In Obesity: The Post Mortem, pathologists cut open an anonymous woman’s body, exclaiming that her liver is like pate as their knives become slippery. Even in death, people can be horribly, gratuitously fat-shamed

The UK, we are told almost daily, is on the brink of an “obesity epidemic”. With predictions that 75% of the population will be overweight by 2035, it seems that we can look forward to a culture of constant diet surveillance. The fat have replaced smokers as the new drain on the economy, the prevailing social pariahs, BMIs the currency by which people are valued. Citing health policy, bodies have increasingly become public property, to be judged by the government and the media.

While affluent “clean eaters” and “wellness experts” get spots on primetime TV, rhapsodising about the power of raw eating and cutting just about everything from their diets but kale, larger people are still portrayed as figures of fun, lazy and lacking in willpower. In news segments, unsuspecting people are often shown walking down streets with their T-shirts hiked up to reveal bulging midriffs. Buttons strain on the shirts of men on park benches, their heads cropped to anonymise them. “Fattertainment”, meanwhile, has been part of the TV schedules for years, from a time when Gillian McKeith would routinely recoil in disgust at fat peoples’ excrement, through to The Biggest Loser, with their intensive boot camps and weekly weigh-ins on industrial sized scales. Shows like Lose Weight For Love, Fat Families, and Secret Eaters regularly employ the tactics of what has been termed “constructive fat-shaming”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Constructive fat-shaming?’ Lose Weight For Love. Photograph: Geraint Warrington/BBC/Renegade Pictures

On to this damaging landscape comes Obesity: The Post Mortem, which is being marketed by BBC3 as an educational documentary. Though fat is very much visible from the outside, the creators contend, we have little idea what it looks like on the inside, and the toll it takes on our bodies.

When Professor Gunther von Hagens performed a real-life autopsy on late-night Channel 4 back in 2002, the then British Medical Association’s Head of Ethics denounced it as “degrading and disrespectful”. Since its move online only, BBC3 have been showing thoughtful and sensitive documentaries with some regularity – which makes this misstep all the more glaring.

Here, a postmortem is carried out on a woman about whom we are told very little; she is presented as a puzzle to be solved by pathologist Dr Mike Osborn and Anatomical Pathology Technologist Carla Valentine. We know she donated her body to medical science (though not whether she was aware that this might extend to something as extreme as a televised autopsy).

She lived in Long Beach, California, where her body was packed up to be sent over the Atlantic for this examination – again, it is not explained why a British person was not used. One of her arms has been amputated and left with her family for cremation. At the time of her death, she was in her early 60s, 5 ft 5 and weighed “almost 17 stone”. Further, we are told the cause of death was heart disease – she did not die from obesity, but obesity “increased the risk factors ... that led to her death”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The camera lingers over her naked body, a vast landscape of pale, mottled flesh. Photograph: BBC/7 Wonder

The camera lingers over her naked body, a vast landscape of pale, mottled flesh, before the postmortem begins. The only thing covered is her face, which has a cloth casually draped over it. Two tiny details humanise her over the course of the autopsy – the discovery of breast implants and the coral nail varnish still on her toenails. As Valentine cuts into her, while exclaiming “so much fat!”, the knife becomes greasy and slippery. “It feels very much like butter,” she says. Slowly, a psychedelically neon yellow mass is revealed.

Intercut with the postmortem are interviews with people deemed to be obese, speaking straight to camera in an attempt to provide some context for this woman silenced by death. They talk about how they came to weigh what they do – illness and medication, eating disorders, anxiety and low self-esteem, plus the availability and cheapness of high fat food. They speak, too, about the many ways life is made difficult for them, including being denied NHS treatments on account of their weight, and the loss of confidence which leads to a vicious comfort-eating cycle. “If you’re fat you are marginalised by society,” says 22-year-old Nick, the only man interviewed.

Meanwhile, text flashes up on the screen, almost subliminally, telling us that obese people are judged as less productive, less competent, and less intelligent than those within their BMI range. But instead of examining this, we swiftly move on to Osborn holding up the woman’s liver and describing its consistency as “like pate”. “This is bad news for this lady,” he says (though it is uncertain how much worse the news can get for her at this stage).

By using this woman’s body to speak for her unique history and experience, it is intimated that obesity is the fault of the individual, rather than an indicator of intersections of poverty and class, genetics, medical issues and psychology. The body, taken completely out of context, becomes dehumanised. Such portrayals can only intensify the pathologising of the plump, fuelling prejudice of a growing number of people. This programme is pure spectacle. If Obesity: The Post Mortem reveals anything, it’s that even in death, the obese are not free from gratuitous fat-shaming.

Obesity: The Post Mortem is on BBC3 now.