War on fat in postwar Finland: A history of fat-shaming

ABSTRACT By the twenty-first century, obesity has become a focus of medical concern, moralizing statements, and most significantly, alarmist rhetoric. As a case in point, the Finnish people were in danger to turn into a fat nation already in the early 1950s – or that was the claim of the anti-fat activists organized as the Association to Combat Obesity [ACO] (Liikalihavuuden vastustamisyhdistys). Founded in 1950, the ACO’s aim was principally educational. However, the association did much more than spread ostensibly unbiased information – in fact, we argue that they became opinion leaders at the forefront of fat-shaming. In this article, we examine the interconnectedness of health education and fat-shaming in postwar Finland. As the ACO was started by the initiative of one man, the attack on fat seemed personal. The ACO’s anti-fat activism also left a controversial legacy. The history of the ACO hence shows how the stigmatization of fat people and personal reactions to it change over time to reflect prevailing cultural climates and social and political environments.


Introduction
The Finns are about to turn into a fat 1 nation!Or so went the claim of the antifat activists organized as the Association to Combat Obesity [ACO] (Liikalihavuuden vastustamisyhdistys) in 1950, despite the fact that World War II-era food rationing lasted until 1954.The ACO proudly proclaimed itself to be the pioneer of anti-fat campaigning globally (ACO 1960).The ACO was initiated by businessman and magistrate, Yrjö Similä (1884Similä ( -1961)), who himself had lost a considerable amount of weight.However, the ACO was anything but a one man's army as Similä managed to engage leading Finnish doctors and scientists. 2 While the ACO's aim was principally educational, the association did much more than spread ostensibly unbiased information.In fact, we argue, they became opinion leaders at the forefront of fat-shaming. 3 By the twenty-first century, obesity became a focus of medical concern, moralizing statements, and alarmist rhetoric.As Amy Erdman Farrell (2011) argues, we tend to assume that weight stigma is simply a sign that we recognize the apparent health dangers of fat.In the medicalized discourse, health and social stigma intertwine.Fat-shaming can be disguised as concern over someone's health and asserts individual moral responsibility over fatness (Harjunen 2017;Spratt 2023).Research continues to animate the misguided belief that weight stigma, induced by shame and prejudice, can ultimately motivate weight loss (Puhl and Hauer 2010).The ACO's stated health concern rested on this premise as it openly adopted a rhetoric of "war" and called the nation to fight against fat, their new "number one enemy." 4 In this article, we examine the interconnectedness of health education and fatshaming in postwar Finland.We look at the forms of fat-shaming the ACO applied and ask: what functions did the derogation of fat serve in health propaganda?In 1960, the ACO referenced a poll, according to which 39% of women and 17% of men "considered themselves too fat" (ARA, ACO 1960, 48).The apparent vagueness of the epidemiological data concerning Finland adds weight to our argument that behind anti-fat sentiment there were other persuasions than an established scientific consensus.The ACO's attempts to find statistical data on obesity and parts of their rhetoric (such as elevating fat to a number one public health concern) were in obvious ways indebted to "America's first obesity crisis," which Nicolas Rasmussen dates to the 1950s (Rasmussen 2019, 2-3).Either way, the "fat is a problem"narrative appears as purposefully created.Nor were its moral connotations accidental.We unpack the ACO's narrative strategies around obesity and posit them against the social and cultural landscape of the time.By looking at temporal changes and historical agency that went into the obesity discourse, we uncover how the Finnish "war on fat" was born.As the historian Wendy Mitchinson states, "place matters" when we investigate the historical attributes given to fat (Mitchinson 2018, 19).

Method
Our primary sources consist of written and audiovisual materials as the ACO spread their message through health journals, lectures, leaflets, radio programs and films.Also, their most prominent form of activity were intensive weight-loss courses that were advertised in newspapers and organized across the country.We have collected material by examining Finnish health magazines to illuminate the broader opinion environment around fat prior to and during the ACO's influence, such as Terveydenhoitolehti (Health Care Magazine, published by the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim, the largest medical association in Finland), Terveys (Health magazine), and weekly news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti (The Finnish picture magazine).In addition, we searched for articles from the extensive digital newspaper archive of the Finnish National Library (https:// digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/etusivu).Through close reading, we have situated the ACO's anti-fat campaign within the Finnish social, cultural, and political contexts.This has allowed us to identify fat-related theories and practices that gained their significance in these historical circumstances and/or have since had a longstanding impact on twentieth-century discourses of fatness.

