14 DAY TRIAL // The physical health of obese individuals may depend on the manner they are treated in a restaurant, on the street or in the workplace, the results of a new study shows. Experts argue that discrimination can have a direct effect on physical health in this population.
Scientists at the Purdue University analyzed obese and overweight individuals, and looked for indications as to how they responded to discriminatory situations in the long run. The results came as a shock for the team.
Not only does discrimination have an effect, but it has a direct, obvious one. The connection is also true for overweight people, who are considered to have a predisposition for becoming obese later on in life.
The condition has been tied to an increased risk of developing a number of forms of cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, and a host of other complications. Most of them affect sufferers' quality of life directly.
At this point, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that about 34 percent of the general population in the country is obese. About the same percentage is classified as being overweight, and these numbers raise a serious public health issue.
Doctors determine whether a person is obese or overweight by looking at a measure called the body-mass index, which takes into account people's height, weight and gender.
“Obesity is a physiological issue, but when people have negative interactions in their social world – including a sense of being discriminated against – it can make matters worse and contribute to a person's declining physical health,” Markus H. Schafer explains.
“We found that around a third of the severely obese people in the United States report facing some form of discriminatory experience, and the experience of weight discrimination plays into people's own perspective about their weight,” he adds.
Schafer is a PhD student in sociology and gerontology at the Purdue University, and also the leader of the new investigation. He argues that obese individuals tend to internalize the prejudice and stigma they are subjected to.
This in turn contributes to elevating their regular stress levels. Human bodies are especially vulnerable to this attack, and this is why their health eventually grows to be severely affected.
Stress also opens the way for other related conditions to set in, the Purdue experts report in the March issue of the esteemed journal Social Psychology Quarterly.
“As expected, those who were obese fared worse in overall health when they were followed up with 10 years later. But we found there was a difference among those who felt they were discriminated against and those who didn't,” Schafer concludes.