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"In American culture, the urge to moralize and medicalize as many aspects of personal behavior as possible runs deep. Today epidemiological regression analyses have largely taken the place of the sorts of exhortations once represented by Jonathan Edwards’ eighteenth-century sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Nevertheless...the motivating impulses behind such apparently dissimilar texts turn out to have a number of things in common. At bottom, the obesity myth is both a cause and a consequence of what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It is a particularly tenacious example of the same sort of impulse that fueled hysteria about demon rum, reefer madness, communists in the State Department, witches in Salem, and many other instances of our eternally recurring search for scapegoats, who can be blamed for the decadent state of American culture in general, and of the younger generation in particular.
"Our anti-fat warriors are right about one thing: How we approach issues of weight, weight control, and body image tells us a great deal about what kind of people we really are. Much like their Calvinist spiritual ancestors, those who prosecute the war on fat treat the most extreme forms of intolerance as the surest signs of virtue. And, as we shall see, in their unwillingness to brook dissent, their eagerness to sniff out heresy, and their ultimately tragic devotion to a task that can neither be completed nor abandoned, those who have transformed the Protestant work ethic into the American diet ethic are worthy heirs to a tradition of life-warping fanaticism."
-Paul Campos
http://www.obesitymyth.com/excerpt.html
"Our anti-fat warriors are right about one thing: How we approach issues of weight, weight control, and body image tells us a great deal about what kind of people we really are. Much like their Calvinist spiritual ancestors, those who prosecute the war on fat treat the most extreme forms of intolerance as the surest signs of virtue. And, as we shall see, in their unwillingness to brook dissent, their eagerness to sniff out heresy, and their ultimately tragic devotion to a task that can neither be completed nor abandoned, those who have transformed the Protestant work ethic into the American diet ethic are worthy heirs to a tradition of life-warping fanaticism."
-Paul Campos
http://www.obesitymyth.com/excerpt.html