Combatting a positive image of fatness
According to the cultural critic Helene Shugart (2016), evaluations of fatness only make sense in context.Fat is an asset in the face of scarcity and malnutrition but suggests inability or unwillingness to control one's appetite against the backdrop of abundance.The ACO's offensive against fatness and the rhetoric and discursive choices they made must too be analyzed against their immediate and the long-running historical contexts.Initially, the ACO had to banish skeletal shadows of the past, as the recent war and centuries-old experiences of scarcity had left the Finns with an incessant fear of hunger.Not so long ago, thinness could have meant impending death.For example, the Great Hunger Years from 1866 to 1868, when consecutive bad harvests led ten per cent of the Finnish population to perish due to malnutrition and related diseases, were still fresh in the Finnish cultural memory (Kraatari and Newby 2018).
In the 1930s and the 1940s, not having enough food persisted as the most pressing food-related problem on Finnish minds.Newspapers continued to run articles reminiscing the catastrophic hunger years (e.g.Tasan 70 vuotta sitten 1867 alkoivat kauheat nälkävuodet, Helsingin Sanomat, 3.9.1937).Characteristically, in 1949 -a year prior to the founding of the ACO -a 94year-old man related in a newspaper interview that the Great Hunger Years were among his "most horrific memories" ("Satakunnan vanhuksia," Helsingin Sanomat, 7.9.1949).In 1950, Suomen Kuvalehti published an article on bouts of night frost that had recently not only wrecked the financial security of smallholders but also reminded them that "hunger" should be dreaded (Jokela 1950).
The poor nutritional status of Finns had long run counter to the centralized goal of producing healthy citizens.The idea that vital and strong bodies signified national prowess had strengthened in the authoritarian climate of interwar years.The ideal Finn was neither sickly nor fat -and any deviation from this model was to be nipped in the bud.It is illustrative that the Finnish pediatrician Arvo Ylppö's health guide from 1920 defines the normative child, among other things, by their ideal weight and measurements and the "regularity" of the body.However, underweight children were the far more pressing concern (Tuomaala 2003).
Against this history, the medical experts working with the ACO anticipated that the public would not accept without question that fatness was an unhealthy condition.Searches to the newspaper archive of the Finnish National Library reveal that in the contemporary news media, fatness was more of a laughingstock than a serious health concern.Illustratively, the professor of physiology Alvar Wilska (1911Wilska ( -1987) ) quickly dismissed any public objection to the burgeoning medicalization of fatness and underlined that obesity should be resisted stoutly.Certainly, the ACO had not been founded to "starve the Finnish people" and to create more work for physicians ("Wilska puhuu: Rasvatauti," 1950, 18).However, medical experts were able to integrate some elements of the earlier, deficiency-focused nutrition discourse in the attack against fat.A 1951 article on tapeworm in Suomen Kuvalehti pointedly juxtaposed the old and the new worlds.The tapeworm, a parasite that had long been emblematic of the poor Finnish nutrition status, was now regarded to do good work in helping citizens maintain their figures (Huhtala 1951).To be sure, the statement was meant to be sarcastic, but it still illustrates how stigmatizing fatness was quickly becoming.
Medical discourse also resisted change as older theories depicted fatness as an inherited (not an acquired) quality.A common reading of the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer's (1888Kretschmer's ( -1964) ) human typology based on biological constitution described a pyknic type -a short and stocky body associated with a jovial character (Eskola 1948).In contrast to this biological conceptualization, the ACO's doctor Osmo Turpeinen offered in 1950 that fatness was a "psychosomatic disease" -a "visible consequence" of over-eating, which in turn was one of the most "primitive" sources of contentment and psychological relief (Turpeinen 1950, 52).Turpeinen was clearly familiar with the American lexicon that made obesity into a mental disorder in the 1950s (Rasmussen 2019).However, since only a minority of obese individuals "overate because of psychological reasons," asserted the physician with an ACO membership, Ole Appelqvist (1912Appelqvist ( -2002)), weight loss could be achieved through a reducing diet (Appelqvist 1952, 87).
