QMJC April 2023: Overeating and the scientific interest in ‘obesity’

Colleagues from Deakin University (Australia) held a meeting of the Qualitative Methods Journal Club in April 2023 to discuss an article about ‘the varied and sometimes contradictory ways in which addiction intersects with obesity science’.

Summary

In the 2013 article “Junk: Overeating and obesity and the neuroscience of addiction”, Suzanne Fraser explores how the science of ‘obesity’ is remaking notions of addiction and drugs via neuroscientific theories of behaviour. Drawing on feminist scholarship of the ‘fat body’ and science and technology studies, Fraser argues that addiction is being reframed through scientific interest in obesity, with concerning implications and effects for thinking about food, the body, health, and wellbeing, as well as the field of addiction studies itself.

Analysing 40 articles across key journals in the fields of addiction and obesity, Fraser notes that the most substantial coverage of obesity as addiction emerges after 2000, reflecting the broader rise in the neuroscience of addiction. Science and technology scholar John Law’s concept of ‘collateral realities’ is used to analyse how the scientific linking of obesity and addiction produces realities of addiction and drugs as a side effect of meaning-making about obesity.

In the first half of the article, Fraser analyses how ‘excessive’ eating is materialised as addictive behaviour. She observes that addiction is enacted in scientific work on obesity as “a single, stable and self-evident object” despite the lack of consensus and contested understandings of the concept in addiction scholarship. Indeed, on close scrutiny the enactment of overeating as a type of addiction reveals the empirical multiplicity and incoherence of the concept of addiction itself. While addiction is enacted as repetitive consumption of a drug, given that we are all reliant on the regular consumption of food to live, Fraser argues that the notions of ‘bingeing’ and ‘craving’ are highlighted to make comparisons between obesity and addiction viable.

In the second half of the analysis, Fraser tracks how junk foods are enacted collaterally as akin to drugs. Again, although ‘drugs’ operates as a catch-all term to describe various substances, with different attributes and variable effects, the scientific literature does not acknowledge this heterogeneity, regularly (re)producing generalising statements about drugs and drug effects. For example, refined or ‘junk’ foods are reframed as drugs through their capacity to overstimulate the brain and produce an addictive state. Or alternatively, the source of addiction is attributed less to the properties of certain foods and more to the susceptible brain of the consumer. In denaturalising the status of drugs and addiction as self-evident, objective phenomena, Fraser aims to draw back “within the bounds of contestation two fundamentals of the new obesity [drugs and addiction] and, in so doing, to contest the proliferating realities of neuroaddiction as well”.

Discussion

Members of the group were already highly sceptical of the dominance of obesity as an explanatory concept for understanding food and eating, and enjoyed Fraser’s careful and lucid analysis of how obesity is produced as an object of concern through over-simplified accounts of drugs and addiction. In particular, we thought a strength of the article was its fine-grained, elegant analysis of the varied and sometimes contradictory ways in which addiction intersects with obesity science. It teased out the broader implications of these entanglements for the social world, the body and food and individual agency. In other words, the article manages to home in on the detailed dynamics of addiction and obesity and then widens the aperture to address larger concerns relating to the body in contemporary society, and the everyday practice of eating.

To our knowledge, this 2013 article was the first to apply John Law’s work on collateral realities to the drugs field, and Law’s work has been used widely since to analyse issues as diverse as craving and relapse prevention in the context of ‘addiction’, gender in alcohol policy, drug law reform, legal narratives of addiction and parenting in the family court, and alcohol and other drugs in human rights policy.

We discussed the implications of Fraser’s detailed synthesis of reality-making practices for stoking an interest in the politics of science, policy, and evidence in critical, qualitative drug research. We also spoke about the strength of Fraser’s translation of the concept of collateral realities from science and technology studies to qualitative health research, noting its usefulness for understanding how diverse knowledge systems work to support and authorise each other in the face of considerable scientific uncertainty. As Fraser’s analysis compellingly shows, the concept of collateral realities has conceptual reach beyond the domain of critical drug studies and could be applied to contest the self-evidence of other taken-for-granted contemporary health phenomena.

by Dr Renae Fomiatti, Dr Kiran Pienaar, Dr Ashleigh Haw, and Dr Kyja Noack-Lundberg.

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