The study of eating covers a range of areas from food choice to weight
concern and eating-related problems such as obesity and eating disorders,
and a range of fields from social sciences including sociology, psychology,
and nutrition to physical and medical sciences such as physiology, psychiatry, and medicine. My own work has concentrated on factors influencing
eating behavior, especially dieting and its place in the etiology and treatment of eating disorders and obesity. Obesity has long been decried as a
serious medical disorder. For example, a government-sponsored conference
in the United States in the early 1980s concluded that anyone who was as
little as 5 lbs. heavier than “ideal” weight should be considered to be obese.
It was recommended that anyone suffering from such “obesity” should be
aggressively treated with calorie-restricted diets. Many in the medical profession have long seen obesity as the primary health threat facing Western
societies (and their definition of obesity, as the US National Institutes of
Health conference indicates, includes more than half of the adult population). Obesity has been accused of causing heart disease, diabetes, elevated
blood pressure, and a whole host of other medical maladies that may
contribute to elevated mortality. More ominously, the incidence of obesity
has been rising steadily since the 1960s. Dieting, then, seems on the face
of it to be a solution to a widespread health threat.