The ACO really did seem to be a pioneer on the anti-fat front.While admiring the strides made in the American anti-fat campaigning, they worked with Danish and Norwegian diet promoters to establish associations similar to the ACO (ARA 1960).By mobilizing a range of experts, it seems that the ACO single-handedly started an obesity fervor in Finland.The first wave of weightloss articles in Finnish magazines bore the ACO's imprint.These texts aimed to instill a fear of fat into the public by connecting overweight to increased mortality.In 1952, Similä related that he himself had been warned about impending death due to overweight in the 1930s -an example which he would revisit on multiple occasions (1952).A year later, Similä translated and edited a series of articles originally written by "the Swedish anti-fat pioneer" Nils Brage Nordlander for the widely-read Terveydenhoitolehti.
Here, fatness was presented as a disease -not merely a "flaw of appearance"that impaired capacity to work, caused suffering, and brought about premature death (Nordlander 1953a, 21).Obesity killed by raising the risk of multiple diseases (cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer) as well as of accidents (Nordlander 1953b).The view of overweight as life-threatening was even used to raise weight loss morale, as an ACO physician tried to scare the participants of the ACO's weight-loss course into shape with "what medicine had established of obesity as a cause of disease and death" ("Laihdutushoito vauhdissa," 1952, 22).
In general, the ACO's courses held in the 1950s and 1960s showcased the medicalization of fatness.They were supervised by a doctor and nurse, and participants were routinely called "patients" (e.g."44,3 kiloa laihduttu kahdessa viikossa, " 1952, 20;"Laihdutushoito vauhdissa," 1952, 20).Courses were also framed as "diet therapy," apparently inspired by the promising results of group therapy for obesity in 1950s America (Rasmussen 2019).The ACO's courses certainly had the pros and cons of a group approach, one aspect being the potential of shame.Having to show up every week and share one's journey with the group made one accountable for their own weight loss (ARA, 1957).Therefore, the ACO harnessed participants' fear of public shame, as did many weight-loss groups of the time (Rasmussen 2019).But despite keeping the course participants on a tight leash regarding diet and weigh-ins, the ACO did try to preserve their dignity.A report from 1957 recognized that many fat people were "sensitive" about their weight, which was why the courses operated on a principle of confidentiality: names of the participants were not made public, and photographs were taken only sparingly.
Medicalization of fatness, as promoted by the ACO, did not only work towards changing the health political meaning of the fat body.The ACO's emphasis on individual agency and responsibility regarding weight loss paved the way for so-called neoliberal body culture as well.As Hannele Harjunen has pointed out, "the body is understood as an individualistic project," and one is required to strive toward health constantly (2021, pp., 68, 70).Neoliberalism as an economic policy is typically dated to have emerged from the 1980s onwards.However, the emphasis put on individual health-nutritional agency by the ACO in Finland (and internationally by organizations and discourses with similar aims) have spread the idea that thin equals being in control (Farrell 2021;Kyrölä 2021).This contributed to a general cultural shift toward neoliberalism by the end of the twentieth century.

Derogatory words
Convincing the public with the latest medical knowledge was only one of the strategies the ACO adopted.A related tactic was taking fat shame to the level of parlance.The ACO strove to change the connotations of familiar Finnish words referring to fatness and promoted new terminology.For instance, the ACO considered the term lihava (a typical translation of the English "fat," but literally, "fleshy") too benign.Lihava suggested that obesity was not about harmful fattening but about accumulating excess flesh, perhaps even muscle, which could not be deemed categorically unhealthy and, as such, allegedly downplayed the severity of the phenomenon."More sophisticated languages" did not risk such misunderstandings.The Swedish fetma or fettsot, the German Fettsucht or Fettkrankheit, and the English "fat" all called adipose tissue by its proper name.Many of them also placed emphasis on the presumed lethality of fatness (ARA 1954).
