It’s illegal to discriminate against someone because of race or gender, but our culture condones a bias against people who are overweight. There are no federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of weight, and only Michigan has such a law, according to a new study from Yale University. As a result, the researchers contend, weight discrimination is spiraling upward, and that’s a dangerous trend that could add fuel to the obesity epidemic.
Weight discrimination “occurs in employment settings and daily interpersonal relationships virtually as often as race discrimination, and in some cases even more frequently than age or gender discrimination,” the researchers report in the current issue of the International Journal of Obesity.
Overweight women are twice as vulnerable as men, and discrimination strikes much earlier in their lives, the report states.
