It was incredibly serendipitous that my family was vacationing at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. when the scuttlebutt over the Habit Heroes exhibit erupted. As a mom, pediatrician and health expert, I've learned over the years to not buy into the emotional uproar of these situations but to take a more journalistic approach -- fact check as much as possible and experience first-hand whatever it is, when reasonable, which in this case happened to be days after the uproar began.
So, last Friday, my husband and I hit Futureword at Epcot on the hunt for the exhibit. Our first observation was that it was not at all easy to find. We finally found it tucked on the side of Innovations West.
Once we found it, we initially saw this sign:
So, this wasn't just a Disney exhibit but one sponsored by a health group. Despite claims that Disney didn't use "experts" this sign implied otherwise.
From there, a very distorted and large comic strip appeared on a convex wall introducing the concept of unhealthy habit "villains" and the habit heroes.
Here's the reality. The characters and text were placed on a huge, convex wall, and were very difficult to read and truly take in given the direction of the walkway leading to the exhibit entrance and the overall dimensions of the room. You basically notice a big cartoon in passing but that's about it. And, the images are not anything but a cartoon. There is nothing scary about them or anything about them that would cause a child of any age to feel bullied or ashamed. Given our comic book culture infatuated with superheroes and villains, kids would see the comic in that light, nothing more. In fact, watching the families walk with us along the path to the exhibit, no one seemed to stop to notice the wall -- adults or kids.
Once we all reached the exhibit entrance, we were greeted with a sign and an exhibit worker. Both reinforced the interactive nature of the exhibit:
From there, we entered a basic Disney entrance room. The room was decorated like an old time gym with images of old teams, trophies and a scale.
Once the room was filled with a few more families, school age and preteens mostly, a video came on with our heroes -- Will Power and Callie Stenics. Our heroes talked about how we were there for an important mission -- to help today's kids learn healthier habits.
The video was incredibly well done. The content was appropriate for kids and adults and did a nice job explaining how kids could get more healthy and why that was important. It didn't place blame or shame. In fact it was spot-on in discussing that kids today are suffering from too much:
And, kids are becoming unhealthy and sometimes, overweight as a result. Due to the weight issues, kids are subsequently at risk for serious health problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
The way the material was presented, no one's vacation would be ruined. The material was no different than anything the kids or parents have heard in other settings and had the twist of having fun activities to show just how easy combating these issues truly is.
From there, we go into three rooms to try and help a typical teen become more healthy. The teen boy had a typical body habitus of many kids today -- not too thin or overweight but not in shape, either. He looked like many of the kids today's kids go to school with or see on TV.
In the first room, screen time was taken on in a game that had people zap screens that came down from the sky. The amount of screens on our display equaled the amount of screen time in a child's day so there were times we were zapping a lot. In the second room, we zapped unhealthy foods to make room for healthy foods. As the unhealthy foods fell, we could see healthy foods on the display. In the final room, we combated "lead bottom" who was the only "villain" shown for any considerable amount of time. He looked like your typical super villain in any movie or comic strip kids see these days. He wasn't scary or threatening -- he was just there. The way we fought him was to move our bodies and the more we did, the more he started to move. Within a few minutes, our villain became our ally and happily left the screen. The exhibit ended with our teen emerging moving more, eating a healthy snack and not on a screen.
Everyone in the exhibit was smiling and laughing by the end and left with smiles on their faces. We were all given wristbands with www.habitheroes.com on the side and I overheard parents and kids talking about going to the site.
Experiencing the exhibit after reading the critics was truly as if the critics of the exhibit were in a different, alternate reality. It disturbs me that Disney and Florida Blue felt the need to cave under the loud and misguided views of people who clearly didn't understand the exhibit or realize it was right on the mark. As a health expert, and mom, I felt it was fantastic and would have had no hesitation recommending it to any family, with normal weight kids or overweight kids. The exhibit was not truly about obesity but learning to be healthy. I hope Disney and Florida Blue don't retool the exhibit too much based on the loud few... they were more on track than they realized.
Follow Gwenn Schurgin O'Keeffe, MD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drgwenn
and I was fine with it until Lead Bottom appeared toward the end. The comic bouncing of his large midsection is clearly made for laughs, which I believe is the wrong message to send. Also, the name Lead Bottim is demeaning. If he were called "SedenTerry" or something like that, it would not be nearly as objectionable.
Obese people should not be the object of ridicule. I would feel better if the exhibit cut off after shooting broccoli at the unhealthy foods. No issues whatsoever with anything that occurred up to that point, though I know that a 15 minute Disney exhibit oversimplifies the issue of childhood obesity.
We know that a certain segment of the population is at risk for eating disorders and these are in fact more deadly, less treatable and cause more morbidity than mild or perhaps even moderate obesity. Eating disorders are associated with anxious or obsessive personality and many many younger children have developed obsessive thoughts about eating healthy that set the wheels in motion for a full blown eating disoder. These are notoriously difficult to treat and I think is not necessarily in the interests of public health to have small children become too analytical about what they are eating or their exercise habits. And as experts are monitoring the outcomes of these interventions, they should look not only at rates of obesity but also take a look at the rapid rise of eating disorders in very young children. Most of us parents can point to comments about weight and healthy eating that turned into a focus of their child's attention right before they fell ill with the eating disorder.
As a pediatrician I would think that you would understand how vulnerable children are to finding their place in the world, how fat children are bulled more often than any other group, and having that bullying reinforced by outside sources doesn't help. Doctors such as yourself need to start thinking critically about the world around you and that doesn't happen if you just write something off because the message isn't worse than anywhere else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoM38R9xfMs
Helping today's families stay healthy is complicated. We all come from different perspectives. Instead of focusing anger at me or an exhibit, what we should be doing is brainstorming on ways for families to combat the many forces working against them and offer suggestions to groups like Disney for improving well meaning but,perhaps, misguided exhibits.
