A recent study shows student dieticians may have a negative bias toward overweight or obese people, which can lead to different treatment recommendations simply based on how much a patient weighs
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“Weight bias is definitely an issue,” said Christopher Wharton, an ASU nutrition professor and researcher in the study. “If you can measure weight bias, and we have, you know it’s possible that it affects treatment recommendations.”
ASU and Yale University researchers conducted a study to test weight bias in dietetics students nationwide through an online survey and self-assessment questionnaire, Wharton said.
Wharton said students were presented with mock-patient profiles, two male and two female, in which the only information that differed were weight-related figures, like body weight, body mass index and body-fat percentage, and otherwise described healthy patients. The students were asked to provide treatment and recommendations for patients suffering lactose intolerance, he said.
“The reason we chose lactose intolerance was because it’s a non-weight-related condition,” Wharton said, so treatment plans would normally not be based on weight.
Students gave their recommendations and were asked if they thought the patient would comply with the suggested treatment, he said, and the results showed students made different recommendations based on patients’ weights.
“Potential weight bias was a factor in terms of students rated overweight or the obese patients, based on their profiles, to be less compliant to their recommendations,” Wharton said.
Only 2 percent of students surveyed had positive or neutral feelings toward obese people, he said.
The second part of the study involved a weight-bias questionnaire about what students think of obese patients, Wharton said, and the results were not surprising.
“[Researchers] found that [students] had a moderately high level of weight bias, which is pretty reflective of the overall population,” Wharton said.
He said he thinks dietetics students, as well as the majority of the population, may perceive obese or overweight people as lazy and solely blame individuals for their weight issues, rather than thinking of it as a societal problem.
“We live in an environment that is saturated with messages about food and saturated with food itself, so it’s actually really easy to gain weight,” Wharton said. “The underlying argument is that there is a number of very serious environmental factors that come to play that make it really difficult for people to maintain a healthy weight.”
Wharton said he believes weight bias could potentially be minimized in dietetics students if it was discussed in classes, though since the issue is not built into most academic curriculums, it will be up to individual professors to introduce the subject.
“In [the dietetics] standardized curriculum, there’s not anything specific about addressing weight bias, so it’s not a mandatory topic,” Wharton said. “My hope is that with the body of evidence, individual instructors will start to take weight bias as a class topic and incorporate that into at least a couple of lectures across the semester.”
Nutrition graduate student Alexandra MacMillan said she thinks weight bias is an issue that should be covered in dietetics classes to spread awareness of the problem.
“Bringing awareness to [weight bias] can help the problem,” MacMillan said. “I think the biggest problem is that people [judge others on their weight] without thinking.”
Reach the reporter at abigail.gilmore@asu.edu.
