November 11, 2023 — Newly published in full, the results of the SELECT study of semaglutide for cardiovascular outcomes in persons with obesity but not diabetes makes one thing undeniable. Obesity is a chronic, treatable disease. Treating obesity requires more than just telling a person to change their lifestyle. It involves addressing the disease pathology that is at work, […]
November 11, 2023 — It has long been a struggle – one of confronting the biological reality of obesity while claiming autonomy and embracing our own identity. Having our eyes wide open about obesity and health while we tell people who want to impose their judgments on us to buzz off. This is my body and my life. Puritans […]
November 5, 2023 — We’ve got this. “We know what works to prevent obesity.” This is a refrain public health experts repeat often on the subject of obesity and childhood obesity in particular. But it reminds us that there’s a stark line between confidence and competence – especially in dealing with obesity. Unfortunately people mistake confidence for competence all […]
October 27, 2023 — This week’s unexpected result in diet and health comes from PLOS One. In a study of mortality and diabetes risk from added sugar in coffee or tea researchers found nothing. No incremental risk attributable to sugar in coffee or tea. But if you check with CDC, there’s no distinction for those packets of sugar people […]
October 13, 2023 — The handwriting is on the wall. Insurers can’t avoid covering obesity drugs forever, said a recent analysis from Bloomberg and they were right. What prompted that conclusion is the cascade of health outcome studies that make it unmistakeable. Treating obesity and and related metabolic diseases with advanced medicines like semaglutide has a dramatic effect on […]
October 6, 2023 — At EASD this week, it was quite a showing for tirzepatide. Sold under the brand name Mounjaro, it’s already available for treating diabetes and it’s awaiting approval for treating obesity. Based on the research presented at EASD this week, semaglutide might be looking a little like old news. For tirzepatide, a total of 11 presentations […]
September 30, 2023 — We hate to be the bearer of bad news. But those pumpkin spice lattes that define the pleasure of fall are both ultra-processed and hyper-palatable. In other words, they spell doom for our dietary health. That is, they do if we accept the current presumption that UPF and HPF explain all that is increasingly unhealthy […]
September 14, 2023 — Epidemic, pandemic, syndemic, crisis, emergency: well-meaning people attach these words to obesity in general and often to childhood obesity in particular. Two decades ago, Cara Ebbeling, Dorota Pawlak, and David Ludwig proclaimed in Lancet that childhood obesity was a “public health crisis” and prescribed a “common sense cure.” But a new perspective published yesterday in Pediatrics […]
August 26, 2023 — Scientists who study semaglutide in obesity are producing a steady stream of impressive results. Yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, a randomized controlled trial in persons with obesity and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction demonstrated superior weight reduction, improvement in heart failure, better physical functioning, and a halving of serious adverse events. […]
August 21, 2023 — How much might the application of new insights from the SELECT study of treating obesity do for preventing heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. A first pass at answering this question appeared in Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy last week. Nathan Wong, Hridhay Karthikeyan, and Wenjun Fan estimated the potential for semaglutide treatment to lower cardiovascular disease […]
