Archive for October, 2014

Dietary Quality: Garbage In, Garbage Out

October 13, 2014 — “Food diaries are important for people trying to improve their dietary health, but the information in them is garbage.” — Professor John P. Foreyt With a new study of the healthfulness of American diets making headlines, it’s worth remembering that all of these studies are based on what people say they eat. A distinguished team […]

NFL Obesity

October 12, 2014 — Obesity might just rival traumatic brain injury as a health concern for retired NFL players. NFL players are sometimes cited as examples of weakness in BMI as a tool for identifying obesity. In a 2005 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers concluded that the BMI of most NFL players (56%) […]

Going to Walmart for Tube Socks and Healthcare

October 11, 2014 — If you have any doubt about how fast healthcare is changing, consider this: Walmart plans to be the number one healthcare provider in the industry. Earlier this year, Walmart opened a half-dozen of their own convenient care clinics in Texas and South Carolina stores. Six more are on their way to opening before the end of […]

Is Supersizing off the Menu?

October 10, 2014 — Supersizing — selling restaurant food with excessive calories — may be fading, according to a new study published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Sara Bleich and colleagues analyzed data from 66 of the 100 largest restaurant chains in America and found a 12% decline in the calories delivered by new menu items […]

Obesity Tax

October 9, 2014 — The obesity tax is a fact of life. A new publication in the journal Demography paints a stark picture of a tax on earnings and productivity paid by young men with excess weight and obesity. By studying pairs of siblings over time, they find a 16% wage penalty — a tax on earnings, so to speak […]

Neighborhood Obesity

October 8, 2014 — Neighborhood obesity clusters have been evident to public health and obesity experts for quite some time now. Presumptions have become articles of faith to explain why some neighborhoods have persistently high rates, while neighborhoods nearby have dramatically lower rates. A pair of new studies are challenging some of those presumptions. In the Journal of Human Nutrition and […]

Taking Obesity Seriously

October 7, 2014 — Today we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post by Asheley Cockrell Skinner. She works at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she conducts research on health policy, obesity, and pediatrics. We are grateful to her for allowing us to post her thoughtful perspective here. Is obesity a disease? This is a question I […]

Weight Bias in Healthcare as Great as in Fashion?

October 6, 2014 — Sometimes we learn more from surprises than from research that confirms our suspicions. Nancy Rudd and colleagues set out to study weight bias in healthcare, fashion, and other service sector students. They expected — as we would have — to find more bias in students of fashion and retail studies. But it turns out that […]

Can Granny Smith Save Us from Obesity?

October 5, 2014 — Granny Smith is sitting on top of our list of entertaining and distorted health news reporting. The press office at Washington State University issued a headline promising, “An Apple a Day Could Keep Obesity Away.” Hmmm. Washington State. Could it be that Big Apple is behind these reports? We searched the research report and found no declaration of […]

Follow the Leader in Healthy Dining (or Not)

October 4, 2014 — When it comes to healthy dining, it seems that the company you keep really does matter. Obesity can spread through social networks. This observation has been pretty well documented for a while now, but the nature of the relationship between obesity risk and social networks has been understood more as an association than as cause and effect. For example, […]