Adiposopathy - Society and Culture

Society and Culture

The scientific and medical organizations are not alone in grappling with if and/or when too much body fat is actually a “disease.” Many patients and clinicians have the same uncertainties. This is reflected by the attitude of many of the public as well. Many are often resistant to the idea that gaining too much fat is a disease, for a number of reasons. One illustrative example in pop culture would be the “song” entitled: " Underwear Goes Inside the Pants " performed by Lazyboy in the album Lazyboy TV (2004). An excerpt of the publicly disclosed lyrics includes:

Americans, let’s face it: We’ve been a spoiled country for a long time.
Do you know what the number one health risk in America is?
Obesity, obesity
They say we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic.
An epidemic like its polio.
Like we’ll be telling our grandkids about it one day.
The Great Obesity Epidemic of 2004.
“How’d you get through it grandpa??”
“Oh, it was horrible Johnny, but there was cheesecake and pork chops everywhere.”
Nobody knows why we’re getting fatter? Look at our lifestyles.
I’ll sit at a drive through.
I’ll sit there behind fifteen other cars instead of getting up and making the eight foot walk over to the totally empty counter.
Everything is mega meal, supersize. You want biggy fries with that, you want a jumbo fry, you wanna go large.
You wanna biggie fry,
You want thirty burgers for a nickel you fat mother f****r. There’s room in the bag. Take it!
You want a 55 gallon drum of coke with that? It’s only three more cents.

Given all the problems with medical terms such as overweight, obesity, and metabolic syndrome in describing when excessive body fat is a disease, adiposopathy has emerged as a term that reflects the fact that adipose (fat) tissue is no less capable of being diseased than any other body organ. The addition of the suffix “pathy” to an organ is not only accepted, but an historic universal identifier as to when a body tissue is diseased. Cardiomyopathy describes heart (cardiac) disease; myopathy describes muscle disease; encephalopathy describes brain disease; ophthalmopathy describes eye disease; retinopathy describes eye disease; enteropathy describes intestine disease; nephropathy describes kidney disease; neuropathy describes nerve disease; and dermopathy describes skin disease. Adiposopathy describes the disease of fat cell and fat tissue that frequently occurs with excessive fat weight gain.