Understanding Obesity as a Disease

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">On this week’s episode of <em>The Dose, </em>host Joel Bervell talks with<em> </em>Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford about obesity: its history, including the racist origins of the body mass index (BMI), as well as the flawed science, misperceptions, and stigma that people with obesity encounter.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Stanford, who’s based at Massachusetts General Hospital, calls obesity “a really complex, multifactorial, relapsing, remitting chronic disease.” She discusses genetic differences that account for the prevalence of obesity in racial and ethnic minority communities, the financial profitability of the weight loss and pharmaceutical industries, and the biases and dangerous risks of misdiagnosis that patients with obesity face every day at doctors’ offices.</span></p>