San Antonio College Library

"In the past decade, obesity has emerged as a major public health concern in the United States and abroad. At the federal, state, and local level, policy makers have begun drafting a range of policies to fight a war against fat, including body-mass index (BMI) report cards, 'snack taxes, ' and laws to control how fast food companies market to children. As an epidemic, obesity threatens to weaken the health, economy, and might of the most powerful...

One of the most significant global health challenges we face today is obesity. Over 100 million people in the US alone are seeking a game-changing solution to this problem. How can we break free from obesity's clutches and shed unwanted weight for good? The answer--multifaceted, interconnected, and rooted in scientific fact, clinical experience, and common sense--lies within the pages of Outsmarting Obesity. In Outsmarting Obesity, pioneering physician...

This book investigates the controversial claim by welfare critics that public assistance programs like the Food Stamp and National School Lunch programs contribute to obesity among the poor. The author synthesizes empirical evidence from an array of disciplines--anthropology, economics, epidemiology, marketing, medicine, nutrition science, psychology, public health, sociology, and urban planning--to test this claim and to test whether other causal...

This book takes on the "obesity epidemic," challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. The author examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask if our efforts to prevent "obesity" are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. She takes issue with the currently...

"This book looks at the interweaving of fact and fiction relating to obesity, tracing public concern from the mid-nineteenth century to the modern day. It looks critically at the source of our anxieties, covering issues such as childhood obesity, the production of food, media coverage of the subject, and the emergence of obesity in modern China. Written as a cultural history, the book is particularly concerned with the cultural meanings that have...

"The United States, we are told, is facing an obesity epidemic-a 'battle of the bulge' of not just national, but global proportions-that requires drastic and immediate action. Experts in the media, medical science, and government alike are scrambling to find answers. What or who is responsible for this fat crisis, and what can we do to stop it? Abigail Saguy argues that these fraught and frantic debates obscure a more important question: How has fatness...

Abstract: This light-hearted historical account of dieting is devoted to explaning the cultural fit between shared fictions about the body and the reducing methods of the era. Discussions are as follows: dieting and history ; ritual and romance of dieting ; men, women and fat ; thin body and the Jacksonians ; buoyant body (obese) in Victorian America ; the balanced body at century's turn ; regulated body (fasting, slow chewing of foods, calorie counting,...

The current "obesity epidemic" has been at the top of the national and, increasingly, global public agenda for the last decade, the subject of extensive and intensive concern, scrutiny, and corrective efforts from various quarters. In the United States, much of this attention is predicated on the "official" discourse, or story, of obesity-that it is a matter of personal responsibility, specifically to the end of monitoring and ensuring appropriate...

Fat. Such a little word evokes big responses. While "fat" describes the size and shape of bodies -- their appearance -- our negative reactions to corpulence also depend on something tangible and tactile. As this book argues, there is more to fat than meets the eye. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life offers reflections on how fat has been perceived and imagined in the West since antiquity. Featuring fascinating historical accounts as well...

In the United States, fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose. Bodies Out of Bounds challenges these dominant perceptions by examining social representations of the fat body. The contributors to this collection show that what counts as fat and how it is valued are far from universal; the variety of meanings attributed to body size in other times and places demonstrates that perceptions of corpulence...