The ACO promoted a medical vocabulary of fatness.This is no wonder given that, in 1956, 110 of its 421 members were doctors (ARA, 1956).This did not happen without moralistic intent.As Mitchinson points out, the medical word "obesity" comes from the Latin ob (over) and edere (to eat), which immediately shifts the blame to the person who has eaten oneself fat (2018).Also in Finland, the term obesitas is linked to the project of medicalization and was prominently applied in Duodecim by the Finnish internist Esko Nikkilä .The ACO reprinted Nikkilä's 1960 article "On the problem of obesitas" (Obesitaksen ongelmasta) in the same year -but in a simplified form.The need for the ACO to "explain the scientific terms" in Nikkilä's text underlines that the vocabulary of fatness had really shifted to a more technical direction (ARA, 1960, p. 19).With its medical name and even more esoteric suggestions for its causes -like "hyperphagia," an incessant desire to eatfatness was unquestionably the domain of experts.But the medicalization had its downsides.The anti-fat propaganda was now more challenging for the lay reader to understand and that much more difficult to disseminate.
While lihavuus ("fatness") was, by far, the commonest term used to designate the ACO's "number one enemy," fat people were called many names in the ACO's annual reports: "'healthy' blimps," "bloated Madonnas," and the "ill-shapen" (linjavikainen) (ARA 1956, p. 5).The Finnish nurse, tapeworm expert, and MP, Alli Vaittinen-Kuikka (1918-2006), who led a few of the ACO's weight loss courses in the 1960s, used for the participants a quaint term, köllykkä.The term is difficult to translate; however, it connotes something big, round, and clumsy.The course reports included other attempts at relaxed language, but the overall tone was belittling.Those who had not succeeded in losing weight were called "weak-minded" and "secret eaters."A comment from one participant reveals internalized fat shame: only after losing 19 kilos, she finally felt "like a person again" (Kiviranta 1966).
From unflattering images of men. . .While the ACO's anti-obesity propaganda spread mostly through the written word, activists recognized the appeal of the moving picture.Two educational films the ACO promoted in the 1960s were clear attempts to enforce negative ways of seeing fatness through the means of visual culture (Snider 2013).When Yrjö Similä established an ear-marked fund to support metabolism research in 1960, one of its first grants was used to produce a short educational film called Paksu juttu (literally "The Thick Thing," Forsman 1960).Such films were commonly shown in Finnish movie theaters from the 1920s through the 1960s and were often produced by ideological associations, as they were an effective means of mass communication prior to the era of home televisions (Lammi 2006).The ACO's film was shown in most Finnish movie theaters in the early 1960s and was reportedly "very well received" (ARA, 1963, p. 4).
In Paksu juttu, a benevolent nagging wife tries to ignite a spark for weight loss in her husband by gifting him the ACO's anti-fat book.As the husband reads it, the book's narrator (with the help of the wife's gentle nudges) tears down his misguided beliefs and terrifies him with warnings of premature death: "Do not dig your own grave with your teeth!"The man gradually loses his appetite.After a nightmarish night, he accidentally meets Yrjö Similä, who hauls the man to the ACO's office to meet a doctor.Aesthetic reasons for weight loss are quickly dismissed as feminine vanities, but arguments about saving money and living longer begin to persuade the man.As he leaves the doctor's office, he promises to return as "half the man he used to be." In the film, Similä once again recounts the story of what convinced him to lose 30 kilos and to stay thinner ever since.The story is told in greater detail in Kuta pitempi vyö.In 1931, severe chest pain, subsequently diagnosed as angina pectoris, forced Similä to take a leave of absence.But it was not until his doctor urged Similä to draw up a last will and testament that Similä fully realized the "gravity" of the situation.He would die, and his family would be "left helpless" (Similä 1960, 187).The man's role as a provider, and the broader expectation that he would keep track of household finances, motivated Similä and, in his hopes, all overweight men, to reduce their girth.
Similä clearly falls into the category of an "active" male overeater, usually a busy businessman, for whom heart disease is a much more persuasive cause for weight loss than looks (Rasmussen 2019).However, a fat body wrecked the ideal image of masculinity (Gilman 2004) and went against the strong and athletic body ideal established in the 1920s and the 1930s.Fat masculinity fit particularly poorly in the military context; the ACO's annual reports from the 1950s recurrently noted how postwar armies struggled with the bulging bellies of soldiers, a problem which in the US had, purportedly, even warranted court martial measures (ARA, 1954(ARA, , 1956)).Fat soldiers, in a sense, twisted the knife in the wound that being defeated by the Soviet Union had inflicted on national manhood.Perhaps "doughy boys" would be unable to defend the nation from external threats or to rebuild the economy and infrastructure that was destroyed in the war.Certainly, these kinds of sentiments prevailed in the discourse on fat in the latter half of the twentieth century.For instance, Deborah McPhail (2018) has shown that, in Cold War Canada, fatness was regarded as a sign of "failed masculinity" and a national threat if a war should break out.
