June 11, 2014 — Orexigen and the rest of the world have been poised for action by the FDA today to approve the drug formerly known as Contrave, a combination of bupropion and naltrexone, for the treatment of obesity. Today, June 11, was the date that FDA was required to render judgement on their resubmitted application, based upon new […]
June 11, 2014 — The interaction between gut bacteria, obesity, diet, and physical activity just keeps getting more interesting and complex. New research suggests that physical activity may interact with diet to promote more diverse gut bacteria in athletes, compared to less active controls. Unfortunately, the reporting on this research glossed over the complexity of this three-way interaction. Headlines went […]
June 10, 2014 — From the Annals of Duh comes a new study in press to remind us that when we’re pitching nutrition, being dogmatic comes back to bite us. It seems that just giving children healthy food — without telling them how wonderful it is — increases the odds that they’ll actually eat it. Two marketing professors, Michal Maimaran of […]
June 9, 2014 — The folks at Coke have a new ad on the Web to tell us that it takes 23 minutes on a bike to burn the calories in a can of Coke. It’s not at all clear that they’re helping themselves with this one. We asked a representative sample of adults how the message of this […]
June 8, 2014 — Light at night (LAN) appears to be a growing phenomenon that is invading our bedrooms. Linking clues from animal studies to epidemiology from more than 100,000 women in the Breakthrough Generations study, scientists at Oxford have found reason to suspect that LAN exposure might be contributing to obesity. They found that the odds of obesity […]
June 7, 2014 — Tom Wadden and Rudy Leibel made compelling presentations about confronting obesity at the Blackburn Course in Obesity Medicine Friday. Together they brought a sharp focus on the tension between biology, destiny, and persistence that goes with facing this chronic disease. A number of headlines this week have suggested that keeping excess weight off is “scientifically almost […]
June 6, 2014 — Lee Kaplan opened the Blackburn Course in Obesity Medicine yesterday with an assessment of Obesity 2014. He described a year of frustratingly slow progress, but progress nonetheless on three fronts. Better Perspective. Obesity is increasingly understood as a disease, rather than a lifestyle choice and a character flaw. He pointed to the determination by the […]
June 5, 2014 — Pushing breakfast as the most important meal of the day has endured for more than a century — despite thin evidence to support the claim. The association between breakfast skipping and weight gain is one that has been repeated so often that it’s been accepted and repeated as cause and effect by experts who should be more discerning. […]
June 4, 2014 — Novo Nordisk has been busy presenting pivotal clinical trial data for their diabetes drug — liraglutide — in the treatment of obesity. Both at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists meeting and at the European Congress on Obesity, investigators presented a one year study on its usefulness in treating obesity for people who do not […]
June 3, 2014 — The food at your fingertips is the food you will eat. This basic fact of human behavior is something that food and beverage marketers have understood and factored into their work for many decades. A new study in Appetite adds to the growing behavioral research literature showing that — surprise — people eat the food […]
