Readers are advised this article includes an offensive and outdated disability term in a quote from the film.

Poor Things is a spectacular film that has garnered critical praise, scooped up awards and has 11 Oscar nominations. That might be the problem. Audiences become absorbed in another world, so much so our usual frames of reference disappear.

There has been much discussion about the film’s feminist potential (or betrayal). What’s not being talked about in mainstream reviews is disability. This seems strange when two of the film’s main characters are disabled.

Set in a fantasy version of Victorian London, unorthodox Dr Godwin Baxter (William Dafoe) finds the just-dead body of a heavily pregnant woman in the Thames River. In keeping with his menagerie of hybrid animals, Godwin removes the unborn baby’s brain and puts it into the skull of its mother, who becomes Bella Baxter (Emma Stone).

Is Bella really disabled?

Stone has been praised for her ability to embody a small child who rapidly matures into a hypersexual person – one who has not had time to absorb the restrictive rules of gender or patriarchy.

But we also see a woman using her behaviour to express herself because she has complex communication barriers. We see a woman who is highly sensitive and responsive to the sensory world around her. A woman moving through and seeing the world differently – just like the fish-eye lens used in many scenes.

Women like this exist and they have historically been confined, studied and monitored like Bella. When medical student Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) first meets Bella, he offensively exclaims “what a very pretty retard!” before being told the truth and promptly declared her future husband.

Even if Bella is not coded as disabled through her movements, speech and behaviour, her onscreen creator and guardian is. Godwin Baxter has facial differences and other impairments which require assistive technology.

So ignoring disability as a theme of the film seems determined and overt. The absurd humour for which the film is being lauded is often at Bella’s “primitive”, “monstrous” or “damaged” actions: words which aren’t usually used to describe children, but have been used to describe disabled people throughout history.

In reviews, Bella’s walk and speech are compared to characters like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, rather than a disabled woman. So why the resistance?

Freak shows and displays

Disability studies scholar Rosemarie Gardland-Thomson writes “the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display”.

In the 19th century, when Poor Things is set, “freak shows” featuring disabled people, Indigenous people and others with bodily differences were extremely popular.

Doctors used freak shows to find specimens – like Joseph Merrick (also known as the Elephant Man and later depicted on screen) who was used for entertainment before he was exhibited in lecture halls. In the mid-1800s, as medicine became a profession, observing the disabled body shifted from a public spectacle to a private medical gaze that labelled disability as “sick” and pathologised it.

Poor Things doesn’t just circle around these discourses of disability. Bella’s body is a medical experiment, kept locked away for the private viewing of male doctors who take notes about her every move in small pads. While there is something glorious, intimate and familiar about Bella’s discovery of her own sexual pleasure, she immediately recognises it as worth recording in the third person:

I’ve discovered something that I must share […] Bella discover happy when she want!

The film’s narrative arc ends with Bella herself training to be a doctor but one whose more visible disabilities have disappeared.

Framing charity and sexual abuse

Even the film’s title is an expression often used to describe disabled people. The charity model of disability sees disabled people as needing pity and support from others. Financial poverty is briefly shown at a far-off port in the film and Bella initially becomes a sex worker in Paris for money – but her more pressing concern is sexual pleasure.

Disabled women’s sexuality is usually seen as something that needs to be controlled. It is frequently assumed disabled women are either hypersexual or de-gendered and sexually innocent.

In the real world disabled people experience much higher rates of abuse, including sexual assault, than others. Last year’s Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability found women with disability are nearly twice as likely as women without disability to have been assaulted. Almost a third of women with disability have experienced sexual assault by the age of 15. Bella’s hypersexual curiosity appears to give her some layer of protection – but that portrayal denies the lived experience of many.

Watch but don’t ignore

Poor Things is a stunning film. But ignoring disability in the production ignores the ways in which the representation of disabled bodies play into deep and historical stereotypes about disabled people.

These representations continue to shape lives.

Louisa Smith, Senior lecturer, Deakin University; Gemma Digby, Lecturer – Health & Social Development, Deakin University, and Shane Clifton, Associate Professor of Practice, School of Health Sciences and the Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fermented foods have become popular in recent years, partly due to their perceived health benefits.

