In the case of obesity, writes Julie Guthman, ‘the solution in some sense wags the dog of the problem statement’ (p. 16). In this compelling book, Guthman offers a lucid account of the ‘obesity epidemic’ said to plague the USA. The book’s core argument is twofold: first, that obesity is an ecological condition, and second, that the political, sociocultural and economic dimensions of ecologies have been largely absent from both popular and scholarly discussions about obesity. At the outset, Guthman is clear that the book’s purpose ‘is not to falsify myths * or even necessarily to reveal another certain explanation’ in terms of the purported causes of weight gain trends (p. 16). This is what is perhaps most crucial about Weighing In. It is not another attempt to explain away the field of possible causes and feel-good solutions for weight gain, in favour of a magic bullet. To be sure, it is a well-researched book about public health, food systems and alternative food movements. But it is at its heart a book about capitalism, and as such offers health scholars of all methodological stripes an outstanding example of how to foreground the political. Conceptually, the book traces how late twentieth-century neoliberal ideologies permeated American socio-economic structures, and how the infusion of freemarket values into public goods shifted city planning, labour conditions, environmental regulations and agricultural policies. In this same space, Guthman argues, neoliberal ideals of self-governance, self-control, interpersonal competition and personal risk management transformed aesthetic values of thinness into matters of good health. This political ecological framework acknowledges that people may be getting bigger, but it also asserts that many definitions of the obesity ‘problem’ (often unintentionally) inhibit social justice and leave weight gain and its ‘logical’ fixes as foregone conclusions. If obesity is the material result of capitalism in neoliberal times, then we must reckon with how ‘bodies as material entities are literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption’ (p. 182). The book’s structure examines specific potential causes and consequences of obesity. Chapter 2 asks how we know obesity to be a problem, and unravels the politics of body mass index that underlie the medicalisation of body size. Chapter 3 examines some of the discursive threads that constitute the notion of ‘healthy lifestyle’, namely the concept of ‘healthism’ as an ideology that pins the responsibility for good health onto individuals. Guthman contextualises healthism Global Public Health Vol. 7, No. 8, September 2012, 911 913

Weighing in: Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism

A review of Donna R. Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans.

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We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans

Background: While there is a growing body of research on food environments for children, there has not been a published comprehensive review to date evaluating food environments outside the home and school and their relationship with diet in children. The purpose of this paper is to review evidence on the influence of the community and consumer nutrition environments on the diet of children under the age of 18 years. Methods: Our search strategy included a combination of both subject heading searching as well as natural language, free-text searching. We searched nine databases (MEDLINE, Web of Science, CINAHL, Embase, Scopus, ProQuest Public Health, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, and GEOBASE) for papers published between 1995 and July 2013. Study designs were included if they were empirically-based, published scholarly research articles, were focused on children as the population of interest, fit within the previously mentioned date range, included at least one diet outcome, and exposures within the community nutrition environment (e.g., location and accessibility of food outlets), and consumer nutrition environment (e.g., price, promotion, and placement of food choices). Results: After applying exclusion and inclusion criteria, a total of 26 articles were included in our review. The vast majority of the studies were cross-sectional in design, except for two articles reporting on longitudinal studies. The food environment exposure(s) included aspects of the community nutrition environments, except for three that focused on the consumer nutrition environment. The community nutrition environment characterization most often used Geographic Information Systems to geolocate participants’ homes (and/or schools) and then one or more types of food outlets in relation to these. The children included were all of school age. Twenty-two out of 26 studies showed at least one positive association between the food environment exposure and diet outcome. Four studies reported only null associations. Conclusions: This review found moderate evidence of the relationship between the community and consumer nutrition environments and dietary intake in children up to 18 years of age. There is wide variation in measures used to characterize both the community and consumer nutrition environments and diet, and future research should work to decrease this heterogeneity.

/pdf/the-community-and-consumer-food-environment-and-children-s-3hnejwcznh.pdf

The community and consumer food environment and children’s diet: a systematic review

Spend your time even for only few minutes to read a book. Reading a book will never reduce and waste your time to be useless. Reading, for some people become a need that is to do every day such as spending time for eating. Now, what about you? Do you like to read a book? Now, we will show you a new book enPDFd what s wrong with fat that can be a new way to explore the knowledge. When reading this book, you can get one thing to always remember in every reading time, even step by step.

What's Wrong with Fat?

Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton offer a critique of the increasingly prevalent message that reforming the food system necessarily entails a return to the kitchen. They argue that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536504214545755

Nicole DiNuccio

Papers

Foodways of the urban poor