Doctors and nurses' weight biases harm overweight patients

People who are overweight live with this type of ridicule all the time. "There are pervasive stereotypes that obese individuals are lazy and undisciplined," says Rebecca Puhl, director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. They're also commonly viewed as mean, stupid and unhappy. A 2008 study in the International Journal of Obesity found that almost 6% of moderately overweight men and women reported experiencing bias because of their size; the rate was 13% for individuals who were obese and 40% for those who qualified as severely obese.