Resisting biopedagogies of obesity in a problem population: understandings of healthy eating and healthy weight in a Newfoundland and Labrador community.

High rates of obesity in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s eastern-most province, have helped to position Newfoundlanders as a ‘problem population’ within discourses of the Canadian obesity ‘epidemic.’ As such, biopedagogies of obesity have been deployed by public health offices in the province, through which Newfoundlanders are imagined as unhealthy eaters who are unknowledgeable about healthy eating, a narrative which aligns with older classist stereotypes about Newfoundland as ubiquitously poor, its population uneducated, backward, and naïve. A qualitative study with 28 participants (and a total of 54 interviews) from St. John’s, the urban center of Newfoundland and Labrador, however, not only revealed a group of people quite knowledgeable about and invested in biopedagogies of healthy eating and healthy weights as propagated by public health discourse, but who also resisted them through alternative understanding of healthy foodways. Results of this study therefore contribute to critical obesity scholarship, as they interrupt assumptions that position populations with high obesity rates as unknowing and uncaring about healthy eating and body weight, demonstrate the ways in which a population might resist biopedagogies of obesity, and highlight the need for research disrupting universalist stereotypes about ‘problem populations’ and their health behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]