‘Sound Health Starts from Education’: the social construction of obesity in Iranian public health discourse

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study exploring official public health discourse surrounding obesity in Iran. Data were obtained from the Iranian Government agency website responsible for public health. Our study contributes to the knowledge about the social construction of public health issues in general, and obesity in particular, in a developing country that subscribes to sociocultural norms and a political economy regime proclaimed to be very different from those in secular liberal democracies. Our analysis reveals noteworthy differences and parallels between obesity discourses emanating from public health officials in the neoliberal West and those currently taking shape in the Iranian context. While a notable lack of emphasis on consumption as a tool of lifestyle change as well as distinctive anxieties regarding modernization and technology characterize obesity discourse in Iran was noted, so was the promotion of individual behaviour change. We discuss the implications of these findings and make recommendations for further research on the public health strategies currently being undertaken to address obesity in Iran and other non-Western contexts.

Keywords:

• Obesity
• Iran
• social construction
• public health
• neoliberalism
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, a recent analysis of the World Health Organization’s (2013) Global Burden of Diseases Study published in the Lancet concluded with a demand for ‘urgent global leadership to help [middle- to low-income] countries more effectively intervene against major determinants such as excessive caloric intake, physical inactivity and active promotion of food consumption by industry’ (Ng et al., 2014, p. 779–780).

2. Mirzazadeh et al. suggest that fluctuation in obesity patterns across Iran may be attributed to the wide diversity in Iran’s population characteristics, which encompass different cultures, lifestyles and ethno-racial markers (2009, p. 1).

3. This suggests that Iran suffers from a ‘dual burden of disease’ (i.e. significantly high levels of both infectious and non-communicable diseases), which increasingly characterizes developed and developing countries (De Maio, 2014).