Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

“Don’t Listen to Those Influencers,” Cries an Influencer

February 16, 2024 — Influencers are not doctors. They can’t understand the science issues with obesity drugs. That’s not what they do. With expressive skill, a leading influencer in the fat acceptance movement put her finger on an important issue in the Washington Post this week. On this, we totally agree. If we listen to many social media influencers, […]

Inflated Claims and Inadequate Testing for Rexulti

November 20, 2023 — FDA has a bone to pick with Otsuka, the company that sells Rexulti (brexpiprazole). The agency is taking issue with false advertising by the company for this drug used in schizophrenia and severe depression. To us, this problem of inflated efficacy claims is especially noteworthy because, for people with obesity who may need this drug, […]

Why Ozempic Gets More Traction Than Wegovy

April 26, 2023 — Insights surface when we take the time to listen to people living with obesity. Yesterday, Ro and the Obesity Action Coalition released results from a study of the thoughts and feelings people are having about obesity, weight loss, and the new GLP-1 medicines. There’s a lot to think about in these results – about motivations […]

Posh Fitness Culture for a Healthy Lifestyle

January 14, 2023 — What exactly is a healthy lifestyle? If you dig into a certain corner of public health research, you are likely to come up with healthy patterns of eating, physical activity, sleep, and stress management as the answer. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, has a different answer for you. Fitness culture defines a […]

Market Forces, Vanity, Obesity, and Diabetes

June 1, 2022 — When “health plans” tell someone seeking treatment for obesity it’s a vanity thing, we are not fooled. They simply don’t want to pay the bill. Health plan? Not really. It’s a lot like car insurance. It pays for a wreck. Not so much for preventing one. Writing in the New York Times today, Gina Kolata […]

Were Meal Kits Just a Pandemic Thing?

March 15, 2022 — The pandemic isn’t done with us yet. Cases are rising a bit in Europe and it’s anyone’s guess where this is heading. But certainly, it appears that many of us are done with the pandemic. Does this mean the boom in meal kits will fade? Will it turn out that they were just a pandemic […]

Mindfulness: Past the Peak or Just Getting Started?

May 17, 2021 — At the height of the pandemic in 2020, mindfulness had quite a moment. In some corners of the world, the peak of the pandemic may have passed. Has the peak of interest in mindfulness passed, too? If our searches on Google are any indication, this may be the case. Perhaps people are more interested in […]

Will Home Fitness Surge Past the Pandemic?

January 9, 2021 — We seem to be living in boom times for home fitness – at least for the folks selling it. In 2019, people wondered if Peloton would be a flash in the pan. After a 2019 IPO at 29 dollars per share, its stock price dropped by more than 30 percent in early 2020. But that […]

The Hilarity of Naive Efforts to Regulate Food Marketing

December 23, 2020 — China is going to eliminate food waste and fight obesity in a single stroke of regulation. How, you ask? Operation Empty Plate will expand into law. China will make it a crime to promote food waste, including overeating. The hilarity of naive efforts to regulate food marketing never disappoints. Stiff Fines for Bad Marketing Right […]

From Chaos Comes a Booming Market for Calm

November 8, 2020 — Even chaos is a business opportunity. So it seems that the market for calm is booming – both as a state of mind and a popular health app. This week the company behind the health app named Calm seized an opportunity. They sponsored those jarring election news alerts on CNN that were delivering the precise […]