The exhibit is down now and with all the comments, on both sides, Disney and Florida Blue will hopefully retool the exhibit in a way that meets everyone's needs more comfortably. My hope is that the core of the exhibit, the focus on less screen time, more activity, and more ways to make healthy food choices, stays. That part truly was well done.
Thank you again for sharing your views. It's out of exchanges like this that we can learn from each other and sort out tough problems such as this.
I certainly respect your efforts towards dialogue about obesity prevention for our children. I would respectfully point out two things. First, the images were at the theme park. In December when I was last there with my daughters we saw the advertisements for the upcoming exhibit, and my girls being the thoughtful teen daughters of a psychologist immediately commented on the shaming cartoon of an overweight boy.
I share the concerns of my colleagues who work with the issue of obesity from the behavioral health perspective. There is a good reason why so many professional organizations objected to the exhibit. Obesity is both a health issue and a behavioral issue - twofold. What may seem like a good intervention based on health science may not be a poor intervention from the perspective of behavioral science. That is the crux of the objection to the Disney/Florida Blue exhibit. We all want our kids to be healthier. Please advance that effort by attending to the input of the behavioral science perspective.
The exhibit's finally included Lead Bottom. My guess is that were he to exist in real life, he'd weigh somewhere on the order of 900-1,000 pounds.
He had a wrestling costume on and the point of the exhibit was to exert "positive peer pressure" aka "bullying" to make him dance....and when he danced his stomach jiggling was no doubt supposed to lead to giggling and merriment.
Did you leave before the part where you were supposed to laugh at what fat people looked like dancing occurred?
Which largely translated to them stealing our lunches because "the last thing you need is MORE food fatty", and pelting us with rocks on the playground while encouraging us to "run off that flab fatty".
By 15 I was envious of girls with the willpower to become anorexic... I actually thought it was a failing in me as a person that I wasn't "strong" enough to just stop eating and become healthy. By 17, I wished I wasn't such a coward and could just bring myself to end it since I was too weak willed to become thin.
This is what you're advocating teaching children. That fat bodies are defective and must be attacked and loathed. Kids don't see a habit when they see a character like Leadbottom, they see a fat body and that it's ok to attack that body "for it's own good".
Oh, and even if you did manage to get to the right location despite your multiple malaprops, Habit Heroes was closed last Friday.
But I'm sure, in your alternate reality universe last Friday, where Epcot has a "Futureworld", where, inside "Innovations" West there is an attraction called Habit Heroes which was open, I guess it is entirely possible that you experienced something completely different and much better than those half dozen or so humans who live in THIS universe and actually experienced the real attraction before it closed - you know, before last Friday.
Just a friendly hint to someone who's trying to write using a more "Journalistic Approach", you might want to at least get your basic facts correct.
I apologize if I misstated the geography at Epcot. But, I can assure you that the exhibit was open on Friday February 24 when my family was vacationing at Disney. But, you are correct that last Friday, March 2, the exhibit was closed. The confusion over the dates occurred by the delay in getting the post through the Huffington Post queue. I posted it on March 1, assuming it would be live by March 2, but it was delayed due to editorial backlog until this Monday.
Dr. Gwenn
The study Obesity in the News: Do Photographic Images of Obese Persons Influence Antifat Attitudes? indicated that participants who viewed the negative photographs expressed more negative attitudes toward obese people than did those who viewed the positive photographs. Implications of these findings for the media are discussed, with emphasis on increasing awareness of weight bias in health communication and journalistic news reporting.
The study Weight Stigma: Health Implications relates that weight stigma:
• Compromises psychological well-being
• Is NOT an effective motivator for lifestyle changes
• Affects healthcare
The study The Stigmas of Obesity: Does Perceived Weight Discrimination Affect Identity and Physical Health? reveals that perceived weight discrimination is found to be harmful, increasing the health risks of obesity associated with functional disability and, to a lesser degree, self-rated health.
There is an evidence-based compassionate alternative to conventional dieting: Health At Every Size®. For more information on Health At Every Size, you can find in-depth research-based information in the book Health At Every Size - The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Dr. Linda Bacon (http://www.lindabacon.org/HAESbook/).
When people from an oppressed group tell us that something is damaging or offensive, it is not the job of the "experts" to vet their statements.
I'm so grateful to healthcare professionals who are coming to recognize their own weight biases and that of their education. We have a long history of hate-speech masquerading as health speech. If we bothered to include members of the community to whom we are speaking before we launched such campaigns, we might make fewer mistakes. But even Michele Obama's "Let's Move" campaign has no one from a civil rights organization representing fat people or the parents of fat children.
When people tell us their reactions, we need to learn from those people - they are taking the time from their busy lives to educate us, which they really should not have to do. Too often, we reject this gift and get defensive or dismissive, or retreat into our "expert" position to undermine their credibility to comment, even on their own reality.
People with disordered eating, people of varying weights who understand body shaming, fat people, parents of fat kids, and people who love those people, are all saying this is offensive. This is not up for a vote. They are speaking their truth to your power, and invoking your power should not silence them.
do unto others. plain and simple and if they tell you what your are doing is hurtful. you stop.
So, if nobody is paying any attention to the display, then why have it? Do you really want us to believe that Disney wasted money on this so that nobody would notice it?
Here is the true reality... it's there for a reason and people ARE noticing it! And our children will be damaged by it.
One more thing - please remember to be respectful on this blog. I value all comments and from all commenters but do draw the line on personal attacks towards me or towards other folks willing to put a comment on this space. Thank you.