Can obesity really be a social contagion?

All those stick-bug models didn’t lead to an epidemic of thinness, although it’s fair to say they contributed to more chinks in women’s already fragile self-images and to a minor epidemic of eating disorders.

So, it seems counter-intuitive to read a study that concludes that normalizing bigger body types in marketing messages contributes to rising obesity.

It’s annoying (and not only because the study used only images of women, but no images of men) because we’ve only recently got to the point where normal-looking women who aren’t digitally enhanced and minimized are no longer anathema to advertisers like Dove. What a relief! From idealized Disney princesses, blue- eyed, blondhaired Elsa and Barbie dolls to fashion magazines and ads for everything from soap to cars, we’ve been led to believe that we can never measure up because those “normal” images are nothing close to healthy reality.

So, when marketing professors Brent McFerran of SFU and Lily Lin of California State University say that using “plus-sized” models (a.k.a. normal-sized women) increases obesity … well, it kind of makes some of us want to scream that we’re not that stupid. Even if we’re fed a steady diet of them, we’re not going to emulate obese models.

Except, here’s the thing. We may just be that stupid. Given social permission, obesity can be contagious. Certainly, that’s what their peer-reviewed paper titled The (Ironic) Dove Effect, published Wednesday in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, suggests.

Exposed to images of obese women and those labelled as “plus-sized,” study participants ate more, chose higher-calorie meals and were less likely to describe themselves as needing to lose weight.

“Just as exposure to underweight models had a host of bad consequences like body anxiety, binge eating, so does exposure to larger bodied models,” McFerran said in an interview.

Exposure normalizes overweight bodies, giving people “social permission” to eat more and exercise less. McFerran likens the “contagion effect” of using large bodies in marketing to going to a restaurant with a group of overweight or even obese friends. They eat more and so, probably, will you. Spend more time with those friends and you’ll probably exercise less because they don’t exercise.

Conversely, McFerran says other researchers have shown that “fat shaming” — unlike shaming smokers and drivers who drink — has not had the desired effects. Stigmatizing individuals makes them more likely to overeat or be less motivated to exercise than to change. Among the examples he cited was an ad from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta showing a photo of a girl tagged with: “Warning … It’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not.”

So what’s the solution? McFerran says what’s likely best for all is if advertisers, marketers and publishers showed a range of people and didn’t label their body types — whether petite, plus-sized, fat, thin, average, normal or real — because every term is highly charged and even misleading.

Plus-sized models would fit the norm for their height and age using the Body Measure Index. As for “normal” and “average,” in Canada that means overweight or obese because, according to Statistics Canada’s 2014 data, 46.2 per cent of women and 61.8 per cent of men in 2014 fit those two categories.

(And let me digress and say that the latter statistic again raised my ire over the researchers leaving the impression that women are to blame for rising obesity levels.)

The StatsCan numbers seem to bolster the social permission thesis. In the Vancouver region, obsessed as people are with cycling, walking, skiing, skateboarding and yoga, the obesity rate is a third of the national average at 11.3 per cent.

Coincidentally, another business professor from the other university gave us more food for thought when his study was released Wednesday.

UBC business professor Yann Cornil has found that foodies who revel in the taste, sight and scent of food eat less regardless of how rich, buttery and wonderful it all is.

But, perhaps more importantly, he found that Epicureans — regardless of their BMIs — are more satisfied with life than stick bugs and all those others.