Are patients with obesity "scapegoats"? The obesity prejudice levels of health care workers in Turkey.

Objective: This study assessed obesity prejudice levels, attitudes, and perceptions of health care workers toward individuals with obesity and the relationship between health care workers' perceptions of own and society's weight bias, healthy lifestyle preferences, body mass index, and other factors with obesity prejudice levels.

Methods: This cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted with 700 health care workers in Turkey via an online survey addressing characteristics, perceptions, and attitudes toward obesity including an obesity prejudice scale. Categorical variables were expressed as frequencies and percentages. The χ² test was applied to compare categorical variables. The distribution of the data was evaluated by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Normally distributed data were compared by an independent sample t-test, while the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for comparing non-normally distributed data.

Results: Participants' mean age was 40.2±11.3 years and 67.9% were women. Notably, 57.9% worked at tertiary health care centers, 85.9% were physicians, and 64.8% were family physicians; 25% were prejudicial, while 58.1% tended to have prejudice toward individuals with obesity. Obesity prejudice scores were significantly higher among those who were in close contact with and who stated their preference for patients with obesity.

Conclusions: Half of the participants tended to have prejudice, and one-fourth were prejudicial toward individuals with obesity. These results highlight the necessity of raising awareness of health care workers to reduce prejudicial attitudes that may negatively impact patients with obesity. Stigmatizing experiences might be detrimental, reducing the quality of life with long-term consequences for emotional and physical health.