UCC researchers call for obesity to be renamed to increase understanding of the disease 

Researchers at UCC and the University of Galway are calling for obesity to be renamed to help the public and policymakers better understand the disease of obesity and drive advances to treat and prevent it.

A recent study by the researchers which was published in highlights ongoing confusion about the term obesity, which can refer to the disease of obesity or to a BMI range, or a combination of both. 

Dr Margaret Steele, a postdoctoral researcher in UCC’s School of Public Health, and Professor Francis Finucane, consultant endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Galway, explored different understandings of the term obesity.

The researchers suggest it is time to reconsider whether the term obesity conveys the reality of this complex disease that centres on environmental, genetic, physiological, behavioural, and developmental factors, not on body weight or on BMI. 

They say that new appetite-control medications are generating phenomenal demand worldwide, but patients with obesity may be sent to the back of the queue on the mistaken assumption that they do not need the medication as much as patients with diabetes. 

The researchers suggest that clearer terminology could play a role in addressing this inequity.

“Our focus should be on the underlying pathophysiology and not on body size,” Dr Steele said. 

“For people with the disease of obesity, treatment is not optional or cosmetic.

“A different diagnostic term such as ‘adiposity-based chronic disease’ could more clearly convey the nature of this disease, and avoid the confusion and stigma that may occur if we keep using the term ‘obesity’, which has become synonymous with body size.”

Prof Finucane said: “There is a deeply stigmatising idea out there that people with obesity are looking for an easy way out, that these medicines provide a low-effort alternative to healthy diet and lifestyle.

“But for people living with the disease of obesity, these drugs don’t make behavioural change unnecessary, nor do they make it easy — they just make it possible.”