Towards a cultural physiology
Stanley Ulijaszek & Caroline Potter
Presented as an Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology Departmental Seminar, The University of Oxford, 16 October 2009

Public interest in the body from medical perspectives has increased dramatically in recent years, partly thanks to the fascinating new technologies for seeing its most delicate interior structures. However, the increase in obesity, one of the most urgent public health challenges of our time, remains stubbornly resistant to official exhortations around exercise and diet. There remains a great gulf between the biomedical language of body management, and the capacity and/or willingness of people to apply it to their everyday lives.... read more about this project on The Energized Body project page.

Obesity as a complex problem
Stanley Ulijaszek
Presented as a part of the ANU-Toyota Public Lecture Series, Australian National University, 24 September 2009

Obesity has increased dramatically across the world, and there is currently no solution to its control. While obesity is easily understood as the positive imbalance of energy intake and expenditure, this does not explain why it is easy to overeat and underexercise. Explanatory models that feed into energy balance include those of obesogenic environments, thrifty genotype, obesogenic behaviour, obesogenic culture, nutrition transition, political economic structures and biocultural interactions of genetics, environment, behaviour and culture. The last of these models has obesity as an outcome of the complex systems which constitute modern life, and in which biology, environment, sociality, economics, infrastructure, culture and behaviour interact. An attempt to understand obesity as complex system has come with an initiative of the British government, in which a qualitative systems map of obesity for the British population has been generated. In this presentation, various models of population obesity are considered in relation to the idea of obesity as complex system.