Kingdom defined obesity as a disease. The second important step occurred
in 1998 when the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for the first time
represented the increasing number of obese citizens in the United States in
the way one usually shows the spreading of an infectious disease.^4 Starting
in 1985 with many states shown in cool blue a sequence of PowerPoint
slides show the United States gradually growing red. According to one of
the inventors of this presentation, “[t]hese maps have shifted the discussion
from whether a problem exists to what we should do about the epidemic”
(quoted inOliver, 2006, p. 42).
The third event is the 2001 Callto action to prevent and decrease over-
weight and obesityby the US Surgeon General. This document for the first
time officially uses the term epidemic and recognizes obesity as a public
as opposed to a privatehealth problem (Basham et al., 2007, p. 55).
Other Western countries presented their own obesity policy documents at
the same time. In 2003 the Netherlands government published Living
Longer: Also a Matter of Living Healthyin which obesity for the first time
is mentioned as a major target of health policy (Minister of Health, 2003,
Parliamentary document TK 22894, no. 22). In 2004 the UK Commons
Health Committee published theirObesityreport (Basham et al., 2007,
p. 54).
The above mentioned events specifically concern the situation in
Western countries. More recently the idea of obesity epidemics hitting rich
countries is being expanded to obesity truly becoming pandemic. Already
in 2000 the WHO initiated a policy making process which after an expert
consultation in 2002 led to the 2004 approval by the World Health
Assembly of aGlobal Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health. This
fourth event prepares the stage for the notion that obesity is a problem of
global proportions: a pandemic. That notion is bolstered with research
findings from the Global Burden of Metabolic Risk Factors of Chronic
Diseases Collaborating Group published in February 2011 byThe Lancet,
a fifth formative event. While the editorial spoke of “An Epidemic of Risk
Factors for Cardiovascular Disease” ( 2011 ,The Lancet, Vol. 377, p. 527),
the Comment by two researchers was labeled “Stemming the global
tsunami of cardiovascular disease” (Anand & Yusuf, 2011). The same day
theBritish Medical Journalpublished an editorial referring to this research
with the title “Tsunami of Obesity Threatens All Regions of the World,
Researchers Find” (Wise, 2011). The media widely picked up this lead.
Reuters ( 2011 ), for instance, reported: “Obesity Epidemic Risks Heart
Disease ‘Tsunami’.” The WHO (2012b) frames obesity as a “non-
communicable disease” (NCD) andthe sixth formative eventin June
Obesity as Disease and Deviance 121