Through the ages, humanity’s perception of weight has shifted drastically. In the 18th century, circuses brazenly boasted obese individuals as “attractions,” while later etiquette advised more tact, famously instructing: “never tell a lady she’s fat.” Today, obesity has been recast as a social justice issue, with the left treating body size as a symbol of oppression and shielding it from criticism under the banner of “body positivity.” The catch? Body-positivity ideology has gone so far that even medical schools are now teaching anti-scientific approaches to weight management.
Last week, Do No Harm exposed a presentation given during the “Doctoring 1” course for first-year med students at Temple University. Considering that it was designed for future doctors and nurses, its contents were saturated with ideology and displayed an alarming lack of science.
On one slide, the presentation juxtaposed “Weight Centric” and “Weight Inclusive” approaches to healthcare. According to the chart, a “Weight Centric” approach is one that includes an “emphasis on personal responsibility in maintaining a healthy weight,” and leads to “harms” like “heightened weight stigma,” and “risk of eating disorders.” In contrast, the “Weight Inclusive” column posits that health is “achievable for all regardless of weight,” adding that “weight [should not be] a focal point for [medical] treatment or intervention.”
The presentation goes a step further by posing the question, “What if obesity is another problematic social construct?” It lists “fatphobia” alongside other “implicit biases” like sexism and racism as major contributors to social determinants of health (SDOH) such as health behaviors, food access, and more, which then lead to positive or negative “health outcomes.” In short, it is, the accredited research university claims, the aversion to obesity, or “fatphobia,” that is the cause of health issues, not biology, diet, or exercise.
[RELATED: Med Schools Risk Funding Cuts Within a Year for Lack of Nutrition Courses, RFK Jr. Warns]
In their “historical review,” Temple University claims that “Anti-fat attitudes originated not with medical findings, but with Enlightenment-era belief that over-feeding and fatness were evidence of ‘savagery’ and racial inferiority.” The absurdity continues: “Fatness denoted a new articulation of racial identity due to intermixing during the slave trade, by which “[f]atphobia becomes a direct consequence of the attempt to rule over Black bodies,” the source reads.
To be clear, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared obesity a global epidemic back in 2021, citing its link to a variety of health problems, most especially chronic disease. Yet, at the peril of scientific fact, the left has begun to turn anything remotely uncomfortable or distressing to humanity—including medical conditions—not into an appeal for change, but into a point of “oppression.” Once again, physical realities are exchanged for pathos, and future medical professionals are indoctrinated in ideology, not data-backed science.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison echoes Temple, claiming that “In most contexts, it is inappropriate to comment about someone else’s body, especially when doing so is disguised as being concerned for someone’s health and wellbeing.” The source concludes that “[e]quating weight loss with health is dangerous.”
Northwestern University even banned weight-related jokes, calling them “harassing conduct that may create a hostile environment.”
Meanwhile, courses like “Fat Studies” at the University of Maryland, “Fat Talk and Thin Ideals” at Harvard, and “Fat Fashion” at New School all debuted at accredited—and federally funded, I might add—universities in the last calendar year.
This Fall 2025 semester, one doctoral candidate from the University of Colorado is conducting research on “historic and present day fatphobia and ableism in nature spaces” to make them “more inclusive.”
The absurdity of topics approved for academic study is astounding. So astounding, in fact, that in 2018, three dissenters wrote a series of ideologically saturated articles and presented them as “academic research” to see if any scholarly journals would take the bait. In what is now known as the Grievance Studies affair, seven out of the 20 articles submitted were accepted for publication. Among the approved theses were claims that dog parks were “rape-condoning” spaces, that men should use dildos on themselves to reduce transphobia, and a third that contained an excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with the word “jews” replaced with “white men.” This hoax was designed to prove how far academia had fallen into the pit of ideology—and it succeeded.
Last month, I reported how university inclusion writing style guides have taken to reframing reality for the sake of others’ feelings, to the degree that they’ve even attempted to rework criminal convictions in a positive, “empathetic” light. Obesity, now, is being transformed in a similar fashion, to the apparent detriment of Americans’ health.
How far will this charade extend? Will we be told next that pedophiles are victims of ageism—a recognized “identity” by the World Health Organization—and thus blameless of their vile tendencies toward innocent children?
