Increasing attention is being paid to the link between insecurity and obesity. The link is, however, still mainly described on national level as causal connections between social security and prevalence of obesity. It remains abstract: why and how this connection works are unanswered questions. In the cross disciplinary field of obesity research, where biomedical world views and large scale quantitative analyzes are dominating, the sociology of health and illness have an important role to play in attempts to understand how structural conditions affect individual and family-level health behavior.
Insecurity is becoming a widespread prerequisite in an increasing number of people’s lives under the current economic crisis, all the while European governments make cuts on welfare and health budgets. Thus, there is an urgent need to understand the connection between insecurity and obesity at the social level where health behavior is enacted, in order to know how to counter health problems that will assumingly grow as social security levels decrease. Based on qualitative interviews with a sample of Danish adults with low SES-status and diverse ethnic backgrounds, this paper explores insecurity as a recurrent pattern in their life conditions and how it affects family health behavior in relation to weight management. Further, it will theoretically conceptualize the empirical examples of insecurity, using Bauman’s exploration of security, and discuss ways to sociologically grasp why insecurity facilitates obesity at family level.