For instance, there is some evidence eating or drinking fermented foods can improve blood glucose control in people with diabetes. They can lower blood lipid (fats) levels and blood pressure in people with diabetes or obesity. Fermented foods can also improve diarrhoea symptoms.

But can they help you lose weight, as a recent study suggests? Let’s look at the evidence.

Remind me, what are fermented foods?

Fermented foods are ones prepared when microbes (bacteria and/or yeast) ferment (or digest) food components to form new foods. Examples include yoghurt, cheese, kefir, kombucha, wine, beer, sauerkraut and kimchi.

As a result of fermentation, the food becomes acidic, extending its shelf life (food-spoilage microbes are less likely to grow under these conditions). This makes fermentation one of the earliest forms of food processing.

Fermentation also leads to new nutrients being made. Beneficial microbes (probiotics) digest nutrients and components in the food to produce new bioactive components (postbiotics). These postbiotics are thought to contribute to the health benefits of the fermented foods, alongside the health benefits of the bacteria themselves.

What does the evidence say?

A study published last week has provided some preliminary evidence eating kimchi – the popular Korean fermented food – is associated with a lower risk of obesity in some instances. But there were mixed results.

The South Korean study involved 115,726 men and women aged 40-69 who reported how much kimchi they’d eaten over the previous year. The study was funded by the World Institute of Kimchi, which specialises in researching the country’s national dish.

Eating one to three servings of any type of kimchi a day was associated with a lower risk of obesity in men.

Men who ate more than three serves a day of cabbage kimchi (baechu) were less likely to have obesity and abdominal obesity (excess fat deposits around their middle). And women who ate two to three serves a day of baechu were less likely to have obesity and abdominal obesity.

Eating more radish kimchi (kkakdugi) was associated with less abdominal obesity in both men and women.

However, people who ate five or more serves of any type of kimchi weighed more, had a larger waist sizes and were more likely to be obese.

The study had limitations. The authors acknowledged the questionnaire they used may make it difficult to say exactly how much kimchi people actually ate.

The study also relied on people to report past eating habits. This may make it hard for them to accurately recall what they ate.

This study design can also only tell us if something is linked (kimchi and obesity), not if one thing causes another (if kimchi causes weight loss). So it is important to look at experimental studies where researchers make changes to people’s diets then look at the results.

How about evidence from experimental trials?

There have been several experimental studies looking at how much weight people lose after eating various types of fermented foods. Other studies looked at markers or measures of appetite, but not weight loss.

One study showed the stomach of men who drank 1.4 litres of fermented milk during a meal took longer to empty (compared to those who drank the same quantity of whole milk). This is related to feeling fuller for longer, potentially having less appetite for more food.

Another study showed drinking 200 millilitres of kefir (a small glass) reduced participants’ appetite after the meal, but only when the meal contained quickly-digested foods likely to make blood glucose levels rise rapidly. This study did not measure changes in weight.

Another study looked at Indonesian young women with obesity. Eating tempeh (a fermented soybean product) led to changes in an appetite hormone. But this did not impact their appetite or whether they felt full. Weight was not measured in this study.

A study in South Korea asked people to eat about 70g a day of chungkookjang (fermented soybean). There were improvements in some measures of obesity, including percentage body fat, lean body mass, waist-to-hip ratio and waist circumference in women. However there were no changes in weight for men or women.

A systematic review of all studies that looked at the impact of fermented foods on satiety (feeling full) showed no effect.

What should I do?

The evidence so far is very weak to support or recommend fermented foods for weight loss. These experimental studies have been short in length, and many did not report weight changes.

To date, most of the studies have used different fermented foods, so it is difficult to generalise across them all.

Nevertheless, fermented foods are still useful as part of a healthy, varied and balanced diet, particularly if you enjoy them. They are rich in healthy bacteria, and nutrients.

Are there downsides?

Some fermented foods, such as kimchi and sauerkraut, have added salt. The latest kimchi study said the average amount of kimchi South Koreans eat provides about 490mg of salt a day. For an Australian, this would represent about 50% of the suggested dietary target for optimal health.

Eating too much salt increases your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.