than 60% of the population overweight, fat is the new norm, and people are becoming more aware that so-called obesity stigma goes beyond criticism of appearance and/or negative body image – obesity has been linked to societal trends such as lower income, and even shorter life spans: an essay printed by the New England Journal of Medicine noted that today’s children have the unhappy distinction of being the first American children in two centuries with shorter life expectancies than their parents, thanks to the obesity trends we’re seeing among children today.
The US government has been galvanized into action with its new report, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, because, as Secretary of the Department of Agriculture said, obesity is clearly a crisis we can no longer afford to ignore.
