Archive for November, 2015

Retractions to Make Your Head Spin

November 30, 2015 — What should we make of a stream of retractions from peer-reviewed publications in nutrition and obesity? Weekly Obesity and Energetics Offerings include a section on scientific rigor and scholarly dialogue where noteworthy retractions may be found. The one that grabbed our attention this week, of course, was the retraction of a viewpoint co-authored by Joaquin Barnoya and Marion Nestle criticizing […]

Health and Fitness in Place of Religion

November 29, 2015 — Growing numbers of people find spiritual support in groups formed around philosophies of personal health and fitness, rather than religion. That’s a finding from a study by two Harvard Divinity School students. Looking for places where religiously unaffiliated millennials find spiritual community, two of the places they focused upon are commercial health and fitness franchises that met their criteria: SoulCycle […]

Is Bariatric Surgery Really Brain Surgery?

November 28, 2015 — Years ago, the concept of metabolic surgery started wedging itself into the realm of bariatric surgery. While it’s absurd to say that a gastric bypass is brain surgery, a steady stream of research on the neuroscience of bariatric surgery certainly raises a key question: does this surgery modify the nervous system as much as much as the gastrointestinal system? […]

Obesity from Pizza Boxes

November 27, 2015 — The stuff they put into pizza boxes might cause obesity — and we’re not talking about the pizza. We’re talking about perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) that are put into the box itself to repel the grease. A new study published in Obesity finds that mothers with high PFAS exposure gave birth to children with higher BMI, waist circumference, and body […]

Keep It Thankful Three Ways

November 26, 2015 — Perhaps you have a perfect family and staying thankful all through Thanksgiving is easy. Or maybe you have some unpolished gems at the table today. Regardless, we’re thankful for the growing numbers of you who keep reading what we offer up here. In gratitude, we offer these three ideas that might help you keep the thanks […]

Late Nights, Food, Drinks, and Obesity

November 25, 2015 — Here’s a fun new study. Researchers the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have found that late nights, food, drinks, and a risk of obesity might go hand in hand — or maybe hand to mouth. More specifically they found that when people stay up late, they do more eating and drinking. The authors of this […]

Selling Magic Weight Loss Potions

November 24, 2015 — The U.S. Justice Department has filed a criminal indictment against two dietary supplement companies that were selling magic weight loss products and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales with them. These products have two problems: they don’t work and they contain substances that are illegal because of the danger they present to human health. […]

27 States Flaunting ACA Ban on Healthcare Discrimination

November 23, 2015 — Five major medical groups have filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, charging 27 states with  healthcare discrimination that violates the Affordable Care Act. They cite denial of access to surgical care for obesity that discriminates against people based on pre-existing conditions, disabilities, and gender. All […]

Defining a Healthy Diet for Everyone on the Planet

November 22, 2015 — It’s not surprising that people can’t agree on dietary guidelines. New research in Cell suggests that a healthy diet for everyone can be different, based upon differences in how individuals metabolize their food. The authors explain: Here, we continuously monitored week-long glucose levels in an 800-person cohort, measured responses to 46,898 meals, and found high […]

Who Wants to Sign Up for Chocolate Pills?

November 21, 2015 — How can chocolate pills make sense to anyone? But apparently they do. Bloomberg reports that chocolate extracts sold for heart health have grown twice as fast as dark chocolate. CocoaVia, a dietary supplement of flavanols extracted from cocoa, is ringing up sales that have tripled in the last year. Someone is seriously confused. Food is food, medicine is […]