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The Elephant in the (Class) Room: Campus Obesity
DeBoy JL*Lincoln University, Pennsylvania 19352, USA
- *Corresponding Author:
- James L DeBoy
Professor, Health Sciences, Lincoln University
Pennsylvania 19352, USA
Tel: 1-484-365-7385
E-mail: luhper1111@aol.com
Received date: August 17, 2015; Accepted date: August 28, 2015; Published date: August 31, 2015
Citation: DeBoy JL (2015) The Elephant in the (Class) Room: Campus Obesity. J Community Med Health Educ 5:366. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000366
Copyright: © 2015 DeBoy JL. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Historically, university administrators dismissed date rape, hazing, binge drinking, concussions, and plagiarism as mere “rites of passage”. In the past five years the academic community has made significant strides in publicly informing its student body about these specific issues that can derail student success in college. While successful interventions designed to limit their occurrence have been less than substantial, these topics have been openly discussed and policies/practices enacted…with one exception: campus obesity. Recent efforts to alert students with unhealthy body mass indices (BMI) have met a firestorm of off-campus criticisms that ultimately led to the affected university abandoning its proactive attempts in stemming the obesity epidemic. This paper will explore the reasons that underlie such resistance to obesity screening/disclosure and why such a mindset compounds this national health crisis.
