In recent years, significant attention has been given in the popular and academic press to an ‘obesity crisis’ that, purportedly, is both ever increasing and sweeping across the western world. In this paper, we raise a number of ethical issues about the ways in which discourses around this crisis have been socially constructed and publicly represented. We begin by outlining the ways in which these discourses seem to offer ‘certainty’ and ‘authority’ (of ‘fact’ and knowledge) from within the research field. Yet, as others have pointed out, on closer inspection few such certainties are to be found. We argue that attempts to erase uncertainty around the body, health and size/weight/fatness may be ethically problematic, not least because it can lead to forms of size discrimination and oppression that, ironically, may propel some people towards ill-health via disordered relationships with food, exercise and the body.

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‘Fat Ethics’ – The Obesity Discourse and Body Politics

Does promoting weight loss improve health? This paper draws on diverse writings in empowerment, social justice, critical obesity literature, feminism and stress biology to challenge the appropriateness of the continued reliance on a reductionist metaphor of ‘energy balance’ in understanding fatness. It examines some of the scientific and philosophical premises underlying mainstream UK dietary anti-obesity guidelines and argues that the evidence supporting a link between promoting weight-loss and improving health is, at best, contentious. A central theme is that the current weight-loss schema helps to naturalise a fatness discourse that not only represents large people in offensively stereotyped ways but also fails to integrate people's lived experience as gendered, situated bodies in an inequitable world.

/pdf/is-a-weight-centred-health-framework-salutogenic-some-1bfxdyq5b6.pdf

Is A Weight-Centred Health Framework Salutogenic? Some Thoughts on Unhinging Certain Dietary Ideologies

Dengue fever : Mathematical modelling and computer simulation

Institutions and informal networks have formed a movement that is challenging the growing power and pervasive influence of large corporations. The movement's analyses show that the historical development and current function of the corporate entity requires production of a profit regardless of consequences to health, society, or the environment. As a result, public health professionals frequently address health problems related to products, services, or practices of corporations. There are possibilities for links between public health and the anticorporate movement. Public health research and the professional preparation curriculum should focus on the corporate entity as a social structural determinant of disease.

Public health and the anticorporate movement: rationale and recommendations.

Malaysia is currently at the crossroads with respect to its poverty agenda. The way forward would require a paradigm shift in not only the manner in which poverty is conceptualised and defined but also in the way in which strategies and programmes are conceived and executed. Despite achieving commendable progress in reducing the incidence of poverty from 49.3% in 1970 to 3.6-% in 2007 there are still critical issues to grapple with and urgent problems to resolve. While rural poverty still continues to be the focus of policymakers, urban poverty also needs policy attention and prescriptions. Stubborn pockets of poverty continue to elude policy solutions and new forms of poverty are emerging in the context of a country that sees itself as a developed nation by 2020. What does Malaysia need to do in order to deal effectively with its poverty problems from a policy and programme perspective? What are the changes needed in order to ensure that poor and vulnerable groups in the society are not marginalised while Malaysia becomes a developed nation? This paper will provide insights into the strategic directions that policies and programmes need to take to resolve Malaysia poverty problems it will begin with an overview of poverty in Malaysia which will provide the contextual framework for the subsequent discussions. The second part of the paper will highlight the various changes that have taken place over time in the way in which poverty issues are dealt with. The third part of the paper will examine innovative ways in which poverty has been conceptualised and defined and its theoretical premises while the fourth part of the paper will review creative ways in which poverty has been dealt with both in the country and elsewhere and will conclude with some recommendations for policy and programmes direction.

Moving Forward: Its Poverty Agenda Challenges, Dilemmas and Options for Malaysia#

The peculiar current form of Capitalism rechristened as free market economics goes by the motto of "trade not aid" no matter how uneven the former may be and despite the fact that equal relations between unequals simply reinforce inequality. In line with the above Globalization – Capitalisms corresponding new flagship – is creating wealth for the few and depressing local wages and conditions of employment for the many. It has also brought about a shift in power: the nation state has weakened and has markedly reduced its social accountability. In the Globalization context the privatization called-for often ends up meaning denationalization and an acceleration of poverty of disparities of exclusion of unemployment of alienation of environmental degradation of exploitation of corruption and often brings about violence and conflict. All these add up to marginalization on a massive scale. The effects of Globalization are thus producing big winners and losers. (excerpt)

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2F1475-9276-2-4.pdf

Claudio Schuftan

Papers

Poverty and Inequity in the Era of Globalization: Our Need to Change and to Re-conceptualize