Beyond the BMI: Expanding quantitative methods to study health for all bodies
Presenter Biography
Daniel (he/him) and Kieran (they/them) are second-year MPH Epidemiology students at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Both are interested in epidemiology that targets the social determinants of health.
Institution
OHSU
Program/Major
Epidemiology
Degree
MPH
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-4-2023 4:45 PM
End Date
4-4-2023 4:55 PM
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/40233
Keywords
weight, fat, BMI, anti-fat, stigma, methodology, quantitative, NHANES
Abstract
The public health field is beginning to reckon with its role in perpetuating and reinforcing systemic anti-fatness. Emerging evidence for the devastating health impacts of stigma call into question decades of research and policy that labels the size of people’s bodies as diseased. However, even as we acknowledge the harmful effects of stigma, the field is materially and institutionally invested in a health paradigm that centers weight loss and size-related proxies for health, such as the BMI. Public health scholars interested in questions related to nutrition, chronic disease, and exercise must begin to expand their research focus to imagine non-stigmatizing methodological inquiry. What would it look like to explore the health of fat people without demanding that their bodies change size?
During EpiData in Summer 2022, we used NHANES data from 2013-2018 to explore self-reported experiences related to body size as a theorized effect measure modifier. We sought to understand whether potentially stigmatizing experiences related to weight would alter the observed association between a diabetes diagnosis and an important health-seeking behavior (routine healthcare utilization). Through a multivariable logistic regression, we found some evidence of this modification. We found a robust positive association between diabetes diagnosis and increased odds of routine healthcare utilization (stronger for men), with nonsignificant (but interesting) variation across weight-related experiences.
We invite scholars and professionals to join us for a presentation of our study, a discussion about the lessons we learned, and an opportunity to imagine how to move quantitative health research beyond the limited weight-centric paradigm.
Beyond the BMI: Expanding quantitative methods to study health for all bodies
The public health field is beginning to reckon with its role in perpetuating and reinforcing systemic anti-fatness. Emerging evidence for the devastating health impacts of stigma call into question decades of research and policy that labels the size of people’s bodies as diseased. However, even as we acknowledge the harmful effects of stigma, the field is materially and institutionally invested in a health paradigm that centers weight loss and size-related proxies for health, such as the BMI. Public health scholars interested in questions related to nutrition, chronic disease, and exercise must begin to expand their research focus to imagine non-stigmatizing methodological inquiry. What would it look like to explore the health of fat people without demanding that their bodies change size?
During EpiData in Summer 2022, we used NHANES data from 2013-2018 to explore self-reported experiences related to body size as a theorized effect measure modifier. We sought to understand whether potentially stigmatizing experiences related to weight would alter the observed association between a diabetes diagnosis and an important health-seeking behavior (routine healthcare utilization). Through a multivariable logistic regression, we found some evidence of this modification. We found a robust positive association between diabetes diagnosis and increased odds of routine healthcare utilization (stronger for men), with nonsignificant (but interesting) variation across weight-related experiences.
We invite scholars and professionals to join us for a presentation of our study, a discussion about the lessons we learned, and an opportunity to imagine how to move quantitative health research beyond the limited weight-centric paradigm.