''The Weight of the Nation'' is a four-part
documentary series
Television documentaries are televised media productions that screen documentaries.
Television documentaries exist either as a television documentary series or as a television documentary film.
*Television documentary series, sometimes called d ...
produced by American
cable television
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broa ...
network
HBO
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...
. Addressing the growing
obesity epidemic
Obesity has been observed throughout human history. Many early depictions of the human form in art and sculpture appear obese. However, it was not until the 20th century that obesity became common — so much so that, in 1997, the World Heal ...
in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
, it was first aired in May 2012. The documentary series included collaboration with
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgi ...
and the
Institute of Medicine
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly called the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, E ...
.
The series was produced by John Hoffman.
The scientific commentators featured in the documentary include
Francis Collins
Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is the former director of the National Institutes of Health ( ...
,
Samuel Klein,
Rudolph Leibel
Rudolph Leibel (born 1942) is the Christopher J. Murphy Professor of Diabetes Research, Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and Director of the Division of Molecular Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics ...
,
Robert Lustig
Robert H. Lustig (born 1957) is an American pediatric endocrinologist. He is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he specialized in neuroendocrinology and ...
, and
Kelly D. Brownell
Kelly David Brownell (born October 31, 1951) is a clinical psychologist and scholar of public health and public policy at Duke University whose work focuses on obesity and food policy. He is a former dean of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy. ...
.
Content
The series consists of four approximately hour-long films:
# Consequences
# Choices
# Children in Crisis
# Challenges
References
External links
HBO ''The Weight of the Nation'' site*
Obesity
Public health
HBO original programming
2010s American documentary television series
English-language television shows
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