News Archive for May, 2015

Whatever clean eating is, it must be good. Katy Perry, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a host of other celebrities are totally into it. You can even have your very own magazine if you’re totally into it, too! Presenting at the 2015 Congress of the Humanities & Social Sciences in Ottawa this week, Professor Gillian McCann says she […]

The passions of the breastfeeding war continue to spill into scientific publications. Another in a long line of publications documenting an association between breastfeeding and lower adiposity appeared this week in the Journal of Nutrition. The authors concluded: These data confirm the importance of exclusive BF and prolonged BF for later cardiometabolic health. But in fact, that’s […]

You don’t have to look very hard to find people who are scared to look at people with obesity. Plus-size model Tess Holliday on the cover of People magazine this week flushed out quite a few people worried about visual exposure to obesity. https://instagram.com/p/259NqNvOcF/ “Is People magazine glamorizing obesity?” asks Katrina Fernandez on her blog at patheos.com. Fernandez […]

Attempts at regulating obesity — changing obesity’s prevalence through legal and regulatory action — have been pretty dismal failures to date. In his unique, complete examination of this subject — Regulating Obesity — law professor Bill Bogart asks some critical questions for understanding these failures and developing better strategies. Why have efforts largely failed? Bogart thoroughly […]

One more clue to the complexity of obesity comes in the accumulating evidence about the link between obesity and adverse childhood experiences. Bullies, abusers, and obesity increasingly appear to be linked tightly in a substantial portion of people with obesity. In Psychological Medicine, Ryu Takizawa and colleagues have documented that children who are bullied have an […]

A pair of new studies provide objective evidence for the likelihood of children growing up with obesity over time. In PLOS Medicine, William Johnson and colleagues published data showing that British children born more recently are more likely to develop obesity and overweight at earlier ages. In the Journal of Public Health, Matthew Pearce and […]

On Friday, when most people had gone for the Memorial Day weekend, came this headline from a press release: Treatment with Saxenda® for Three Years Reduced the Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes Compared with Placebo Ordinarily, releasing information in this way would done to bury bad news that you had to get behind you. In this […]

If you want a fresh understanding of how the national discourse about obesity has taken a wrong turn toward the wrong destination, Fat-Talk Nation is well worth reading. In her new book, Susan Greenhalgh sets aside the dogma of fat acceptance and anti-fat bigots. She sets aside the dizzying complexity of this metabolic disease. She straightforwardly examines […]

Was the reaction to kill sibutramine after a cardiovascular safety study in 2010 a mistake? A new study in the International Journal of Obesity raises that question with new data. Joseph Hayes and colleagues found found little risk of cardiovascular events in a cohort of more than 23,927 people receiving sibutramine, except in those people with […]

A research question that seems to get repeated ad nauseum is: “Do parents worry enough about their kids being fat?” Ask young people with excess weight and they will likely tell you that their weight gets plenty of attention. So please stop asking now. We’ve been showered this week with publicity for the umpteenth study of this […]