Let’s Talk About Mike Tyson’s Super Bowl Commercial

30-0, seconds of unmitigated fatphobia vs. mention of policy changes.

This month’s living a better life resources are coming, but have been delayed because I haven’t been feeling well for the past week or so. I apologize for the delay!

Veep remains painfully relevant.

Oh boy.

Seeing Mike Tyson, in black and white, violently biting into a carrot, then an apple, before opining on the amount of processed foods readily available in the U.S. during the Super Bowl, in an ad funded by the MAHA Center, a group aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement, felt like a grotesque hallucination. One where American Fatphobia, anti-intellectualism, and the policymaker’s penchant for blaming anything other than themselves for the country’s well-being collided.

“My sister died of obesity,” Tyson claims before saying that, really, she died of a heart attack since anyone, whether over or underweight, can have one depending on the complexities of their personal health. He goes on to call fat people “fudge-y,” say that he was so “fat and nasty” at one point that he wanted to “kill himself,” and then wraps it all up by saying we need to do something about processed foods.

To address the amount of processed food people eat in the U.S., there needs to be at least a cursory consideration of policy. The advertisement offered none. At this point, I sound like a broken record. I just wrote this about the problem with RFK Jr.’s real food initiative last month:

We’re looking at the type of health future this administration envisions, one that emerged when wellness got its neoliberal makeover in the 1980s. During the Reagan era, draconian cuts to Medicaid, community mental health programs, and other public health services were implemented, and the decades-long project of reframing health from a collective right into a personal responsibility began. Scholars call this the “responsibilization” of the self under neoliberal governance, in which individuals are held responsible for solving problems stemming from systemic failures. Health was once understood as requiring robust public policy, community support, and collective infrastructure. When it was reframed as a matter of personal choice and self-discipline, the message became clear: if you’re sick, it’s your fault for not working hard enough to prevent it.

Now it’s your fault for not eating real food.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford it because of cuts to SNAP, or if you’ve been laid off due to increasing economic precarity, because, in this framework, there’s no room to consider the role systems play in determining health. The Trump administration has gutted the public health workforce and dismantled critical programs, hollowing out the capacity to adequately address population-level health. Deregulation will deepen exposure to pollution in marginalized communities, worsening chronic disease rates. The elimination of health equity programs and the purging of public health data erase the very evidence of these disparities. The same officials championing the new dietary guidelines are oddly mute about cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. At the same time, RFK Jr. himself has played an outsized role in undermining confidence in vaccines and weakening food safety regulations. This administration’s decisions consistently align with industry interests rather than protecting human well-being.

Inverted Nonsense

That’s the long and the short of it, to be honest with you. Of course, someone will read this and say, “Julia, being obese is a risk factor for certain metabolic diseases.” And I’ll respond with, “I’ve never heard anyone say it isn’t.” But risk doesn’t mean causation; it means there’s an increased probability, and all humans are at risk of poor health for myriad reasons.

What people, myself included, are saying is that weight alone doesn’t provide the complete picture of someone’s health, and reducing well-being to the number on the scale—or, worse, how someone looks—is just as ideological as reducing overall health to individual responsibility, as the current presidential administration is doing. Fatphobia is rampant in healthcare settings and even in how anti-obesity research is designed. It reduces the quality of care fat people receive and can lead to misdiagnoses—and, in extreme cases, death—due to a physician attributing whatever issue the patient is having to being overweight. Fatphobia, like racism, sexism, and gutting care infrastructure, leads to an unhealthier population.

Besides, regardless of body size, eating nutritious foods and exercising will reduce metabolic risks associated with being overweight. “Being physically active reduced a person’s risk of heart disease compared to the less active people in their same weight class. So, a fat person who exercises may still be more likely to get diabetes or high blood pressure than a thin person, but the gulf is less enormous,” wrote Virginia Sole-Smith about a 2021 study claiming that people in larger bodies can’t be physically fit. “More importantly, active fat people are less likely to get those conditions than if they didn’t exercise at all. This means that you can still improve your health through physical activity even if you don’t get skinny in the process.”

Such a level of nuance is, of course, missing from the MAHA advertisement because its crux is that people in bigger bodies lack self-control, which harkens fatphobia’s intrinsic links to anti-Black racism. As Hannah Carlan wrote about Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings:

The writings of early race scientists like George Cuvier, J.J. Virey, and Georges-Louis Leclerc drew direct ties between gluttony, stupidity, and the characteristics of Africans, whose idleness was attributed to their warm climate (a pervasive trope also found in colonial discourse about India). Enlightenment-era rationalism elevated food to the moral plane of asceticism required for intellectual pursuit. Soon, a thin physique had gone from being a sign of sickliness to evidence of the moral and intellectual superiority of Europeans, supported by the writings of anthropologists and naturalists seeking to codify and biologize a racial hierarchy. These works placed particular emphasis on the bodies of southern African women, who were depicted as grotesquely monstrous and animalistic while also serving as a source of voyeuristic fascination in formats like Cuvier’s traveling ethnographic menagerie, which featured pay-per-view displays of robust enslaved African women like Saartjie Baartman.

MAHA and its aligned campaigns are flattening a deeply complex public health landscape into a morality play about individual failure, while leaning on narratives that have long been used to rank bodies by worth. A government that genuinely cared about Americans’ health would invest in the socioeconomic and political conditions that determine it, such as food access, housing stability, environmental protections, universal care, and economic security.

Instead, all the current regime has to offer is spectacle: a known abuser grimacing on air for a puppet master hellbent on making his failures as the Secretary of Health and Human Services yours.