Lisa Berzins, a clinical psychiatrist, criticized popular advertisements for promoting unhealthy eating habits in a speech in 105 Dartmouth Hall last night.
Berzins presented "Challenging Fatitudes" -- the keynote address of Dartmouth's third annual Eating Disorders Awareness Week -- to a mostly female audience of about 40 people.
Berzins' presentation consisted of numerous examples from cigarette, diet product and fashion advertisements, as well as a video clip from the television show "Real Life with Jane Pauley."
She also addressed audience preconceptions about weight by wearing, at the beginning of her speech, a "fat suit" that made her look several sizes bigger than her actual size.
Berzins said audience members might question her credibility to attack society's acceptance of media norms if she had a weight popularly accepted as acceptable or desirable.
Berzins identified key traits of an eating disorder that makes it unique among psychiatric disorders. "It's the only psychiatric disorder about which I hear people say 'I wish I could catch that,'" Berzins said. "You don't hear that about depression or schizophrenia."
Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, she said, but added later that a third of the disease's victims fully recover.
Berzins, who lectures on eating disorders and physical appearance, started her activist career after seeing a 1994 Virginia Slims advertisement with the tag "If I ran the world, calories wouldn't count." It showed a thin woman smoking instead of eating.
Berzins appeared on television and radio shows protesting this advertisement. "Self-esteem should not be measured in pounds, not be measured in inches," Berzins said.
"The point for all advertisements is trying to make you feel inferior and want to be like the person in the ad," Berzins said.
Berzins said Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and Virginia Slims advertisements are proponents of negative body images but said corporate responses she got to her protests denied any intention of linking thinness to smoking.
Berzins also condemned diet-product and clothing advertisements for featuring misleading information or emaciated models.
Promotions promising drastic weight loss alarmed Berzins, she said, since diet products have a 95-percent failure rate. "The dieting product industry thrives on failure but perpetually promises success," Berzins said.
Berzins said the industry can continue the pattern because it blames weight-loss failure on the dieter.
"Very often dieters have an all-or-nothing mentality," Berzins said. "They figure, 'If I eat one cookie, I'm really bad so I should eat a lot of cookies, or a pint of ice-cream ...'"
Berzins credited this trend to a "tone of morality" linked to dieting. While dieting is seen as "good," eating is considered "sinful" or "succumbing to temptation."
Controversial ads for Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace also alarmed Berzins, she said. She contrasted Kate Moss' popular waif look with a clip from the film "The Grapes of Wrath," which featured actresses resembling Moss portraying starving and unhealthy characters.
Berzins did include some ads she which she said promote more positive body images, and cited the success of plus-size model Emme as an example of slowly-changing attitudes toward beauty.
A panel featuring Gabrielle Lucke, director of health resources at the College, and Heidi Fishman, a counselor at Dick's House, followed the presentation.
