April 10, 2024 — More sustainable and healthy diets are a global goal of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO says the need for this focus is increasingly evident, but certainly not simple to achieve. Nutrition recommendations around the world are beginning to incorporate these considerations, they say. “Such recommendations include for example: having a mostly […]
April 9, 2024 — More than a decade has passed since the American Medical Association confirmed that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. But the rest of the world is still struggling with this idea. Much as we have all started to say obesity is a disease, we more often act like it’s merely a risk factor for other […]
April 8, 2024 — Obesity research never rests, it seems. Over the weekend, at the American College of Cardiology annual meeting and in the New England Journal of Medicine, we got a third confirmation of the benefit that semaglutide delivers to patients with obesity and heart failure. Specifically, this is about heart failure with preserved ejection fraction – HFpEF. […]
April 7, 2024 — Almost two centuries ago, the world was in the midst of a cholera pandemic and the prevailing belief was that “bad air” was the cause. Near Broad (now Broadwick) Street in London, an especially bad outbreak occurred, killing 616 people. The key to stopping it was to figure out that it was not bad air. […]
April 6, 2024 — Sleep apnea is a complication of obesity and at the same time, obesity can be a complication of sleep apnea. This two-way relationship sets up a problem that is serious and can be hard to resolve. But it deserves close attention because it can lead to an early death. So, given the tangled relationship between […]
April 4, 2024 — We have much to learn from a recent crisis of escalating insulin prices. This is the bottom line of a new paper in Diabetes Care. In short, multifaceted public policy action eased that crisis. So it has important implications for issues with anticompetitive pricing of diabetes and obesity medicines broadly. Anticompetitive Pricing Practices Authors Kathryn […]
April 3, 2024 — We’re stuck. This assessment sums up frustration with efforts to reduce the harm of obesity and diabetes in public health. For many decades we have remained fixated on a paradigm that tells us obesity and diabetes are rising because our patterns of diet and exercise are all wrong. Writing in the Guardian, Amy McLennan tells […]
March 31, 2024 — Narratives are powerful because humanity has a natural inclination to tell stories. We seek to understand our world through the stories we tell. But this sets up a problem for nutrition and obesity science. Appealing narratives untethered from the truth can take decades to recognize as misleading. All too often, this happens only after policymakers […]
March 29, 2024 — A fascinating new study is prompting some very clickable headlines this week. It is all about the interaction of genetic risk for obesity and physical activity. It shows that in people with higher genetic risk scores for obesity, the association between physical activity (using daily step counts as a surrogate) and BMI is different than […]
March 28, 2024 — A new economic analysis in JAMA Network Open brings unsurprising news: manufacturing costs for GLP-1 agonists are a tiny fraction of the price for these important medicines. This is always the case for innovative prescription drugs that must recover billions of dollars of development costs in order to be profitable. The response from policy makers […]
