A woman with hypertension refuses vegetables. A man with diabetes adds iron-fortified sugar to his coffee. As death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes in Latin America escalate, global health interventions increasingly emphasize nutrition, exercise, and weight loss—but much goes awry as ideas move from policy boardrooms and clinics into everyday life. Based on years of intensive fieldwork, The Weight of Obesity offers poignant stories of how obesity is lived and experienced by Guatemalans who have recently found their diets—and their bodies—radically transformed. Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr challenges the widespread view that health can be measured in calories and pounds, offering an innovative understanding of what it means to be healthy in postcolonial Latin America. Through vivid descriptions of how people reject global standards and embrace fatness as desirable, this book interferes with contemporary biomedicine, adding depth to how we theorize structural violence. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the politics of healthy eating.

Reviews

"Yates-Doerr's book offers wise counsel... an excellent indictment of nutritionism."—Raj Patel

"She convincingly argues there is an element of race-making in the talk around fat and the pathologization of certain lifestyles."—Medical Anthology Quarterly

"The richness of the book lies in its attention to detail. Emily demonstrates a lovely care for language throughout, showing how specific words are not just embedded in but elicit social contexts."—Rebeca Ibanez Martin Somatosphere

"In the short few weeks that I have had [Weight of Obesity] on my desk, I have come to consider it as a text to think with, an approach to learn from, and material to teach. The text will inform my own practices as an anthropologist, a science studies body, a teacher, and—on a good day—a writer. Just to wrap up my praise: like very few others, this text accomplishes what any book should: it makes one live with it, through it, and see the world through its eyes. If a book has eyes, that is—and of course, not to over-privilege the visual among the senses."—Marianne de Laet Somatosphere

"The Weight of Obesity offers a plethora of wide-ranging ideas that emerge powerfully from an ethnography that is subtly grounded on the rupture of political change and the inequities of a global political economy."—Simon Cohn Somatosphere

Publication Details

Yates-Doerr, Emily (2015) The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.