Fear of Fat in Food

How the preference reversed

Over recent decades, in most developed countries, fat has progressively been banished from plates and from bodies. Lipophobia is described as growing in affluent societies, in striking contrast to traditional societies, where lipophilia, an appetite for fat, prevails.

That contrast is the useful part. A fear that appears where food is abundant and not where it is scarce is unlikely to be a fear of the substance. Over the same thirty years, scientific, medical and public health interest in obesity increased sharply, and the media adopted the word epidemic to describe the prevalence of corpulence.

The academic treatment of the change looks at how standards towards fat evolved and at the role of moral entrepreneurs, meaning people and organisations who campaign to make a behaviour a matter of right and wrong, working through the media. On that account the fear is manufactured rather than discovered, and by identifiable parties.

What the citations date it to

Wiktionary defines lipophobia as a fear of dietary fat and collects three quotations, which between them supply a chronology.

A history of American tourists in France, published in 1998, describes a generation that avoided fixed itineraries, stayed in cheap hotels and hostels and, being unaffected by the lipophobia of later generations, lived on bread, cheese and pate. The fear is placed in the future relative to the people described.

A study of the chicken industry from 2002 names the decade and a consequence. It calls the rebirth of Kentucky Fried Chicken as KFC in 1993 the most audacious example of chicken meat being used to position a company, since the primary purpose was to shed the image of the fried food king, and credits the change to the lipophobia movement of the 1980s together with the broader consumer movement.

A book on feeding children, published in 2012, glosses the term as the irrational fear of fat and observes that a particular group can be as prone to it as the population as a whole, which puts the fear at ordinary background levels rather than at clinical ones.

What makes this word different

Most terms in the phobia lists name an object and describe nobody. This one names an attitude, and the attitude has four things most of the vocabulary lacks:

• a date
• a geography
• a documented commercial effect
• a proposed mechanism

It is also the rare case where the object of the fear was reclassified rather than the people fearing it. Fat did not change. What changed was the public standing of fat, pushed by campaigns that treated its consumption as a moral question, and the reversal is visible in a fast food chain removing a cooking method from its own name.

None of that makes it a phobia in the clinical sense, and no source treats it as one. It is a food aversion held at population scale, and the word for it is used mostly by people describing the population rather than by anybody describing themselves.