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Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
This is a huge story, every pun intended. This deep dive article from the Huffington Post, written by American journalist Michael Hobbes, has gone viral in the medical community and outside — and for strong reasons. The very title says it all and the article elucidates in a no-nonsense tone about why the so-called war on obesity is as cruel and futile a war as any other. The article talks too about how this war has created a whole gamut of lies, deceit, subterfuge and misconceptions that continue to thrive and thus cause heavy mental (and physical) damage to millions worldwide.
The extensively researched piece stirringly chronicles the demeaning experiences fat people go through trying to get advice from doctors and generally just to lead their normal lives. It blames the medical community squarely for primarily, well, putting the blame on fat people for being fat.
Sample this quote:
“Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good.”
In the accompanying podcast (listen here), Hobbes, along with another journalist, talks in detail about what prompted his anger. He also discusses the years of research that brought him to this article where he strongly asserts (and he is right to a large extent) that everyone knows most diets don't work and doctors ought to stop pressuring patients to diet.
The article argues that we have known for long (nearly 70 years now) that our strategy to combat the 'obesity epidemic' is not working and yet we continue to follow it blindly with a kind of inexplicable determination that is ultimately failing us. And it is really time to stop wanting to become skinnier nations and look to become healthier ones.
P.S.: For those who do not have the time to go through the long read, the podcast is shorter, livelier and, I would argue, has more curious information nuggets than the article.
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