A study published on 20 August 2026 surveyed 1,865 adults in the United States, Portugal and Mexico who described themselves as overweight. It asked two different questions: how much weight discrimination they personally experience, and how negatively they think their culture views fat. The two turned out to behave differently, and only one of them varied by country in the way the authors expected.
The paper, “Weight discrimination and the negative cultural value of fat: the relationship to well-being across individuals with higher weights of different nations”, is by Ana Clara Vieira Zaidan and Joseph D. Wellman of the University of Mississippi. It appeared in the International Journal of Obesity (open access). The authors say that, to their knowledge, no earlier weight stigma study had asked people in larger bodies how they perceive their own culture’s attitude toward fat.
Who took part
Participants were recruited separately in each country through the online platform Prolific: 676 from the United States, 616 from Portugal and 573 from Mexico. To qualify, they had to agree with the statement “I consider myself to be overweight” with a 5 or higher on a 7-point scale. The authors chose self-perception over BMI because they cite research finding it more predictive of negative outcomes. Participants also had to be native to and living in their country and fluent in English, because the survey was in English.
Of 1,969 people who completed the survey, 104 were excluded for missing data or failed attention checks, leaving 1,865 (934 women, 931 men, mean age 34.6). The three samples differ in composition. The US sample was 78.8 percent White, the Portuguese sample 95.3 percent White, and the Mexican sample 53.2 percent Latine. The countries also differed significantly in age, so age was controlled in the analyses.
What was measured
Perceived weight discrimination came from 7 items such as “I experience discrimination because of my weight”, rated 1 to 7. The negative cultural value of fat came from just two items, “In my culture, being fat is considered a bad thing” and “In my culture, being thin is an important part of being attractive”, also rated 1 to 7. Psychological distress was the DASS-21 (depression, anxiety and stress, 21 items scored 0 to 3 and summed), and difficulties in emotion regulation came from the 16-item DERS-16.
The two stigma measures correlate at r = 0.31, which the authors take as evidence that they capture different things: your own experience versus your read of the culture around you.
The findings
Discrimination. Women reported more perceived weight discrimination than men in all three countries. Portuguese participants reported more than American participants (a difference of 0.26 points on the 7-point scale) and more than Mexican participants (0.40). American and Mexican participants did not differ significantly. The gender gap did not differ significantly between countries.
Cultural value of fat. Here the gender gap did depend on the country. Portuguese women scored 0.93 points higher than Portuguese men, Mexican women 0.61 points higher than Mexican men. Among Americans the difference was 0.13 points and not significant.
Well-being. Women reported higher psychological distress and more difficulty with emotion regulation than men. Participants from the United States reported lower distress, by about three points on the summed DASS-21 (which runs from 0 to 63), than both Portuguese and Mexican participants, and fewer emotion regulation difficulties. Portugal and Mexico did not differ from each other.
The mediation models. The authors tested whether the gender differences in well-being could be statistically accounted for by the two stigma measures, with nationality allowed to change the pattern. Perceived discrimination did so in all three countries, most strongly in Portugal. The negative cultural value of fat did so only for Portuguese and Mexican participants, not for Americans. The full estimates are in Table 3 of the paper.
Reading it carefully
The headline hypothesis was that gender gaps in perceived discrimination would be larger in Portugal and Mexico than in the United States. That was not supported: there was no significant gender-by-country interaction for discrimination. Only the cultural-value measure showed the predicted pattern. The abstract’s sentence that cultural context moderates the associations is therefore true for that measure, not for everything.
“Mediation” here is a statistical term. The data are a one-time online survey, so the study cannot say that perceiving a hostile culture causes distress, or the other way round. All measures are self-reports. The cultural-value measure has two items. The survey was in English, and the authors themselves note that in Portugal and Mexico this may have selected more acculturated participants or primed answers toward US norms. Online recruitment leaves out people without internet access. The sample is people who call themselves overweight, so it says little about people in larger bodies who do not use that word for themselves.
A smaller point: a few degrees-of-freedom figures in the results text, for example a three-group comparison reported with one numerator degree of freedom, look like typos. The F values and effect sizes are internally consistent enough that this does not change the findings, but this article does not quote those figures.
This article reports the design and findings of one study. It does not evaluate any treatment or weight-related intervention.
Why it belongs here
Discussions of weight stigma often treat it as one thing. This paper separates what happens to you from what you believe your culture thinks, and finds that the second is where the countries and the genders pull apart. It also finds the United States had the lowest distress of the three samples, which is not what a simple “more stigma, more harm” story would predict, and the study is not built to explain it.
Germany and the United Kingdom are not covered by this data.
Source: Vieira Zaidan AC, Wellman JD. “Weight discrimination and the negative cultural value of fat: the relationship to well-being across individuals with higher weights of different nations.” International Journal of Obesity 2026, doi.org/10.1038/s41366-026-02192-2. Full text read on 1 October 2026.