ABSTRACT
The right to health has been little more than a patchwork of international treaties and covenants with mostly symbolic value. More recently though, attempts to define the right to health have become more concrete and related to specific topics such as the prevention of over- and malnutrition as well as fatness. The right to health in this context is meant to create an environment that makes it less likely to consume foods considered to be unhealthy and fattening. The measures applied here are mostly restrictive. In this paper, two main lines of critique are presented with regard to the right to health in the context of nutrition and fatness – a libertarian and a social justice argument. Based on this reasoning, the right to health as articulated in this context is criticized as incompatible with the right to be fat. On the other hand, it will be argued that the philosophical base of the right to health as elaborated by the UN and the WHO does indeed have a strong potential to strengthen the right to be fat. But in order to fulfill this potential it is of paramount importance to respect the diversity of human bodies and lifestyles as well as to take the discrimination of fat people seriously.
