Is obesity a public health problem?
Abstract
It is often claimed that there is an obesity epidemic in affluent countries, and that
obesity is one of the most serious public health problems in the developed world.
I will argue that obesity is not an 'epidemic' in any useful sense of the word, and
that classifying it as a public health problem requires us to make fairly controversial
moral and empirical assumptions. While epidemiological evidence suggests that the
prevalence of obesity is on the rise and can lead to serious health problems ranging
from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, this does not by itself show that obesity
is a public health problem. © 2012 The Author 2012.
Type
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6320Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1093/phe/phs028Publication Info
(2012). Is obesity a public health problem?. Public Health Ethics, 5(3). pp. 216-221. 10.1093/phe/phs028. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6320.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Jonathan Anomaly
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
I work mostly on issues at the intersection of ethics and economics, including how
we should respond to the under-consumption of vaccines and the over-consumption of
antibiotics, and whether the market for biomedical enhancements should be regulated
in any way. More generally, my research focuses on collective action problems. I
recently co-edited the first major <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-politics-and-economics-9780190207311?cc=us&lang=en&a
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