The ACO also bought a short film, Herkullista lihavuutta (roughly translated, "Luscious fatness"), from Fennada-Filmi Oy in 1965 (Nuorvala 1965).The film, which takes the intimidation tactics a step farther, was shown during the ACO's public lectures and weight-loss courses (ARA, 1965).The film is cluttered with puns about big bodies and other attempts at comic relief -people getting stuck in chairs, not fitting in elevators or busses, and nearly getting hit by cars due to fatness slowing them down while crossing a street.Such use of humor bears similarities to the American educational film Cheers for Chubby (1951), produced as a part of Metropolitan Life's anti-obesity campaign.In it, "Mrs.Chubby's" motivation for weight loss is raised when her buttocks gets stuck in a taxicab door (Rasmussen 2019).But perhaps the most prominent feature of the ACO's film is the gritty imagery of fat people that clearly aims to stir ridicule and disgust in the viewer.A massage scene featuring a large man cuts to images of baking and kneading dough.The narrator also derides the man by calling him "missus," as if by accident.Again, calling out softness appears a serious offense made against the male body, as it constitutes him as weak and feminine (Kindinger 2022;Kyrölä 2021).

. . . to misogynistic depictions of women
As with today, obesity discourse of the 1950s and the 1960s was strongly gendered (Farrell 2021;Rasmussen 2019).Materials produced by the ACO correspondingly reveal different tactics of fat-shaming between men and women.As noted above, fat men were depicted as irresponsible, providers who could die at any moment and leave their families in the lurch.Female fat invoked a different set of judgments, concerning women's appearance and household skills.On one hand, emerging diet enthusiasm added to women's domestic responsibilities, as they became the "weight monitors" of the nuclear family (Stearns 1997, 95).For instance, in Paksu juttu, the wife's good cooking ("almost like my mother used to make") was implied to be the reason the husband had fattened in the first place.On the other hand, keeping a trim figure was challenging while being responsible for the family's food, that is, while spending a lot of time near the cupboards.Therefore, remaining slim could be interpreted as a sign of self-control and moral superiority.
That women were the typical attendees of the ACO's weight-loss courses demonstrates the special connection between fat and the feminine.The ACO copied the course idea -and apparently their attitude toward female fat -from the American doctor John R. Pate (1906Pate ( -1985))."That a woman . . .regains her normal weight, shape and posture," Dr Pate reportedly maintained, "is a great blessing one cannot put a price on" (ARA, 1957, p. 5).High female attendance influenced the content of the weight-loss courses.In 1958, "medical cosmetology" to reduce wrinkles and saggy skin caused by weight loss was included in the course program.The addition was justified as something that the female participants themselves "favored" (ARA, 1958, p. 26).We can discern two overlapping beauty standards: to be thin and to be youthful.They both were constitutive of attractiveness, which, throughout the many rejuvenation projects in history, has been associated with a person's moral worth (Alexander, Honeck, and Richter 2020;Farrell 2021).
No longer appealing to the male gaze brought disgrace upon a fat woman.An anonymous author writing in the ACO's annual report (1960, p. 13) painted a degrading picture: The body's surface is shaped . . .by ill-fitting clothes that desperately try to conceal fatty masses under the sweaty skin.The male viewer cannot help but compare the beauty and grace of the non-obese female body to this saggy and unnatural bulk that seems to have forever devoured the lovely figure created by God.
Here, the aesthetic standard is accompanied by a moral one derived from a (at the time) still-influential Christian worldview.As R. Marie Griffith (2004) has shown regarding American Protestantism, Christian ideals endured in the 20th century and spread beyond devotional groups to connect fitness and beauty with piety.Hence, the postwar diet culture was not only a response to new affluence and consumerism, but also carried metaphysical undertones.This, in turn, contributed to bigotry against fat people (Griffith 2004).
