Medicalization of Fatness and How it Affects Socioeconomic Status and Race

Medicalization of Fatness
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Medicalization is characterized by providing treatment and preventive measures to decrease the trend or rate of a particular disease or disorder. It often applies to the illnesses that negatively impact the patients’ quality of life. However, it also applies to some risk factors that result in a disease: one of these is obesity (Guthman, 2011, p. 25). The medicalization of “fatness” affects many aspects of life, including social status and racial predisposition, because these have been identified as some of the risk factors in becoming “morbidly obese,” providing a negative connotation to the quality of life of obese people whose race and socioeconomic status have been implicated as risks.
Here are some of the reasons how the medicalization of fatness affects social status and racial predisposition. First, poverty-associated obesity implies that the marginalized people cannot afford healthy food and avail exercise programs, both expensive but critical in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Desilver (2013) suggests that it is common knowledge that obesity is a disease of the “poor,” despite a contradicting result of the latest research by trustworthy agencies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2010, obesity was more prevalent with men and women with higher versus lower income. Moreover, the World Health Organization reported that in 2010, obesity was more prevalent in the developed versus developing countries, in both men and women. The negative connotation may have come from the emergence of diet technologies claiming that their products, despite having the pleasure to taste more of sweetness or saltiness, are healthy but more expensive than authentic products. An example of this is diet coke, which tapped the potential market of dieting people, even when there are no concrete proofs that it is adequate diet food (Mull, 2018). Analyzing these reports contradicts the negative connotation that most obese people are poor and that the reason behind this is that they cannot afford to be healthy. In this matter, medicalization may be overvalued because modification of eating behaviors using an expensive diet and exercise may only apply to the rich, who need it based on statistics, and the poor may only have little to no benefit f...