The framing of obesity in France: Between a sciences war and coalitions

The fight against obesity is a public health issue in France since 2001 with the establishment of the National Nutrition and Health Program. As in all activities of expertise, the collective definition of the problem is a major issue. Current works in science studies have shown how this activity, prior to the implementation of public policy, was the target of many social actors as scientists, politicians and laymen as well. She then makes the subject of much debates whose pronouncements reveal different “world views” involved in the framing of obesity as a health problem. Other studies also show that all collective mobilizations cannot necessarily become visible and perform at a more political level to ensure that their knowledge equip public policy. By taking support on a corpus consisted by newspaper articles, “gray literature”, interviews and ethnographic notes taken at various scientific events, our communication is helping to light this process of “politicization” of the knowledges, the passage of the science to the action, the theory to the practice. In particular, we identify co-construction effects between various scientific disciplines but also between the “confined” scientific area and the public space. They embody two main forms of knowledge translation in public action mechanisms. The first one, carrying a “scientistic and managerial” vision, juxtaposes the biomedical sciences and the management and communication sciences. The second one, partisan of a more “critical” point of view, combines knowledges from psychiatry, psychology and sociology. These dynamics give us then information about the evolution of the tensions which originally structure the mobilization space of the obesity management according to a nutritional perspective.