This short documentary examines how biases about body size can influence the questions scientists investigate and what information people accept as true. 📽️ By kelso_harper, in partnership with RetroReport
In December 1994 then former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop launched a national weight-loss campaign at a White House press conference, stating that obesity had become the country’s second-largest cause of death, “resulting in about 300,000 lives lost each year.”
Hoping to better understand the relationship between body size and mortality, Flegal led a study that ultimately revealed something many scientists—and certainly the public—did not expect: the annual deaths related to obesity tallied to just more than 100,000. More interesting still, people considered clinically “overweight” had a longer life expectancy than those who fell in the “normal” weight category. .
In this short documentary, Retro Report partners with Scientific American to examine how biases about body size can influence the questions scientists investigate and what information people accept as true. “People are just more comfortable with a larger number—they prefer it to be larger,” Flegal suspects. “I don’t think discomfort itself should be a factor in science, but I think it has more of an effect than we might realize.”
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