ABSTRACT
It would be quite possible to saturate this chapter with examples of how various media, such as TV, magazines and film, have helped nurture moral panic by reporting the risks and dangers associated with obesity or, much more rarely, with being too thin. We have explored how the media relentlessly recontextualises health knowledge about weight and obesity either produced ‘in house’ as pseudo science or by scientists working in primary health research. We could document how magazine and newspaper articles spin ‘stories’ of the inadequacies of individuals or families who, purportedly, allow themselves or others to become unhealthily fat and potentially ill. As we write, in the UK, BBC Radio News, having ‘contacted’ some fifty consultant paediatricians, is leading with the headline, ‘Infants being treated for obesity’, claiming that ‘Doctors say they are now seeing children as young as six months old in their obesity clinics’. Despite protestations from at least one of the paediatricians interviewed that ‘obesity is a public health issue, not a child-protection issue’, the commentary centred on whether such children should be taken away from parents and put into care, on the logic that ‘In virtually all of the cases, it is down to overfeeding, according to the doctors surveyed . . . They are concerned that some parents are supersizing meal portions for very young children and have lost sight of what “normal” weight looks like’ (Jones, 2007). Detail of methods, reliability, validity or nuance of data is never found in pseudo science of this kind.
