ABSTRACT
When U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama made tackling childhood obesity her priority in 2010, she was riding the wave of nearly a decade’s worth of attention to the global phenomenon of increasing obesity rates among people of all ages, a phenomenon whose contours as both a medical and societal issue had been recognized and supported through research funds by prominent international and national organizations (Chopra; Moffat; Ogden et al.).2 So far, rates of chronic disease related to the condition of obesity-among them cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes-do not seem to have responded to fact-based messaging from public health ofces. As a result, there has been concurrent attention to the integral role of culture in shaping disease and health, both medically and discursively (Fisher and Burnet et al.).
