Weight Discrimination is Common in the United States

Americans are some of the fattest people on Earth. We are now even fatter, on average, than the Eskimos. And they need that extra fat because it is so cold up there in the North. It's all because of our diet. We eat a diet that has far too many calories and fat as well as salt and carbohydrates. And too many of us are couch potatoes that sit around on our duff when we get home from, guess what? Sitting on our duff all day at the office.

Because of this, our life expectancy is getting lower instead of higher for the first time in years. The other fallout from this is that Type 2 diabetes, or what I like to call "lifestyle diabetes" is on the rise to almost epidemic proportions. And our children are eating so much that they are getting Type2 as well. This was unheard of twenty-years-ago.

For a nation that is so fat, you wouldn't think that we would discriminate against fat people, but we do. Do you ever see a fat man or woman in a commercial selling designer clothes? Of course not. The models of today are practically anorexic. It's much harder for an overweight person to get a job or a relationship as well.

When I was working part-time at the mall, a very short and heavyset man came in and applied for a restaurant job. He was well-dressed and groomed but he must have weighed about 350 lbs. The manager interviewed him, but I knew that he didn't have a chance of getting a job. He didn't.

If he would have been a woman, the odds would have been even worse. With a man we look at him as being big and brawny. But with a woman who is overweight, we think that she is gross and just doesn't take care of herself.

According to NewsMedical.net:

"Discrimination against overweight people - particularly women - is as common as racial discrimination, according to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University."

The authors of the study suggest that we treat weight discrimination the same as age and race discrimination. Many people win discrimination lawsuits every year, but you hardly ever hear of someone winning a lawsuit because of weight discrimination.

The study revealed that overweight women were twice as likely to be discriminated against as men. Body Mass Index (BMI) is used to measure whether a person is obese or not. Men don't experience discrimination in the workplace until they have a BMI of 35. For women it's 27.

Unless we pass laws against this type of discrimination, we all might run the risk at the rate we are putting on pounds in this country.

Source: http://www.news-medical.net/news/2008/03/31/36791.aspx