Luana Maroja encounters “Fat Studies”

“Fat Studies” is not a pejorative term, but rather an activist branch of academia with an agenda, including the claim that being fat is not unhealthy, and is a sign of oppression by the weight-deprived.  Particularly disturbing—and detrimental to health—is the persistent assertion that fatness (or whatever you want to call obesity) is not injurious to health.”Healthy at all sizes” is the mantra.

But a gazillion medical studies show that this is an arrant lie.  Now it’s not good to point out to someone that they’re fat, for, as Grania once told me when she was alive, that is a thoughtless, hurtful, and even useless remark. “Fat people,” she said, “know that they’re fat.” There should be no social stigma attached to the condition. But neither should we silently accept assertions that fatness is not harmful to health.  For lives can be saved by pointing out the dangers. Stigmas are one thing, empirical distortions another.

There’s a Wikipedia article about the “Fat acceptance movement,” which it also calls “fat pride, fat empowerment, fat liberation, and fat activism.”  And Fat Studies even has its own eponymous academic journal.  It’s an open-access journal, and you can see the latest issue here.  Scanning the articles, you immediately see the field’s ideological bent. These are simply the first five articles I saw, and they’re not just about fatness, but, vis-à-vis intersectionality, also connect fatness to all other purported forms of oppression (note the use of “playful” and non-standard language, a characteristic of postmodernist writing):

Luana Maroja has been fascinated by this field, I suppose because of its plethora of antiscientific assertions. She recently went to two lectures at the school where she teaches, Williams College, and wrote about them in the article below, just published on the Heterodox STEM site. Click the screenshot to read for free, or find the article archived here. It’s written in an objective, reportorial fashion, but what she heard was appalling.

I’ll reproduce a couple of excerpts below (indented):

Public confidence in higher education has dropped sharply in recent years. The main contributors appear to be a lack of ideological diversity in colleges and universities, constraints on open inquiry, and the erosion of empirical standards in parts of the academy. Here I describe two college-sponsored events dealing with “fat studies”—one in late 2024 and another in April 2026—which I attended out of simple curiosity about this academic discipline. Here is an account of the claims made at these events taken from my notes.

Lecture 1:

My biology and pre-med students were particularly intrigued by a Gender Studies talk that promised to “interrogate the false association between fat and unhealthiness” (see workshop description below). Being new to “fat studies,” I was curious to see more about this claim. Two years later, I decided to attend a second event, wondering whether the messaging had shifted in the age of Ozempic and following the 2024 elections. What I encountered may sound satirical, but it was not. The speakers were dead serious. I have kept the speakers’ names private; my aim is not to mock individuals but rather to show the persistence of anti-scientific perspectives in this field at my college. Both cases exemplify the ideological erosion of science that has led Americans to lose confidence in their colleges and universities.

. . .The event opened with identity: the speaker stated that she identified as “fat, white, and used they/them pronouns.” I learned that “obese,” “BMI,” and “weight” are seen as pejorative terms that should never be used. She added that it was bigoted to suggest that obesity is mainly a lower-socioeconomic-class issue tied to the inability to afford healthy food. This view, we were told, wrongly assumes that the foods fat people eat are unhealthy and that being fat is bad. We were then asked to “pair-share” with colleagues in the room, about our emotions and body image and recount when we first developed the idea that being fat is bad.

The speaker next wrote down the roots of “fatphobia” on the board (see figure below). Body mass index (BMI), she said, was invented to discriminate against fat people, and its origins lie in capitalism. White people were blamed for creating the notion that “whites are thin” as a way of oppressing black people. Medicine was described as another culprit: there is no such thing, we were told, as a “healthy diet.” Instead, “a healthy diet is what you like to eat.” Further, children were described as having an innate ability to sense how much food and what kind of food they need. The research on whether processed foods affect health was described as unclear. What ultimately harms fat people, the speaker claimed, is oppression and dieting. Anti-fatness, we learned, goes hand in hand with every other system of oppression: “Whenever we are talking about anti-fatness, we are also talking about white supremacy”.

The medical system was described as actively discriminatory: “When fat people come into the hospital with cancer, they are told to lose weight before being screened,” and waiting-room chairs are too small. These forms of discrimination, rather than physiology itself, were said to explain the observed correlations between fatness and health problems.

