Empowering People to Make Healthier Choices: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Tackling Obesity Policy.
Gavin BrookesPublished in: Qualitative health research (2021)
In response to the heightened risk that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses to the health and lives of people with obesity, in 2020 the U.K. government launched a new package of policies intended to stimulate weight loss among the country's population. In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of the policy paper which announced these new measures. I identify the discourses that are used to represent things, people, and processes in this policy text. These discourses are interpreted in terms of broadly neoliberal ideologies of public health management. Taken together, the discourses identified contribute to a broadly neoliberal ideology of public health management. It is argued that the policy paper represents an instance of "lifestyle drift," as it initially appears to engage with social and economic determinants of health but ultimately neglects these in favor of focusing on individual lifestyle factors, particularly in the shape of individuals' "choices."
Keyphrases
- public health
- weight loss
- coronavirus disease
- bariatric surgery
- metabolic syndrome
- roux en y gastric bypass
- gastric bypass
- insulin resistance
- healthcare
- global health
- mental health
- cardiovascular disease
- type diabetes
- sars cov
- weight gain
- physical activity
- high fat diet induced
- respiratory syndrome coronavirus
- skeletal muscle
- adipose tissue
- smoking cessation