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In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children's obesity 'epidemic', most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children's health, physical activity and obesity and explored for how these issues were represented in the discourse. Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach to discourse analysis guided our interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying Canadian and Australian public health discourse, the ideological and political influences involved in its construction, and the knowledge base upon which it rests. The article calls for critical reflection on how children's physical and leisure activities are being advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food security is an evolving concept with various definitions and associated meanings. The way food security is understood by policy-makers impacts on how it gets addressed in public policy. This research uses an interpretive approach to uncover how food security is represented by stakeholders. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 stakeholders in South Australia between June and September 2010. The findings reveal four dominant representations for food security that locate responsibility for the issue across different stakeholders, namely individuals, governments, communities and private enterprise. These representations hold different underlying assumptions about the role of government in addressing the issue; the neo-liberal perspective supports a reduced role for government whereas the social determinants of health perspective calls for greater government intervention. Food security activists may need a greater awareness of how they represent the issue in order to change public policy action in this area. The approach taken in this research is relevant to other public policy problems and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current preoccupation with body weight in western cultures is arguably unprecedented. The obesity crisis has engaged not only health communities, but numerous other public and private organisations, and, in so doing, has created moral alarm as well as a medical crisis. This paper examines the development of obesity and will discuss the ways in which fatness has been rationalised within health discourses. It will explore the way that the corpulent body, once historically considered as a physiological state, is now regarded as a state of moral pathology representing an 'epidemic'. The prospect of this disease sweeping through populations, reaching into virtually every social group, is presented as all the more frightening when no known effective prevention or cure is at hand. The paper will look at the ways in which new forms of government have developed with the panoptic capacity to gaze across populations and objectify the everyday activities of individuals. This 'government of girth' reaches an apogee in the problematisation of children and body weight. Three subject positions in childhood provide a number of opportunities to problematise children: the sick child, the anti-social child, and the innocent child. Each of these amplifies concern about the state of health of children, the permissive nature of parenting and potential moral social decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite heightened concerns about levels of obesity and overweight in Western societies, there is a relative absence of sociological research into the subjective experience of dieting, especially for men. This paper focuses on findings related to the male participants from a qualitative study of fourteen volunteers (six female and eight male) drawn from a larger clinical trial comparing two diet conditions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in two stages to gain an in-depth understanding of the experience of dieting, and found that these men understood and practiced their dieting in different ways from the women, but also from each other, depending on their notions of masculinity. Some were eager to reframe their dieting in 'more manly' terms. The social support or sabotage received from friends and family is significant to these experiences of dieting. This paper discusses how men understand and practice dieting within the framework of gendered discourses and gendered relations that can make healthy eating hard to sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social theory provides a lens through which we can analyse the role of trust in health systems. However, the majority of theoretically informed trust literature addresses 'institutional' or 'interpersonal' trust individually, failing to investigate trust as determined by a 'web' of mutually interacting relationships between individuals and social systems. Current theoretical assumptions are also problematic as they fail to recognise the role that social factors (such as socio-economic status, class and age) play in an individual's willingness to trust. Through the analysis and critique of existing social theories of trust, this paper demonstrates a need for further empirical research into the multidimensionality of trusting relationships, while suggesting new directions for research in public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]