Obesity is not related to individuals but to environmental conditions; from the perspective of obese patients

Background: The Beliefs About Obese Persons Scale (BAOP) is used among non-obese people in English speaking countries to evaluate their opinions on obese people. Nevertheless, the data are scarce from the view of obese people. Therefore, we wanted to test BAOP on obese patients in order to evaluate their opinions from the perspective of obese patients. Methods: Between August 2019-June 2020, 115 (76.7%) female and 35 (23.3%) male, a total of 150 obese patients who were admitted to the general surgery department to be evaluated for bariatric surgey, were included in this study. Local ethics committee approval was obtained (2019/08-10). These obese patients were asked to fill out BAOP, which included 8 statements in which each statement was valued between -3 to +3 points. Results: Mean score of BAOP within all obese patients was 34.87 ± 8.12 (range: 5-48). The average score of BAOP was 34.33 ± 8.60 (range: 5-48) in females and 36.62 ± 6.06 (range: 21-48) in males (p = 0.14). The frequency of the answers given by the male and female patients to the 5th statement, which was “Most obese people eat more than non-obese people”, showed a statistically significant difference (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Obese patients had higher BAOP scores compared to previous BAOP studies performed with non-obese people. Within this study, obese patients considered obesity as a condition which was not under their control.