The racial origins of fat stigma

Why are White women on diets?' This was something that she puzzled over for years, because no one could really provide her a satisfactory answer."It was her grandmother's stories like this one that inspired Strings, who is now a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue research on the history of fat-phobia — the fear of fatness due to the stigmatization of weight — in the Western world. But the look of ideal bodies changes a great deal all the time."While the 1977 Times article considers the switch to thinness as the preferable body type to be part of "a period of revolution in both taste and politics" in the late 18th century, Strings' research traces how that "revolution" is actually rooted in slavery and Protestantism."With the dawn of the slave trade, skin color was the original sorting mechanism to determine who was slave and who was free.