January 2, 2023 — On 60 Minutes last night, Lesley Stahl reported in vivid detail just how hard it is to get good obesity care in our broken system for healthcare. She had help. Two of the world’s top obesity medicine physicians – Fatima Cody Stanford and Caroline Apovian – took viewers into their clinics. Two of Apovian’s patients […]
December 30, 2022 — CNN, we’re looking at you. Your story claiming that “people with diabetes pay the price” for semaglutide use in obesity is problematic. The story falsely describes the demand for semaglutide as “a hot new weight loss fad.” That is simply wrong. Providing medical care for people who are trying to deal with the complex chronic […]
December 29, 2022 — Very quietly, just before Christmas, FDA approved a major step forward for treating obesity in teens. The agency issued an approval for Wegovy brand of semaglutide to treat obesity in teens. There was no press release at FDA, none on the corporate website for Novo Nordisk. As late as yesterday, the news of this approval […]
November 16, 2022 — It’s a fact. Media needs your attention. Thus, journalistic standards live in in tension with the temptation for sensational headlines that trivialize a subject like obesity. We’ve seen it before. Yet the current crop of sensational headlines offering a twisted understanding of serious new obesity treatments is especially disappointing. Here’s an example from the supposedly […]
October 2, 2022 — From the Annals of Sad but True: “It is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit,” said Guillaume Cabanac. He was commenting of the news last year of hundreds of retractions from special issues in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. This and other recent news suggests that scientific fraud is hardly negligible. But […]
September 21, 2022 — According to Anahad O’Connor in the Washington Post, your microbiome can do amazing things for you. “These vast communities of microbes are the gateway to your health and well-being – and one of the simplest and most powerful ways to shape and nurture them is through your diet.” Because research sez so. So maybe feeding […]
July 27, 2022 — It’s a lot. Writing for USA Today, Karen Weintraub has produced a deep dive into diverse thinking about the complexity of obesity. If you thought USA Today was a place for McNuggets* of superficial reporting, think again. In six parts, with more than 18,000 words, Weintraub has done quite well in painting a picture of […]
July 18, 2022 — Every week from the Obesity and Energetics Offerings, we get sharp reminders. Headlines about nutrition and obesity science very often don’t stand up to a careful look at what the study behind the headlines actually found. This charade, though, has a serious downside. As two studies in the last week show, it perpetuates a fiction […]
July 11, 2022 — It seems like an endless struggle. On one hand we face strident voices from some corners of public health who want to catastrophize obesity. These are the voices of moral panic. But on the other hand, we have to contend with voices who seemingly deny that obesity is a health problem. That the only problems […]
July 10, 2022 — “You oughta wanna do better.” That sums up the feelings evoked by a disturbing number of guidelines for health and wellness. This feeling comes when the guidelines conflict jarringly with the lived reality of many or most people. When guidelines become a prompt for finger wagging, they won’t move the needle on population health in […]
