September 16, 2023 — The question that fuels much curiosity about obesity seems simple enough. What is it that sparked an increase in the prevalence of obesity beginning in the 1980s? But a new paper in Science Advances suggests this may altogether be the wrong question. That’s because Mads Møller Pedersen, Claus Thorn Ekstrøm, and Thorkild I.A. Sørensen have […]
September 11, 2023 — John Keats seems to be guiding a great many people trying to make sense of the stubborn rise in obesity. His advice that beauty is truth has surprising power. So we look for elegant solutions to all challenges. David Ludwig has an elegant explanation for the cause of excess obesity in the carbohydrate insulin model. […]
September 5, 2023 — When an idea captures the imagination, it can become something like an ink stain. Tough to alter. One such idea that captured our imagination is the idea that gut microbiota might be a causal factor in obesity. But a new review in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B suggests rethinking this idea. Matthew Dalby […]
September 2, 2023 — Ask any parent. They can tell you that “Why?” can be the most wonderful question a child can bring them. It can also be the most annoying. And so it is with the question of why the population has so much obesity. But it just won’t go away, and in fact the question seems to […]
August 18, 2023 — Health disrupting chemicals are spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet. Even on the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, they’re showing up. Through carcinogenicity or obesogenicity, they can wreak havoc with our health. But as we follow the public discourse about the bad actors, one thing becomes quite clear. Carcinogenicity prompts alarm […]
August 14, 2023 — Headline writers are fond these days of depicting a “craze” among prescription writers for new obesity medicines. But in fact, it seems that long-standing prescribing patterns may promote more weight gain than weight loss. A new paper by Erik Almazan, Jessica Schwartz, and Kimberly Gudzune documents prescribing for medicines that promote weight gain in 36 percent […]
July 29, 2023 — Two publications this week set up a stark contrast in views of how bad the abundance of ultra-processed food is. In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kevin Hall tells us that these foods present us with a huge challenge. He writes that we must: “Transform the current food system to one that […]
July 27, 2023 — Five years ago, Faith Ann Heeren brought her life experiences to YWM2018 in Denver. Now, as a PhD candidate at the University of Florida College of Medicine, she is the lead author on one in a collection of papers from last summer’s outstanding program on causes of obesity at the Royal Society in London. Life […]
July 6, 2023 — “Whose fault is obesity? Most of the blame rests with one culprit.” In the Washington Post, Tamar Haspel perfectly captures the overwhelming compulsion to assign moral responsibility for obesity. She espouses a popular view: “The lion’s share – I’ll go with 61 percent (and, yes, of course I’m totally making this up to give some […]
June 16, 2023 — At the Boston Course in Obesity Medicine, Sadaf Farooqi received the George L. Blackburn Foundation Award and delivered a masterclass of digging deeply into genetics to fully understand obesity. Simultaneously, she co-authored striking new observations about one dimension of this in the New England Journal of Medicine. All in a day’s work for someone intent […]
