Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming Re-envisioning the Future of BMI Surveillance: Critical Reflection on a Contested Tactic of the “War on Obesity” Exploratory Seminar. We are very excited for this virtual seminar, on Monday, October 24 and Tuesday, October 25, 2022, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon.  Please feel free to explore this website.  We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed.  Thank you.

In the span of a few decades, BMI has become the principal tool of a massively sprawling surveillance system that is near universally accepted and normalized as a necessary tool in society’s arsenal in the “war on obesity.” In recent years, however, a small but growing research literature has begun to estimate the human costs of the iatrogenic effects of the policies and programs themselves marshalled in the “war on obesity,” including the BMI surveillance system, which negatively affects healthcare access and quality of care and exacerbates weight stigma and discrimination. Why, then, has the BMI surveillance system been deployed so extensively and whose interests does this deployment serve? Our planned Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar will convene diverse thought leaders and catalyze the cross-disciplinary and cross-sector dialogue that will be vital to envisioning de-implementation of the BMI surveillance system to achieve societal impact on weight stigma and discrimination.

Due to the constraints of the exploratory nature of this event, we won’t be able to include additional participants at this time. Please contact us if you would like us to let you know when we release a summary of the findings of the event.

Seminar Leadership Information:

S. Bryn Austin, ScD, Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health
Tracy Richmond, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor in Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School  
Allegra Gordon, ScD, MPH, Assistant Professor in Community Health Sciences, Boston University
Amanda Raffoul, PhD, Instructor in Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School