ObesityWeek and The Obesity Society - Part 1

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Ob*sityWeek* (OW) is over, but the onslaught of uncritical media articles promoting its contents has just begun. In Part 1 we’ll discuss what OW is (and who is behind it.) In part 2 we’ll discuss some of this year’s happenings.

So what is OW? It’s a production of The Ob*sity Society (TOS). And who are they? Well, the first claim made on the TOS website is “At The Ob*sity Society, there is no us without you.” You might think that they are at least trying to give lip service to the idea that they are here to help higher-weight people. In fact, when they say “you” they mean people who profit from the weight loss industry, which is the population they actually serve. They describe higher-weight people as an “intractable worldwide epidemic.” Charming. In truth, higher-weight people are the profit base for those people and companies that TOS supports.

The most important thing to those whose profits are supported by TOS is the idea that simply existing in a higher-weight body is a “disease” that requires “treatment.”{ (While there is no shaming in having a disease, existing in a higher-weight body simply doesn’t qualify.) At any rate, if that core idea gets questioned (as it should, because it doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny) then their entire profit center is threatened. They must, at all costs, fight a shift to a weight-neutral paradigm, where the focus is on supporting the health of higher-weight people rather than trying to manipulate their body size.

One of the ways they do that is the “research journal” that TOS created and publishes. It’s called Ob*sity and they use it to pump out research that supports their position. Someday I may write a full piece about this, but the short explanation is that it allows them to publish “peer-reviewed” articles where the “peers” in question never question the common obfuscations, manipulations, and methodology issues that exist in the research. From my perspective (having analyzed a number of the studies they’ve published,) it’s roughly like the World Clown Association creating an academic journal and publishing articles by clowns about the health benefits of hiring clowns.

So there’s the journal, then there’s Ob*sityWeek. A week dedicated to propping up the weight-centric paradigm in general and trying to tamp down any weight-neutral paradigm principles that have been gaining ground whether by (truly questionable) research, or an attempt to co-opt principles (like anti-weight stigma work) and make them about selling weight loss.

I’ll say, as always, that surely there are people involved in this who are well-intentioned. But that doesn’t erase the harm being done (at great profit.) Also, people in weight-neutral health and fat activism community have been pointing out the issues with the weight-centric paradigm since before the 1960’s, so every single one of these people had the opportunity to question the paradigm that drives so much profit and harm. Regardless, my priority will always be those being harmed by those making and driving the profits.

Speaking of profits, let’s follow the money a bit:

The Sponsor page on the TOS website says “Sponsors Play a Key Role at The Ob*sity Society” so you’d think they would be proud to say where the money comes from, but there is no list of sponsors  - not on the sponsor page, or anywhere else on their website that I could find.

What is on the Sponsor page is clarity that TOS offers pay-to-play advertising to sponsors, particularly around OW: “TOS holds its annual meeting at Ob*sityWeek, and the annual meeting gives organizations a variety of sponsorship opportunities. These include sponsoring individual events or sessions. Ob*sityWeek is a unique opportunity to showcase your ob*sity-related products, services and message.”

OW is a big money maker for TOS. In 2021 (the last Form 990 on file) OW brought in $682,960 of TOS’s $2,539,900 revenue. This year, as of 10/14 they had 70 exhibitors for OW at a minimum of $3,400 each for the for-profit exhibitors. (Incidentally, the non-profit pricing allows companies like Novo Nordisk that have both a for-profit company and a non-profit astroturf organization like the “Ob*sity Action Coalition” to get twice the marketing and lobbying at a discount.)

Oh, and remember that “research journal”? The Sponsor page of the TOS website makes it clear that the journal provides another advertising opportunity for “raising awareness of the products and services you offer.” In 2021 their journal brought in revenue of $558,449, enough to cover TOS’s executive compensation (for 2021 at least) which was $423,810, of which their CEO made $220,715.

Their website has conflict of interest disclosures for their governing board, but they limit their definition of conflict to people who take money directly from the industry (and there are plenty, the past President has a “Consulting Fee relationship with Johnson & Johnson; Consulting Fee relationship with Novo Nordisk; Consulting Fee relationship with Rhythm; Consulting Fee relationship with GI Dynamics; Consulting Fee relationship with Boehringer Ingelheim; Pharmaceuticals; Consulting Fee relationship with Pfizer; Pharmaceuticals; Consulting Fee relationship with Gelesis; Consulting Fee relationship with Eli Lilly & Co.) The larger issue is that having built one’s entire career and financial stability on the body-size-as-disease model, such that the activities of TOS directly support one’s career and finances is NOT considered a conflict of interest and thus allows some of them to claim no conflicts.

Now that we know a bit about the “Who” of OW, in Part 2 we’ll talk about the “What” in terms of what actually goes on at TOS’s week-long marketing symposium.

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.