Obesity and Welfare
Obesity is a public health problem in affluent societies, and tends to be related to socio-economic level and to gender. It is not just a problem of individual behaviour, but responds to larger social, political and economic changes over the past fifty years. This project follows two environmental approaches to the rise of obesity, namely 1) that market access to cheap, high-calorie food is associated with high national obesity rates, and 2) that obesity rates are influenced by social welfare regimes, and have risen more in market-liberal than in social-democratic societies. The causal mechanism is assumed to be the individual stresses generated by social and economic competition, which are inversely related with socio-economic status, and which appear to be lower in social-democratic societies. The project investigates these hypotheses by means of comparative statistical studies of the diffusion of obesity in different countries, controlling for local characteristics.
Welfare Regimes and Obesity: Analytical Approaches
Joint meeting - University of Oxford, Copenhagen University, and Karolinska Insitutet, Stockholm
University of Oxford, 8-9 December 2010
Presentations
Stanley Ulijaszek (University of Oxford)
An overview
Stanley Ulijaszek, Rachel Pechey and Avner Offer
Obesity and welfare regimes: an international, personal-level, comparison
Thorkild Sorensen (Copenhagen University)
Cohorts in the study of obesity
Rachel Pechey (University of Oxford)
Cross-sectional data
Michael Gamborg (Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen)
Longitudinal analysis using life course path analysis
Finn Rasmussen and Lena Hansson (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm)
The Swedish Survey of Living Conditions (ULF)
Ola Ekholm (National Institute of Public Health, Copenhagen)
The Danish National Health Interview Surveys
Rachel Pechey (University of Oxford)
UK and US surveys - Health Survey for England (HSE), and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
Tenna Jensen (Copenhagen University)
Food exposure
Lena Hansson (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm)
Stigma and stress
Obesity: the Welfare Regime Hypothesis conference
University of Oxford, 2009
Another connection with neoliberalism was explored at a ground-breaking workshop at the University of Oxford in 2009. The common theme of the presentations, drawn from multiple disciplines, was that political structures such as welfare regimes influence the obesity epidemic. More specifically, higher levels of economic insecurity – associated with market liberalism and the ‘creative destruction’ that Joseph Schumpeter extolled as a defining virtue of capitalism – are causally linked with a higher prevalence of obesity.
Excerpt from ‘How Politics Makes us Sick’ by Ted Schrecker and Claire Bambra, 2015
Perspectives both supporting and refuting the welfare regime hypothesis were presented over the course of a two-day conference on 27-28 November 2009. Preliminary findings were published in a British Academy Review. The conference proceedings are available as a volume edited by Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey and Stanley Ulijaszek, entitled Insecurity, Inequality and Obesity in Affluent Societies (The British Academy, 2012).
Conference Presentations
John Komlos
(University of Munich)
Trends and socio-economic correlates of obesity
in the United States
Thorkild Sørensen
(University of Copenhagen)
The history of the obesity epidemic
Adam Drewnowski
(University of Washington)
Mapping poverty and obesity
Peter Whybrow
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Obesity and time urgency
Avner Offer
(University of Oxford)
Welfare regimes and obesity
Stanley Ulijaszek
(University of Oxford)
Behavioural ecology of obesity
Michael Marmot
(University College London)
Subordination and stress
Richard Wilkinson
(University of Nottingham)
Inequality and obesity: the background
Kate Pickett
(University of York)
Inequality and obesity: the pathways
Trent Smith
(Washington State University)
Behavioral biology and obesity
Robin Dunbar
(University of Oxford)
Food and the social brain
James Stubbs
(Slimming World)
Obesity: implementation of behaviour change
in the general population?
Georgina Cairns
(University of Stirling)
Obesity and marketing exposure
Avner Offer and Stanley Ulijaszek
(University of Oxford)
Welfare regimes and supply shock
OUTPUTS
Ulijaszek, S.J. (2014). Do adult obesity rates in England vary by insecurity as well as by inequality? An ecological cross-sectional study. BMJ Open 4:e004430. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2013-004430.
Offer, A., Pechey, R. and Ulijaszek, S.J. (2012). Insecurity, Inequality and Obesity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ulijaszek, S.J. (2012). Socio-economic status, forms of capital and obesity. Journal of Gastrointestinal Cancer 43: 3-7.
Offer, A., Pechey, R. and Ulijaszek, S.J. (2010). Obesity: the welfare regime hypothesis. British Academy Review 15: 30-2.
Offer, A., Pechey, R. and Ulijaszek, S.J. (2010). Obesity under affluence varies by welfare regimes: the effect of fast food, insecurity, and inequality. Oxford University Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History Number 82. Oxford: University of Oxford.
Offer, A., Pechey, R. and Ulijaszek, S.J. (2010). Obesity under affluence varies by welfare regimes: the effect of fast food, insecurity, and inequality. Economics and Human Biology 8, 297-308.
 Clockwise, from bottom left - Stanley Ulijaszek, Avner Offer, Michael Marmot, Robert Fogel, Robin Dunbar, Peter Whybrow, Trent Smith, Adam Drewnowski, Richard Wilkinson, Tim Lobstein |  Kate Pickett, Mike Rayner, Tim Lobstein |  Richard Wilkinson |
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