Fat people face ridicule every day due to an overly simplistic understanding of health, says fat activist and academic Dr Cat Pausé.
Scientific literature shows that the key predictors of good health are actually genetics, socio-economic status, smoking, drinking heavily, eating healthy foods, she tells Bryan Crump.
Dr Cat Pausé Photo: Supplied
Listen to the whole interview with Dr Cat Pausé
"People often couch their distaste for fat people as being about health, but a thin person who smokes and drinks and never exercises is not talked about in this way."
Dr Pausé, a senior lecturer in Human Development at Massey University, says she is usually the fattest person in the room: “I’m not just fat, I’m super fat."
“If someone is fat like myself, who engages in health-seeking behaviours and is healthy in a metabolic sense, do I then get to be considered healthy or does simply the nature and number of my BMI (body mass index) mean that, nope, it doesn’t matter what else I do, I can never attain that goal in that way."
It is legal to discriminate against people based on their body size in New Zealand and in most places throughout the world, Dr Pausé says.
But the argument that being fat is a choice, and therefore should not be protected in the way a person's sexual orientation, religious affiliation or gender is, is wrongheaded.
“I would suggest that it is a lot easier to change your religious affiliation than it is your body size, and yet we very strongly hold that … you cannot discriminate against someone because of their religious views.
"Another common argument is that there is a moral obligation for individuals to live a healthy lifestyle to be able to take advantage of the public health system."
Yet most people don’t actually believe this applies to everyone, such as people who hurt themselves playing rugby at a huge cost to our health system, Dr Pausé says,