Obesity In America Essay

Fashion, and beauty standards for that matter, have constantly been evolving for decades along with what the height and weight standards are in the United States. One might even argue that the obesity epidemic of the U.S. and the fashion Industry have an effect on each other. Since before the United States was their own independent country, scientists have been studying obesity and how to help people lose weight. Approximately 2,000 years ago, a Greek philosopher and physician by the name of Galen believed that “bad humor” is the cause of obesity. For his patients who were having problems with weight gain, he prescribed “slimming foods” such as greens garlic and wild game. In more recent years we have discovered that “bad humor” is not

O’Brien and Sheldon wrote, “Even though a measurement can be extrapolated from a size, the actual numbers we use in a women’s size are not, themselves, measurements”. Around this same time, a small group of doctors had created a group called the Nation Obesity Society which was the first to try to make treatment for obesity a main concern in 1949 (Brown). However these doctors believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat”, says Nita Mary McKinley, who is a Professor if psychology at the University of Washington (Brown). These kinds of beliefs inspired many treatments such as psychosurgery and jaw wiring (Brown). The psychosurgery would involve burning abnormal tissue, called lesions, into a part of the brain called the hypothalamus which controlled hunger and thirst (Brown). This procedure was only used for people with “gross obesity” (Brown). Jaw wiring, also known as maxillomandibular fixation, held the jaw in a somewhat closed position to prevent the consumption of solid food (Brown). Maxillomandibular fixation was more popular around the 1980s and 1990s but it did not work after people started eating again (Brown). Almost a decade after the Sheldon and O’Brien study was conducted, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reanalyzed their