Analyzing and Examining Media

In this paper, I examine through the lenses of gender and race a long-form article
titled Obesity: Can we stop the epidemic? The article was published in the Spring 2017
edition of the Harvard Public Health Magazine. The bulk of the article is devoted to
discussing what can be done to stop the epidemic.
I see my two constructs – gender and race – represented as dimensions of the obesity
problem. In other words, gender and race or ethnicity are two of the many angles from which
the problem can be assessed. Other dimensions discussed in the article include socio-
economic class and level of education. On the construct of gender, going by the prevalence of
the problem among the two genders (35% among adult men versus 40.4% among adult
women), the study depicts women having a greater risk of the epidemic than men. The gender
disadvantage does not stop with women and mothers; it can be transferred to their children
across generations. In fact, having an obese mother is one of the strongest predictors of
obesity in childhood. However, in what can be interpreted as fairness to the genders, the
article states that during childhood and teenage (ages 2-19 years), male children bear a
slightly greater burden of the problem than female children: the prevalence of the epidemic
among boys 19.1% against 17.8% for girls.
On the construct of race and ethnicity, the article reports that the prevalence of obesity
is unevenly distributed among the races represented in the United States; the burden of the
epidemic is not borne equally by the races. At 38.4%, non-Hispanic black adults are reported
to have the highest prevalence of obesity, followed by Hispanic adults (32.6%) and non-
Hispanic white adults (28.6%). By intersecting the two constructs of gender and race, the
impact and implication are that being an adult black woman puts one at the greatest risk of
obesity.

3
By deciding to look at the obesity problem in the U.S. from various angles, including
gender and race, I believe the author of the article made a good choice. I believe that is the
standard way of analyzing disease burdens because different diseases affect different
segments of a population differently. That said, the author might have made better choices by
explaining to their readers why, for example, women are at a greater risk of obesity than men.
Their failure to do so may make obese people feel unnecessarily guilty and place the
responsibility of dealing with the problem squarely on the affected people. While there is no
doubt an element of personal responsibility as far as obesity and other so-called lifestyle
diseases are concerned, there is an increasing awareness that environmental factors beyond
one’s control, like genetics, too, have a role to play.
I have learned from the analysis that as a media professional, I need to cultivate the
habit of digging deeper than most professionals. Apart from and beyond reporting statistics, I
need to help my audiences make better sense of the statistics by attempting to explain why
things are the way they are. Taking the issue of a higher rate of obesity among women than
among men as an example, an environmental factor that helps understand and explain the
phenomenon is the fact that it has been shown that women who were deprived of certain
foods in childhood are more likely than men to over-compensate for those foods in
adulthood. Hence, a greater risk of obesity (Case & Menendez, 2007).
Similarly, as a media consumer, I have learned the importance of digging deeper than
what is presented to me for my consumption. This is important because I have come to
realize that while everyone is capable of reporting an incident, few can go beyond the
sensational value of the event to tell viewers or readers why the event happened as it did. For
example, I recently came across a video clip on Facebook showing a certain man eating a live
snake. I was so disturbed by the sight that I wanted to know why a man would do such a
despicable and unthinkable thing. It turned out that the man had been on drugs for a long and

4
lived a desolate life. Chances are he was unwell mentally. Meanwhile, almost everyone else
on Facebook seemed to find the incident entertaining.
Finally, considering the article from the lens of faultlines and privilege, a quick
Internet search reveals that the author, though female, does not belong to the race that is most
affected by obesity in the U.S. As such, it is possible that she has not experienced obesity first
hand all her life. Instead, her knowledge of the subject is purely academic. This fact might
partly explain the author’s failure to cross her faultlines and privilege and elaborate on why
some segments of the American population are affected by obesity more than others.

5

References

Case, A., & Menendez, A. (2007). Sex differences in obesity rates in poor countries:
Evidence from South Africa. Economics and Human Biology, 271-282.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/obesity/