Introduction

This chapter examines the newspaper coverage of population weight gain in child populations between 2001 and 2007 as a moral panic. It explores the consequences of the discursive politics of risk unleashed by the moral panic about children's weight gain. The chapter proposes the term reflexive embodiment therefore for understanding the implications of the medicalized discourses on body morphology framed by the news coverage of the obesity epidemic. Lawrence reports a frame analysis of obesity stories in the United States media to document the marked increase in news coverage of the health consequences of weight gain from the beginning of the new millennium which grew dramatically in 2002 and 2003. The chapter describes the overestimation of health risks associated with weight gain when epidemiological evidence confirms that accidents, bullying and suicide are the immediate health risks faced by youths in the United States of America (USA).