Weight Bias in Racial and Ethnic Groups

Weight bias isn’t the same for everyone. We know that a person’s cultural identity plays a key role in their everyday life, but did you know that it also impacts how much weight bias they experience and how they experience it?

Understanding Weight Bias in Communities of Color

The United States is a melting pot of different ethnic groups and the country’s ethnic landscape keeps growing every year. Understanding the differences between ethnic groups and their experiences is crucial to building a better world. However, trying to understand the differences among other cultural groups can be difficult if you are not part of that group.

To better understand how weight bias is affected by one’s background/cultural experience, the Obesity Action Coalition recently placed surveys among four U.S. groups: all adults, Black/African American adults, Latino/Hispanic adults, and Asian/Pacific Islander adults. Here are some of the key findings:

In order to be a part of the solution, we must first understand where bias comes from, how it is formed, and how it is experienced. Learning how weight bias affects communities of color is an important step to pushing equality forward and building a better world – free of weight bias.