By Kathryn West

When we think of discrimination, we think of race, gender, and sexual orientation...why not obesity?

“At 419 lbs, the 23-year-old stay-at-home mom was feeling good about being out of the house that day to take in the fresh air and get some exercise. That was, until a truck of young men pulled up and began harassing her. "You fat blimp!" one yelled. "You whale!" said another. "You fat ass bitch!" the men shouted as they pelted her with empty soda cans and other debris from inside their vehicle.” Jennifer Craig, from tolerance.org.

Our society is obsessed with physical image. It is no longer enough to be intelligent, successful and funny; we must be intelligent, successful, funny and thin. However, the true “obesity crisis” lies deep within this façade of merely large figures. The above testimonial describes one particular moment in Jennifer Craig’s life that has affected her confidence to ever leave her house and is a glimpse of the public humiliation which the obese face on a daily basis. Our country is currently embarking on its most prejudiced and discriminatory era against the obese, and consequently, the obese are now experiencing social inequalities similar to those of various civil rights issues of the past. Specifically, the clinically obese are currently discriminated against in the workplace, in education, and in healthcare.

Weight discrimination in employment, education and healthcare seems to persist because of a belief that people are to blame for their obesity. For example, in healthcare-related insurance policies, insurance companies use a “fault-based paradigm” to justify their refusal to cover weight-related procedures. As Jennifer Craig explains in her personal accounts of dealing with obesity, “it almost seems to be an acceptable prejudice…people think you can’t change your race or your skin color, but you can change being fat.” The problem with this prejudiced attitude is that there is a difference between someone who is ten pounds overweight, someone who is obese, and someone who is morbidly obese. The American Obesity Association defines an obese person as one who weighs an additional 20% more than their ideal body weight. On the other hand, morbid or clinical obesity is defined as someone weighing 50-100% or 100 pounds more than their ideal body weight. When morbidly obese, controlling the intake of food is no longer as simple as pushing a plate of food away; moreover, recent research suggests there is a definite genetic component involved in morbid obesity.

The “obesity crisis” has hit our society hardest in the most recent decades; according to the Surgeon General, it is estimated that instances of adolescent obesity have tripled in the last two decades alone. In response to this increasing growth rate of obesity in the US, current research has found significant leads in determining a genetic component involved in obesity. In an article published in 2005 by the American Diabetes Association, Dr. Andrea Baessler and associates found “a substantial heritable component to the risk for obesity; specifically, 50-70% of the variation in BMI [body mass index] may be attributable to genetic factors.” More specifically, Baessler et al have pinpointed a certain growth hormone called ghrelin that may contribute to a predisposition for obesity. The ghrelin hormone is occasionally administered to cancer patients because it is found to increase appetite and food intake. This research study discovered that the entire ghrelin system is impaired in some obese patients. Subsequent twin studies from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Psykologisk Institut in Copenhagen and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have also supported this idea of a genetic component involved in obesity. The researchers of one particular twin study found that not only was there an association between the weight of an adopted child to their biological parents (which was expected), but there was a lack in association between the weight of a child to their adoptive parents. This twin study suggests that if obesity was merely an environmentally-acquired condition, a child whose adopted parents are obese would raise an obese child. But this is not the case.