Obesity In The Black Community: Treating It As A Disease, Removing Bias, and the Link to Increased COVID-19 Mortality

This week we sit down with Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, FAAP, FACP, FAHA, FTOS, an Obesity medicine physician, to discuss Obesity in the Black community.  Topics Include:

• The issue of labeling people with Obesity as well as the shame that it causes
• The bias of the very doctors tasked to treat patients with Obesity
• Treating Obesity as the disease it is and doing more than saying eat less
• Treatments available for Obesity including surgery and prescription medicine
• The high amount of Black women with Obesity
• The evidence supporting Obesity leading to a higher chance of mortality in COVID-19 patients

Mentioned In this Episode 

Facing Overweight And Obesity: In Children And Adults

Dr. Stanford practices and teaches at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/ Harvard Medical School (HMS) as one of the first fellowship-trained obesity medicine physician in the world. Dr. Stanford received her BS and MPH from Emory University as a MLK Scholar, her MD from the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine as a Stoney Scholar, and her MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as a Zuckerman Fellow in the Harvard Center for Public Leadership. She completed her Obesity Medicine Nutrition Fellowship at MGH/HMS after completing her internal medicine and pediatrics residency at the University of South Carolina. She has served as a health communications fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and as a behavioral sciences intern at the American Cancer Society. Upon completion of her MPH, she received the Gold Congressional Award, the highest honor that Congress bestows upon America’s youth. Dr. Stanford has completed a medicine and media internship at the Discovery Channel. An American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation Leadership Award recipient in 2005, an AMA Paul Ambrose Award for national leadership among resident physicians in 2009, she was selected for the AMA Inspirational Physician Award in 2015. The American College of Physicians (ACP) selected her as the 2013 recipient of the Joseph E. Johnson Leadership Award and the Massachusetts ACP selected her for the Young Leadership Award in 2015. She is the 2017 recipient of the HMS Amos Diversity Award and Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) Award for Women’s Health. In 2019, she was selected as the Suffolk District Community Clinician of the Year and for the Reducing Health Disparities Award for MMS.

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