To Brewis’ surprise, fat-friendly spots had all disappeared. Places like Puerto Rico and American Samoa that once valued bigger bodies now associate fat with laziness, Brewis found. The only place that could be classified as fat-neutral — if not fat-positive — was Tanzania.
“We discovered that the situation appears to have changed very rapidly,” Brewis said.
The researchers developed a scale of fat stigma based on respondents’ answers, spanning from 0 (least stigmatizing) to 25 (most stigmatizing). Tanzania scored a 10, while the most stigmatizing nation, Paraguay, scored a 15.
The other countries studied fell in between these two extremes, and their rates of stigma were not statistically significant from one another, Brewis said. The U.S. scored about a 12.5 on the scale.
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