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Health Is a Privilege, Not a Virtue
The vegan movement shouldn’t embrace an ideology that makes health out to be a personal choice and a moral obligation — it’s not
Healthism, a term coined in 1980 by political economist Robert Crawford, refers to an ideology whereby health is something for which individuals are responsible and have complete control over. It proposes that health should be everyone’s top priority, and consequently, that each person is morally obligated to pursue it in their daily lives.
While the term itself is not commonly used today, the messages of healthism are pervasive throughout society. People are constantly told what they should eat, described as lazy if they don’t exercise, and they’re told that living a healthy lifestyle will prevent them from ever becoming ill or dying early.
There are several problems with this conceptualization. It fails to recognize that health is a privilege. Those with economic privilege have better access to high-quality healthcare and are much more able to engage in health-promoting behaviors, such as regular exercise. By positioning health at the level of the individual, it also neglects the social and genetic determinants of health. Nobody has complete control over their health, regardless of the lifestyle that they lead.
Healthism makes people who are sick, disabled, or “unhealthy,” most often for reasons completely outside of their control, feel that the absence of health is the product of an individual failing, resulting in their sense of self and worth being threatened. Weight is conflated with healthiness, and being thin is assumed to be symptomatic of being healthy. Conversely, fatness is assumed to indicate a lack of healthiness.
A person must continually be striving for improved health to be deemed worthy. Eating nutritious foods is portrayed as “being good” and eating treats as “being bad,” “falling off the wagon,” or “going off track.”
The weight stigma experienced by people in larger bodies — even from healthcare professionals, the individuals that are supposed to be helping them —…
