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Most people have some dissatisfaction or concern about body weight, fatness, or obesity, either personally or professionally. This book shows how the popular understanding of obesity is often at odds with scientific understandings, and how misunderstandings about people with obesity can further contribute to the problem. It describes, in an approachable way, interconnected debates about obesity in public policy, medicine and public health, and how media and social media engage people in everyday life in those debates. In chapters considering body fat and fatness, genetics, metabolism, food and eating, inequality, blame and stigma, and physical activity, this book brings separate domains of obesity research into the field of complexity. By doing so, it aids navigation through the minefield of misunderstandings about body weight, fatness, and obesity that exist today, after decades of mostly failed policies and interventions.

Taking a comparative approach, this book investigates the ways in which obesity and its susceptibilities are framed in science and policy and how they might work better. Providing a clear, authoritative voice on the debate, the author builds on early work to engage further in ecological and complexity thinking in obesity. Many of the models that have emerged since obesity became a population-level issue are examined, including the energy balance model, and models used to examine human body fatness from a range of perspectives including evolutionary, anthropological, environmental, and political viewpoints. The book is ideal for those working on, or interested in, obesity science, health policy, health economics, evolutionary medicine, medical sociology, nutrition and public health who want to understand the shifts that have taken place in obesity science, policy, and intervention in the past forty years

Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and population