Obesity: The Weight of Modernity: An Intergenerational Study (Edition.) [Hardcover]

Over a half of adults in the US, Canada, Australia and numerous European countries are now overweight or obese, a proportion that has risen sharply in the past two decades. Even in developing countries like Thailand, up to one third of adults are overweight or obese.

This book offers a perspective that sees increasing obesity as a social phenomenon as well as a public health problem. The authors are persuaded that obesity is a condition of modernisation: an inevitable and unintended consequence of economic development. Typically, economic development spawns a transition from old communicable diseases to new chronic conditions because it brings affluence, longevity and health damaging behaviours such as smoking, inactivity, and over-nutrition. Many Western countries exemplify the circumstances that give rise to diseases of modernity.

This study brings together in-depth interview data with various lines of sociological enquiry to produce greater clarity about the social patterning of obesity and strategies for its mitigation. By deploying concepts from French theorist Bourdieu, along with gender studies and cultural economy theorising, we add the historical, structural and experiential dimensions to investigate an issue usually reduced to individual behavioural risk factors.