In medicine, there's the field of bariatrics, I mentioned in another comment, and a lot of us would joke about it being called "fat studies," but never did we actually think there would be something like this, the plight of the hambeasts, as a major. I think Oregon was the first to start it, I could be wrong though. There was a post on fph about it a while back, but I'm not going to try and find it on my phone.