Obesity Australia, If You Are Listening...

At LONG LAST I am pleased to present Part 2 of our deep dive into the murky underworld of "Big O" - Australia's obesity organisations, and their links to Big Pharma. Join me and fearless anti-diet dietitian Mandy-Lee Noble as we reveal the disturbing progress which Novo Nordisk is making, steadily infiltrating our universities, academics, health professionals, consumer groups, and news media with one goal: to make larger bodied Aussies believe that they are diseased and need urgent treatment! And in spite of the obesity organisations repeatedly claiming to be 'transparent' about their funding sources, we keep discovering that NOTHING is what it seems! Smoke, mirrors and deflections abound, and there is SO much money being thrown at so many different groups, our heads are spinning. AND they're using weight stigma as a weapon to push their drugs and surgeries! It's diabolical double speak and it needs to be stopped. This is an episode NOT to be missed !

Show Notes

• What’s firing up my wonderful anti-diet dietitian guest Mandy-Lee Noble? Since our last podcast, (Ep #55 - Inside The Obesity Collective), there have been some new developments on the Big Pharma front, particularly in how they are trying to shape hysteria around weight - driving people into treatment and portraying higher weight as being a health issue in and of itself.
• What has really spiked Mandy’s frustration is that at the start of 2020 the esteemed journal Nature (in their medical journal ‘Nature Medicine’) released a “Consensus statement” about obesity stigma.
• CONTENT WARNING - we’ll be using the stigmatising ‘o’ word (obese) throughout this podcast because of how the groups we’re talking about use it. But we HATE IT because it is implicitly stigmatising!
• So this group released a joint international consensus statement for the ending of stigma of the ‘o’ word (with that stigmatising word in the title!)
• We thought ... maybe they’re starting to do the right thing? But ... no. Upon reading, it reveals itself as just another push to get people into treatment simply because they are in a larger body.
• And what might be influencing this paper? Let’s check how many times Novo Nordisk is mentioned in this statement as a ‘conflict of interest’ ... it’s in the double digits. 20 times, out of 40 authors.
• Novo Nordisk isn’t the only conflict of interest. The major supporters of this paper were pushing surgical devices for bariatric surgery (Ethicon).
• Mandy has issues about the use of the word ‘stigma’ here. Weight stigma is when you’re treated poorly just due to your weight, which we know is an epidemic and happening all the time and leading to poor health outcomes and disengagement from healthcare. When these industry groups use that word, they consider it a barrier to people using treatment! It’s all just dollar-signs to them.
• In the spirit of transparency - let’s go through the conflicts of interest for Louise and Mandy. Hope you’ve got some time .... (Louise played a cricket sound). ;)
• Basically fuck all, right? We’re not getting paid. We’re here for love, not money - not for the vested interest of corporations or even of ourselves. This kind of ‘investigative journalism’ research has an impact on our mental health, for sure!
• Mandy arcs up at the assumption that people at higher weights need treatment for disease - the stigma is there in the assumption.
• Let’s reflect on what happened after the last podcast. There were unexpected ripples from that episode. The powers that be at Obesity Australia were listening ... either that or there were some totally weird coincidences.
• Some of the coincidences: the fact sheets disappeared! The fact sheets telling people that chips were lethal and to drink Diet Coke to put off their hunger, all of the magic 1920’s weight loss tips have vanished. The whole oldy-worldy Obesity Australia website has vanished and replaced with a trendy new Obesity Collective website. This all happened within 2 weeks of our last podcast with Mandy.
• There was a bit of an MIA issued in the last podcast for the Weight Issues Network - a consumer group that just didn’t seem to exist, until it magically appeared very soon after the podcast aired.
• We wondered, where are they getting the money from? Mandy sent them a Facebook message asking, and was told that the director would be in touch. Tiffany Petrie, director of The Obesity Collective, did reach out and offered to meet us for a coffee, which we accepted. We then learned Petrie would be bringing some friends to the coffee (some backup?). Immediately before the coffee date, they ... pulled out! Petrie said she would be too busy for months to meet. The offer is still open from Mandy and Louise!
• On the types of articles that are being reposted on the WIN Facebook page, which has a huge following - at the mo...