The Fat of said Chewing

I do not have much time; sometimes that is a good thing; it means I have to focus in, get "right at the meat of things" (lines from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? pop all the time these days). I have studied the issue of obesity in depth, in part because of a creative project for stage that I hope some day to finish, in part because of a family history of morbid obesity (I technically am obese according to the popularized BMI tables). What I am most interested in about the issue is how scientific data is popularized and understood/misunderstood by public health officials, journalists and the public at large (word play only slightly intended). How do public officials take scientific data, a less conclusive body of facts and figures than popularly understood, and make policy to address the "obesity epidemic?" And how do they make sound policy that isn't unduly influenced by the moral panics about obesity that have nothing to do with health and have to do with class, race and status and the selling of goods? And how can we acknowledge that obesity is a problem without giving in to the madness in which the bodies of young women with an abnormally low level of body fat are presented to us as "beautiful" and "ideal" and "attainable" to sell us clothes, dieting products and the like?

There are many policy issues that come up because of this crisis, this public health disaster, but I am not yet sure where to focus. I am most interested in finding an issue where the scientific facts are less conclusive than the way they are presented in popular discourse, but that is a secondary concern for this project. I may focus in on the public health policy nightmare in which poor and working class people are increasingly obese and undernourished.