Here are some of the lies purveyed by the speaker, and the evasions they use when called out:

At this point people began asking questions. I inquired about animal studies: surely, fat rats do not die at higher rates because of fatphobia? The reply was nonsensical: “everyone knows fat is protective in rats.” A student noted the well-documented correlation between cardiovascular disease and fatness. The speaker asked for references. When he responded that there were thousands, she reminded the room that “correlation is not causation” and that people die from oppression and from being forced into diets.

. . . The speaker proceeded to write the word “Science” on the board under the heading “institutional problems.” She later stated that genetics, not food consumption, explains body weight: “People can be 15 pounds above or below their genetic makeup and no more or less.” This was another nonsensical idea, easily contradicted by looking at the recent past: just a couple generations ago people of every demographic group were skinnier than they are today, and the genetics of those groups could not have changed much in such a short time. The exchange illustrated how data-based questions were repositioned from a legitimate inquiry to an expression of overt bigotry.

A graph from Luana’s article (she made it) showing the rise in obesity over the last 35 years, which may reverse if Ozempic and other such drugs become prevalent. Note, though, that. as you see below, some Fat Studies people object strenuously to weight-loss drugs.

Oy! There’s more, including graphics and photos, but let’s move on to Lecture #2:

My second encounter with “fat-studies,” in April 2026, was a talk sponsored by the Dively Fund (created to support LGBTQ events, although the talk contained almost no LGBTQ content). It was billed as “A conversation on Blackness, Queerness, Gender, Fatness, Disabilities and Their Intersections.” Attendance here was higher—roughly 20 students plus three adults, myself included.

As before, I approached the talk with genuine curiosity; I wondered whether this corner of “studies” would adapt or remain unchanged in the era of Ozempic and recent shifts in public discussions of obesity.

Some of the speaker’s themes overlapped with those of the first event, including the claim that “good and healthy” food is simply whatever you like to eat. There was also a brief and negative reference to Ozempic: “GLP-1s are terrible because they make fat people appear suicidal for not wanting to lose weight.”

The rest of the talk took a very different direction. Because the content was somewhat disjointed, I will share some direct quotes. We were told that “fatness was invented to prepare individuals for war by the Nazis” (though the speaker later added that it was invented by the slave trade). “Body fascism is now practiced in France, USA, Israel and Britain.” “The ideal body is militarized to displace and violate black people.” “Fat fascism is about the subjugation of the slave and slave-adjacent (Palestinians).” “The Jewish body is imposed on Palestinians by starvation and the denial of junk food [which is the kind of food they would like to eat].” “This subjugation did not begin with Trump; it began with democracy and those elected to represent society.” Michelle Obama’s healthy-lunch initiatives were cited as a pre-Trump example. “Fatphobia is the making of the slave.” “Fatness has been projected onto African flesh.” “You are not men or women; you are just fat or thin in a ship hold” (referring to slave ships). “After Nazis, COVID, HIV, [and] slaves, one must prove they are fit and not crippled—this is how ableism started.” “Nationalists don’t believe cripples have the right to exist.” “Freedom requires the death of our desires.” “Our love keeps us in shackles. We need to divest from love to bring the revolution” (though the speaker added that his love for his people was too strong to relinquish).

Double oy!

Luana’s message is at the end:

When college-sponsored events list ‘Science’ itself as an institutional problem, they expose a deep split in how people view knowledge and truth—and in what these events are really selling. The talks confirmed this split: questions were met not with counter-evidence but with accusations of bigotry, rote reminders that ‘correlation is not causation,’ or outright commands to stop speaking—along with preposterous assertions that flouted basic standards of evidence. Such tactics do more than mislead audiences; by violating the very norms of reason and evidence that people have long accepted as good science, they accelerate the erosion of public trust in both science and higher education.

When people like (recently) the AAUP say that faculty should control the college curriculum, stuff like this calls that claim into doubt.  “Academic freedom” does not give professors the right to purvey lies to students, especially lies that are harmful to one’s well-being. And believe me, this kind of stuff is not only the subject of academic journals, but has made its way into the classroom. Grok, in a half minute of trawling the internet, came up with at least six universities that have courses on Fat Studies, including Harvard University. Here’s one from Southern Oregon University(click screenshots to enlarge):

And one from where I held my first job, The University of Maryland:

The intersectionality and postmodernism that pervade these courses are clear.  “Fatness as a social justice issue”, “fat liberation,” and so on. As I said, Fat Studies courses can be useful if they trace historical oppression against obesity, and thereby help dispel social stigmas against fatness. But I’d bet a pile of dosh that these courses do a lot more than that!

Oh, and shame on Williams College and its Gender Studies program for promoting speakers who lie about science.