Background
At a conference in 2019, a group of expert scientists and clinicians came together to analyse the available evidence around the causes and consequences of weight stigma. The results were published in the scientific paper, ‘Joint international consensus statement for ending stigma of obesity’. It outlines their mutually agreed stance, includes a set of recommendations and invites individuals and organisations to sign the pledge to eradicate weight stigma.
One of the group’s key findings was that people who understood that obesity could be solved by diet and exercise alone displayed more weight bias. This included those working in healthcare and public health. However, scientific evidence shows this belief to be untrue.
Therefore, one of the pledges and recommendations from the paper is ‘to encourage and support educational initiatives aimed at eradicating weight bias through dissemination of current knowledge of obesity and body weight regulation’.
Study
We translated the scientific evidence described in the aforementioned paper into an educational animation suitable for the general public.
The animation should be viewed in its entirety but is made up of two complementary parts: i) the mental and physical health impacts of being stigmatised (empathy), and ii) the biological mechanisms of weight regulation (biology).
We believed that learning about the consequences of obesity stigma and the biology of weight regulation would help to reduce weight bias in the general population and wanted to test if this was true.
We also wanted to know if the empathy or biology section was the information that most changed attitudes, or if the two halves were required together to see any impact.
To test our theory, the animation was used in a research survey which was distributed to 1600 people in the UK and USA.
The survey consisted of a set of questions to determine implicit (subconscious) and explicit (conscious) attitudes towards obesity, followed by one of four animations: i) the full animation ii) a control animation that was not about weight iii) the first half of the animation evoking empathy iv) the second half of the animation about biology.
A month after participants had completed the initial survey, they were invited to take a second survey. This time, with only the implicit and explicit questions (no animation). This would help us understand if any changes in attitudes to weight seen in the first survey remained a month later.
The results of this study build upon our understanding of weight attitudes and may help inform future public health messaging.
Thank you for taking the time to help us with our research.
More information on the project and the animation (which we encourage you to share) can be found at https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/obesity-pledge