Bias Against Obesity Is Found Among Future Dietitians

The excusinators from Yale, home to Oprah expert, Jorge Cruise-supporter and IMHO crooked character David Katz and fat diet expert Kelly Brownell are working overtime.

"Just 2 percent of those training to be dietitians have positive or neutral attitudes toward people who are obese, and the rest are moderately biased against their prospective patients, a new study has found...

Most of the almost 200 dietetic students who participated in the study...rated obese patients as being less likely than non-obese patients to comply with treatment recommendations."

And they are doing it in a self-contradictory way.

"She said that the attitudes expressed by the dietetic students in the study show a lack of appreciation for how difficult it is to lose weight and for the biological factors involved. Also, the message that obesity results from a lack of self control ignores mounting scientific evidence that it's difficult to lose weight and keep it off for a sustained period of time, she said."

So the students are likely correct - "obese patients [are] less likely than non-obese patients to comply with treatment recommendations" since "it's difficult to lose weight and keep it off for a sustained period of time," i.e., they will probably fail.

But that is not the point, really.

This Puhl character from Yale is basically Puhl of crap.

Fat people stay fat and cannot lose weight because, first and foremost, the diet strategies offered to them by the experts, including dietitians, are impossible.

Whether people will do what is possible remains to be seen, but it should be the responsibility of any weight loss adviser to, at the very least, offer fat people the possibility of success instead of the certainty of failure.

The bias argument is spurious.

It offers an excuse to fat people and a way to blame others for that failure while raking in research bucks - "Rebecca Puhl, [is] the study's lead author and the director of research and stigma initiatives at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity."

Alleged bias in a study of attitudes does not necessarily translate into biased behavior.

"Most of the almost 200 dietetic students who participated in the study had pejorative views about the attractiveness...of people who are obese."

That was an example of the alleged bias.

When you have to love the looks of your clients for you to be judged unbiased, that is the day to realize that the researchers are the ones who are profoundly biased.