Obesity as a Complex Problem

24 September 2009

Professor Stanley Ulijaszek

Obesity has increased dramatically across the world, and there is currently no solution to its control. While obesity is easily understood as the positive imbalance of energy intake and expenditure, this does not explain why it is easy to overeat and underexercise. Explanatory models that feed into energy balance include those of obesogenic environments, thrifty genotype, obesogenic behaviour, obesogenic culture, nutrition transition, political economic structures and biocultural interactions of genetics, environment, behaviour and culture. The last of these models has obesity as an outcome of the complex systems which constitute modern life, and in which biology, environment, sociality, economics, infrastructure, culture and behaviour interact. An attempt to understand obesity as complex system has come with an initiative of the British government, in which a qualitative systems map of obesity for the British population has been generated. In this presentation, various models of population obesity are considered in relation to the idea of obesity as complex system.

Broad Topics: Arts and Social Sciences, Medicine and Life Science

Sub-topics: History & Archeology, Humanities, Medical & Health Science, Society & Culture

Areas: ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU College of Medicine and Health Sciences

Stanley Ulijaszek is Professor of Human Ecology at the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford. His research interests include nutritional anthropology and the biocultural ecology of human populations. He has written extensively about the use of anthropometry in understanding human variation and nutritional health, and on bioenergetics in anthropology. He has carried out fieldwork in the Pacific and Asian regions, and maintains ongoing research in India, Poland, Italy and Australia, as well as the United Kingdom. The emergence of obesity as an important biocultural phenomenon among groups he has worked with lead to his increasing interest in this field. Appreciation of obesity as a complex problem have led him to examine network approaches to, and political and cultural drivers of, this condition. He is founder and Director of the multidisciplinary Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity at the University of Oxford.

Presented by the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences and National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, ANU College Of Medicine, Biology & Environment.

Part of the Toyota-ANU Public Lecture Series 2009