Archive for May, 2018

Can Weight Management and Body Positivity Peacefully Coexist?

May 31, 2018 — Kelly deVos is having a crisis of confidence in her beliefs about body positivity. Writing the in the New York Times, she says: The problem with today’s version of body positivity is that it refuses to acknowledge that no one approach is right for every person. One teenager might grow up to be healthy at […]

Loud Restaurant Music Favors Burgers?

May 30, 2018 — Will loud restaurant music make us all order burgers and fries instead of a salad? Based on a study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences, you might think so. A press release and the resulting news stories make it sound cut and dried. But it’s worth stepping back to think about what this […]

Costly Hurdles for Bariatric Surgery

May 29, 2018 — It’s hard to say exactly why we’ve put so many hurdles in the way of effective obesity care. But a new analysis in Medical Care shows us that these are costly hurdles. David Kim, David Arterburn, Sean Sullivan, and Anirban Basu find that cost sharing for bariatric surgery is a bad idea. Payers lose $7 […]

Plummeting Childhood Obesity and Skyrocketing Happiness

May 28, 2018 — Wishful thinking is not the foundation for sustainable health strategies. But when the subject is obesity, it’s abundant. In the bioethics journal Sound Decisions, we find an author telling us this month that skyrocketing happiness will result when obesity declines. Thus, more happiness per person justifies government regulation of food portions, writes Shelby Kantner. Wishing […]

“Let’s Not Be Rude to Fat People” Says The Times

May 27, 2018 — Well, at least we have their attention. The Times of London reported yesterday on our presentation at ECO2018 about explicit weight bias in the UK and eight other countries around the world. Chris Smyth wrote a good, brief story and correctly reported that Britain seems to harbor especially harsh weight bias. The Times paired it […]

How Mediterranean Is the Mediterranean Diet?

May 26, 2018 — The Mediterranean diet is all but dead to children in Mediterranean countries. The WHO’s Jao Breda described the problem at ECO2018 this week: The Mediterranean diet for the children in these countries is gone. There is no Mediterranean diet any more. Those who are close to the Mediterranean diet are the Swedish kids. The Mediterranean […]

Obesity: Information or Stigmatization from the Media?

May 25, 2018 — Public understanding of obesity is fraught by misinformation and stigma. But the subject of weight and health captures public attention like nothing else. So the media faces an ethical choice when reporting on obesity.  Yesterday, CEO Joe Nadglowski of the Obesity Action Coalition put his finger on it. Will journalists promote information or stigmatization? This […]

Global Health Leaders Engaging on Obesity

May 24, 2018 — A remarkable group came together this morning at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. Roughly 60 global health leaders engaged in a lively discussion about strategies to address the economic and public health challenge of obesity. One national public health officer described it aptly: I’ve participated in a number of other events this week. But […]

ECO2018: Global Obesity Brings Global Weight Bias

May 23, 2018 — At the opening of ECO2018 this morning, one thing is abundantly clear. With the rise of global obesity, we have a growing recognition that weight bias is becoming an important global problem, too. New Study Confirms Unfavorable Trends Alan Moses is presenting an analysis of the global prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Unfortunately, the trends […]

Unlocking the Secrets of Beige Fat for Energy Balance

May 22, 2018 — The science of fat tissue has progressed in quite an impressive way over the last decade. And just yesterday, researchers added a new milestone to that progress. With a new paper in Nature Medicine, Heejin Jun and colleagues identified a neurological pathway that may be critical for activating beige fat cells to burn energy. And […]