Discrimination against the obese is not acceptable, says Dr. Charles Billington, associate director of the Minnesota Obesity Center. But, he added, common misconceptions about obesity and the obese make such discrimination all too commonplace.
 
“Many of my colleagues refer to bias against the obese, ironically, as the last safe prejudice,” Billington says. “But the fact that it happens doesn’t make it right, of course.”
 
Billington co-authored a study on obesity bias in which researchers asked attendees at the opening session of the Obesity Society’s annual meeting to associate words such as “obesity” and “thinness” with descriptor words such as “good, bad, lazy, and hard-working.”
 
While researchers surmised that the study’s participants, being knowledgeable about obesity, would be among the least likely to discriminate against them, the results revealed that even this group was more likely to associate negative character traits with obesity and positive ones with thinness.
 
Such a bias stems from misconceptions, Billington says.
 
“There is a common belief among the population at large and also to a large extent among health professionals that obese people are responsible for their own problem,” Billington says. “The implicit assumption is that they have the choice to not to be obese.”
 
That view doesn’t mesh with the emerging body of scientific knowledge which that indicates that obesity has complex biological causes, he says. Such causes include genetic predisposition, abnormal brain mechanics controlling such functions such as appetite and activity, and “the ecology of human beings,” which causes us to shape our environment in ways that are more enjoyable or convenient for us, but ultimately contribute to obesity.
 
“We can have more donuts. We can have more driving and less walking. We can have whatever we want,” Billington says. “But to see those choices as just free choices that we can make outside of the context of joint biology is just missing the point.”
 
Understanding the causes of obesity may help reduce discrimination, Billington says.
 
“There are very strong and important reasons not to discriminate against the obese,” he says. “Particularly, if you recognize it’s not their fault.”
 
Charles J. Billington is a professor in the Department of Medicine and associate director of the Minnesota Obesity Center.

Newborn babies definitely have memories from before they were born, says cognitive development specialist Dr. Kathleen Thomas. And while those memories might still reside somewhere in the furthest reaches of our adult brains, a condition known as “infantile amnesia” keeps us from accessing those memories.
 
Infantile amnesia isn’t true amnesia, which is a medical ailment that can result from disease or trauma, Thomas says, but instead is a phenomenon that keeps us from being able to recollect, as adults, anything in our lives before age two or three.
 
“There are so many developmental changes that occur during the transition from infancy to toddlerhood to preschool age, including language acquisition and identity development,” says Thomas, an associate professor of child psychology in the University’s Institute of Child Development and director of the Cognitive Developmental Neuroimaging Laboratory. “Scientists believe that these changes may alter the way memories are stored and accessed; so even though we still have our memories from the earlier period, we can no longer access them.”
 
Researchers have definitively determined that infants have memories from before they were born. For example, laboratory experiments clearly show that babies can remember and recognize their mother’s voice over another woman’s voice almost immediately after birth. Changes in brainwaves, even while sleeping, signal the babies’ response and recognition.
 
Other studies have shown that babies will prefer a book their mothers repeatedly read to them in utero over other books. Scientists believe the babies prefer the frequently read stories because they remember them.
 
Infantile amnesia is both a fascinating phenomenon and a frustrating component of early memory research, Thomas says.
 
“We know that as adults we can’t remember that far back and with infants we can’t say to them, ‘So, now tell me everything you remember.’”
 
Scientists continue to explore new ways to get a clearer picture of what memories are locked away in our brains’ inner recesses and to determine what biological or evolutionary purposes they may serve.
 
Dr. Kathleen (Katie) Thomas is associate professor of child psychology in the Institute of Child Development and director of the Cognitive Developmental Neuroimaging Laboratory which explores the development and neurobiological correlates of cognitive development, particularly learning and memory, during the preschool and school age periods.