[RELATED: Top Medical Schools Teach Weight Inclusivity, Racial Justice, Report Says]
The left would like us to believe that they care about “empathy” and “acceptance,” but the lies they sell to the American public tell a different story.
Compassion does not require deceiving people about the consequences of their choices. Human beings are inherently fallible, but we grow and improve by confronting reality, not by masking it. Treating obesity as politically untouchable—or framing it as a matter of identity rather than a serious health concern—does more than lower quality of life; it prevents individuals from achieving their full potential.
This is not mere theory. Leading medical schools, including Temple University, now teach so-called “weight-inclusive” approaches that downplay the connection between body weight and health outcomes. If future doctors are trained to ignore or dismiss evidence linking obesity to chronic disease, heart problems, diabetes, and premature death, the epidemic will worsen—and the consequences will be measured in illness and lives lost.
The academic left’s impulse to prioritize feelings over facts is well-meaning in intention but deeply misguided in effect. Policy and pedagogy should be rooted in evidence, not ideology. Acknowledging the biological and medical realities of obesity is not cruel; it is necessary to equip students, patients, and the public with the knowledge to make healthier, more informed decisions.
Image of gym by DenlsProduction.com on Adobe Stock; Asset ID# 267465121 & X element by dwara on Adobe Stock; Asset ID# 499047881
In the 18th century, circuses brazenly boasted obese individuals as “attractions,” while later etiquette advised more tact, famously instructing: “never tell a lady she’s fat.”
No, and there is a lot here that young women don’t realize.
The 1800 infant mortality rate in the US was 462.9 deaths per thousand births — almost half the babies born would die in infancy — one in two. In 1900 the rate was still one in four. It didn’t drop to one in ten until 1930 and then dropped off for the baby boom generation. See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
My mother lost an older sister to Infant Diarrhea, today easily treated with what you can buy at your local WalMart, it was fatal back in 1911 (and there were no WalMarts). My father lost an older brother to pneumonia, something I survived as a child, but they didn’t have antibiotics a century ago.
This is something that young women today often overlook because US infant mortality today is only 7 per 1000 births, and a lot less than that if the mother doesn’t drink or do drugs during her pregnancy. But Abigail Adams wrote in her diary about being warned not to get too attached to her children because she was going to lose them. She was relatively lucky, four of her children lived to adulthood, one died at age 2, and a sixth was stillborn.
Six pregnancies over twelve years — and that is the point I am trying to make. In the 18th Century (1700s), families routinely had ten or more children, and that would be ten or more pregnancies — likely more with the inevitable miscarriages which occur even today.
Back then, pregnancy — and more that which caused pregnancy — was not discussed in polite company — hence the myth of the stork. Could it be that the etiquette books, which wouldn’t even mention pregnancy, was using “fat” as an idiom for “pregnancy”?
Remember that 10 live births per woman meant that women were spending a lot more time pregnant than today, and the Victorians were so proper that table legs had to have skirts on them.
That said, Americans never really reliably had enough to eat until about 1960. Before that, a lot of people were subsistence farmers, and even those in the cities grew some of their own food (e.g. apples) and preserved a lot more when it was in season. They canned (in glass jars), they salted, they dried — as a girl, my mother was taught to do this, as were all girls. Milk came from your cow, if she was giving some and she didn’t year round. Refrigeration, if you were lucky, was your well and Dandelions were brought over from Europe because they were the first edible green vegetable in the spring.
Hence every generation until the Millennials was taller than its parents. Better nutrition.
And what you see, at least amongst men, is obesity being viewed as a sign of prosperity in the 18th and 19th centuries — all the way up until the post-war advances in mechanized agriculture, transportation, refrigeration and food preservation essentially ended hunger in this country. A century ago, an Orange in a child’s Christmas stocking was cherished because they were rare and expensive (at least in the Northeast).
Remember that McDonald’s Corporation wasn’t founded until 1955, Burger King in 1954.
The old general store had a candy counter — a glassed-in counter that the storekeeper opened in the back, with jars things like “Atomic Fireballs” on top — I remember it fondly.
But the soda and junk food of today wasn’t around back then.
And I also fondly remember playing hockey in the street, with driveways as goals. You’d get reported to child protective if you did that today…
Obesity is an issue today — but it wasn’t always and I think that point needs to be made. America now not only feeds itself, but the whole world. Excepting war zones, there really is no starvation in the world anymore — we should be proud of that!