The ACO's religious allusion was hardly accidental.They realized early on that, in Finland, dominant Protestant Christianity could buttress the anti-fat campaign.As such, the ACO hosted two lectures on the benefits of religious fasting in 1952 and 1956.The ACO also unabashedly harnessed Biblical rhetoric to attack the fat female body.These themes were elaborated in Kuta pitempi vyö, where vicar Voitto Viro's letter to "those who only get fatter" was published in 1960.Viro viewed "fattening" not only as a medical or psychological problem, but an ethical problem as well.He evoked an example from the Bible, where the phrase "cows of Bashan" is used to refer to the elite women in Samaria, who committed acts of oppression through their husbands.The cows of Bashan were well-fed, so much so that "their eyes popped out of their heads" (Viro 1960, 149).To use Viro's words, "godless fatness," which was, in this case, particularly female, revealed exploitation of the weak and social injustice.Fat was allegedly more than a type of flesh, but could also be understood as an external manifestation of evil and immorality.

Conclusion
The ACO's influence in the field of weight-loss guidance declined when Weight Watchers arrived at Finland in the mid-1970s (Hänninen 2010).However, their anti-fat activism left a controversial legacy.Certain aspects of the ACO's fat-shaming, such as tapping into the Protestant Christian culture, would not carry as much persuasive weight today as it did in the mid-twentieth century.At the very least, people today seem unaware of just how much secular diet culture is historically indebted to Christian ideologies around body-soul correspondence (Griffith 2004).The history of the ACO reveals how stigmatization of fat people changes over time to reflect prevailing cultural, social, and political climates (Vigarello 2013).
The ACO activists employed the media aggressively to reframe fat.According to Regina G. Lawrence (2004), the act of "reframing" is crucial to changing the opinion environment around health issues and related responsibilities, fatness included.News and media discourses determine which explanatory frameworks dominate public understandings (Lawrence 2004).Now, the idea of health-nutritional agency and the "obesity epidemic" discourse dominate, even though they are resisted by body positivists.The history of anti-fat campaigning reminds us that these trends of discussion, so widespread today, first relied on local efforts.This suggests that the biomedical fat paradigm is not as monolithic as one may suppose (Harjunen 2017).The ACO's project of reframing fat was context-dependent, as they supported negative evaluations of fatness in the wake of unprecedented nutritional abundance.Fat-shaming was an integral part of the lobbying.It was harnessed to support a revolution in eating habits and the ACO did not mince words nor shy away from presenting fatness as an existential and national threat.
Today's obesity discourse is often set in a historical narrative that entails a confused and nostalgic sentiment.The print media of the twenty-first century glorifies the 1950s as a time before Western societies had "let themselves go."This view is repeated in the scientific literature, even though anti-obesity associations and literature mushroomed precisely in the 1950s.As Gard and Wright note, "Western populations have never been what they used to be" (orig.emphasis) (2005, p. 28).This point provokes a compelling question for ACO's anti-fat campaign: What was the source of anti-fat sentiment in 1950s Finland?Some explanatory factors are the same that gave rise to the perceived "obesity crisis" in the US -fear of military impotence in a Cold War environment, increasing interest in preventive medicine and public health, and even fashionability of a psychosomatic disease model (Rasmussen 2019).This is no coincidence, since Finns imported ideas from and looked up to American medicine in the postwar era, even at the risk that ideas might sit awkwardly within the Finnish context (consider the stark contrast between fat and hunger, for example).But as the ACO was started through the initiative of one man, the attack on fat seemed, first and foremost, personal.Similä's own experiences were one reason why the ACO propaganda took on such a derogative character, delivered with the religious fervor and zeal of a new convert.The personification of the subject of fat might even be the most distinctive feature of the Finnish anti-fat campaigning of the 1950s.

Notes
1. English-language fat studies uses the terms "fat" and "fatness" to instill them as valuefree descriptions of body size.Similarly, Finnish fat studies prefer the term lihava ("fat") to ylipainoinen ("obese") to challenge the medical hegemony over fatness (Harjunen and Kyrölä 2007).In general, we use the same terminology, but we also use the words "obese" and "overweight" to accurately present the historical terminology.