Neither good nor useful: Looking ad vivum in children's assessments of fat and healthy bodies

Fat bodies are not, fait accompli, bad. Yet in our international research, we found

overwhelmingly that fat functioned as a marker to indicate health or lack of

health. A body with fat was simply and conclusively unhealthy. This article

reports on how this unbalanced view of fat was tied to assessments of healthy

bodies that were achieved by the act of looking. Despite the efforts of health

education in each of the three countries in our study, children and young people

cited the act of looking at bodies to assess health and when did they arrived at the

conclusion that fat on bodies is unmistakably bad. The article uses a Foucauldian

analysis of medical perception together with material from Conrad Gessner’s

sixteenth century Historia Animalium to outline how the children in our study

placed great reliance on information about fat to make almost exclusively visual

assessments of health. The article makes the case that, despite a great deal of

health education in schools, these judgments reveal a tendency for children to

make incorrect assessments of health.