"Public health concern..."

      A public health concern is obesity. Obesity is a horrible thing to be. Obesity has become the popular term for a set of problems that result in premature death and injury from diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It is a convenient term, but we should stop using it. The word obesity triggers in people more than a technical idea about energy balance or people burning fewer calories than they consume. This is because people understand words only as a part of larger systems of ideas called frames. Ideas about what obesity means, or why it happens are the unspoken parts of the frame that appear automatically in people's heads when they hear the word.

     Obesity is a bodily condition, not a social condition. People are obese, communities or neighborhoods are not obese. Using the term makes it harder to illustrate the conditions that inhibit healthy eating and activity.  Obesity is only one of many risk factors for diabetes and heart disease and in some cases may not be the most important one. Skinny people can also be malnourished and at risk for diabetes. A focus on obesity obscures the other risk factors and equates thinness with health. A focus on weight instead of nutrition may lead people to adopt popular weight-lose diets rather than eating nutritious foods.