VANCOUVER — Prejudice against fat people is spreading around the globe like a multinational junk-food franchise, a new study says. Cultural diversity concerning the concepts of beauty and body type is on the decline internationally, and North-American-style fat stigma is on the increase despite a massive worldwide jump in obesity, the research claims.

One in 10 of the world's adults is now obese, according to a joint British-United States study recently published in the Lancet. This compares with 4.8 per cent of men and 7.9 per cent of women in 1980.

The fear and loathing of fat in American society has been well studied: A 2006 report showed that many Americans say they would rather be blind or dead than obese.

Now, formerly fat-positive societies like Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina and American Samoa are super-sizing their negative attitudes toward the round and jiggly even as their citizens expand in girth.

According to a new study by the University of Arizona, many cultures that once associated curvy bodies with youth, fertility, wealth and beauty have gobbled up North Americans' anti-fat prejudices and now associate obesity with laziness, lack of self-control and moral failure.

The study reports that obesity rates are rising around the world (except in sub-Saharan Africa), with developing countries now identifying obesity as a major public health concern. An obese person's life is, on average, nine to 13 years shorter than someone of normal weight, and obesity is linked with an increased risk of illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart attack and stroke.

John Barker, professor of anthropology at the University of B.C., has worked for 30 years in the South Pacific — and over three decades he's observed the arrival of the North American diet, and the concurrent changes in body size and perception.

Barker did not work on the fat stigma study, but he explained that in a place like American Samoa, one of the countries where changing attitudes were studied, getting fat was historically an honour and a privilege reserved for the very few at the top of the social hierarchy.

"In these societies, traditionally the fattest person in the village was the king . . . the commoners didn't have a chance to get fat, they were working so hard."

That's all changed as lifestyles have changed: The arrival of cheap, energy-dense food, sedentary work and vehicular transportation has contributed to an obesity epidemic that cuts across all hierarchies.

"In Papua New Guinea, there has been a huge impact of processed foods, sugar, starch, and there is a huge obesity crisis," said Barker.

Fat used to represent status, which is just as hard to obtain as the lithe, personally-trained, supermodel body-type is today. As social and economic changes have occurred, more people work and eat in urban environments — and gain weight.

"Someone who could put on body weight under the old system was very special," said Barker.

Although there is a growing recognition that the worldwide obesity trend is beyond the fault of the individual — and deeply connected to poor diets, cheap high-calorie foods, sedentary work and school environments — obese people remain one of the only visibly different groups that are regularly targeted, shunned, joked about and shamed.

Talk show host George Lopez recently slammed Kirstie Alley's performance on Dancing With the Stars, comparing her to that of a dancing pig. Alley fired back with humour via Twitter, but who knows how his remark might have affected a quiet kid struggling with obesity just about anywhere in the world?

Someone who knows just how damaging fat stigma can be is Kim Nicholson, a vibrant North Vancouver, B.C., mom who owns her own business and has seen the issue from all sides and sizes.

"If someone is an alcoholic, or black, or a drug addict, it is politically incorrect to say something negative to judge them, to stay away from them," said Nicholson, who, for the record, loves her body, tops out at about five-feet-two and weighs in at 180 pounds.

Nicholson, 49, believes that there are many biological issues around weight gain that are poorly understood; she came from a family that had many women in it who were "short and round."

"I remember a woman, a stranger, looking at me while I was having a chocolate bar. She said, 'You shouldn't be eating that.'"

Nicholson's weight topped out at 300 pounds after the birth of her son. In her mid-thirties she made the decision to get a small-intestine bypass.

In spite of serious side-effects like chronic diarrhea, malnutrition and complications that required further surgeries, she said, "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."