While aboriginal people are now able to combat racial discrimination legally, the new discrimination (from which they suffer particularly) is against those who have susceptibility to diabetes and therefore also to obesity.

People call this a “lifestyle” disease, while the scientific reality is that this is a strongly heritable disease where people whom evolution has “selected” for survival (Islanders, aboriginals, famine survivors) are now victims of any changed environment to which they are exquisitely susceptible. Our society condemns it as “sloth and gluttony” and women in particular are doomed to a lifetime of fighting weight gain with little support or understanding.

Obese women are less likely than men to get complications of diabetes and heart disease but to receive less treatment and women are particularly vulnerable to trying unproven alternative cures which may be dangerous.

Can we free women from discrimination and guilt by just giving accurate information? Attitudes will have to change at all levels and in the profession and the press.
As our ability to treat improves (and it is beginning) we will see change.

BONUS: Possible extra Guest Speaker Professor Berit Heitman a very good friend of Professor Campbell who is visiting from Denmark (who co-wrote a paper on gender inequity in heart disease and she wrote on gender inequity in obesity).