ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses socialism and the overweight nation. At the beginning of the 1950s obesity was a marginal problem in Czechoslovakia. Workers included women, because emancipation in Czechoslovakia during the first half of the 1950s was understood in terms of participation in industrial labour, even in construction and heavy industry. At the end of Socialism's golden years, in 1955, the sociologist and health nutrition journalist Boena Solnaov published an article in the magazine Viva lidu called 'The Diet of Young Girls and their Determining Influences'. When Boena Solnaov was writing her article, the Congress of the Dietary Section of the Society for Rational Nutrition classified obesity as one of the most common diseases that threatened public health. Interwar protagonists of temperance in eating, often associated with vegetarianism, were similarly criticized sharply, as were drastic Western slimming diets. As medical opinion increasingly dominated the anti-obesity campaign, doctors fought against these notions often using ideological arguments.
