Media and Research Roundup

Image is of a fat woman's hands on top of a closed laptop; Image by Lindley Ashline at Body Liberation Stock

by Bill and Terri Weitze

July 2020: A Chinese study finds that underweight patients are at a greater cardiac mortality risk after an acute myocardial infarction than all other weight classes.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ihj/61/4/61_19-635/_pdf/-char/en
https://doi.org/10.1536/ihj.19-635

June 16, 2020: Writing in Qualitative Research in Psychology, four fat activists propose that social science research on fatness, the fat body, and fat experience would benefit from a Fat Studies framework.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1780355

July 13, 2020: Dr. Sean Maloney has conducted a study wherein he finds that obese patients undergoing emergency general surgery have better mortality rates than underweight and average weight patients.
https://www.generalsurgerynews.com/In-the-News/Article/07-20/Obesity-Paradox-Outcomes-Better-in-Heavier-Emergency-Surgery-Patients/58954

July 20, 2020: Not only is BMI a useless tool for measuring individual health, its roots are sexist and racist, and those problems continue to affect people today.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bmi-scale-racist-health_l_5f15a8a8c5b6d14c336a43b0

July 24, 2020: Prapti Sarkar explains the difference between body positivity and fat acceptance, and why supporting fat acceptance is important to society as a whole.
https://feminisminindia.com/2020/07/24/trade-body-positivity-fat-acceptance

August 5, 2020: Ingrid R. Pipes talks about her pursuit of accomplishments and accolades as a means of protecting herself from judgment of her fat body.
https://rosewatermagazine.com/2020/08/05/being-the-funny-fat-person-is-serious-business

August 7, 2020: Big Fat Science (at Tumblr) talks about how vaccine trials for COVID-19, like most previous medical trials, will probably be conducted on a homogenous group that excludes fat bodies to reduce variables in the study.
https://bigfatscience.tumblr.com/post/625815970703933440/is-it-true-that-vaccines-are-less-effective-in-fat

August 8, 2020: When British talk show host Jeremy Vine asked for thoughts about possible weigh-ins of British school children, the response is almost uniformly against, showing progress in thinking of children's weight and health.
https://themighty.com/2020/08/jeremy-vine-tweet-weighing-students

August 8, 2020: Some experts talk about why obsessing over weight gain or lack of exercise during the pandemic is unhelpful, and offer some advice on how to deal with the stress in a more positive way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/at-home/coronavirus-weight-gain.html

Join the NAAFA mailing list to get more information on recent research and media every month.

[Pic is of Terri and Bill Weitze, a Caucasian couple, both wearing glasses]

Terri and Bill Weitze have been active within NAAFA for years, and they currently coauthor the Media and Research Roundup in the NAAFA Newsletter. They both live and work in San Jose, CA, and met through a fat-positive bulletin board system before the days of the World Wide Web.