May 21, 2015 — People living with obesity are finally beginning to see more options for obesity care and, in part, they can thank competition to innovate in diabetes care for some of this progress. A particularly visible example of this is liraglutide, which has been available for treating type 2 diabetes since 2009. After six years of use […]
May 20, 2015 — Much has been said over the last year about progress against childhood obesity. Both CDC and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have been out front, saying that the childhood obesity rate “has leveled off” and for children ages 2 to 5, it “has dropped since 2003-04.” New data published in JAMA Pediatrics this week suggests that much of this progress may […]
May 19, 2015 — If you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, perhaps it’s news to you that sitting is killing you. If not, maybe you jumped on the latest workplace wellness trend — a standing desk. But the latest research suggests that you might want to walk away from that standing desk. Literally. A study of objective physical […]
May 18, 2015 — In a somewhat surprising outcome, Rebecca Puhl and Sai Liu have found substantial evidence of public support for the 2013 AMA decision to classify obesity as a complex, chronic disease. The majority of a robust national sample of 1,118 of U.S. adults agreed with 11 of 17 reasons favoring classification of obesity as a disease and agreed with […]
May 17, 2015 — Fear and disgust can be powerful motivators. A new analysis in Health Affairs contends that they can also be effective tools for serving the interests of public health. Amy Fairchild and colleagues from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University cite a “contested body of evidence about the motivational effects of fear” to support […]
May 16, 2015 — Are we exporting American obesity to the global south? Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal accelerate the export of obesity to Asia and limit policy options for curbing it? These are reasonable questions to ask, but no one seems really interested in answering them in the midst of a hot debate about this trade deal. The […]
May 15, 2015 — A briefing at the Brookings Institution this week brought the enormity of the bill coming due for childhood obesity in the U.S. into sharp focus. The cost of obesity for children who already have the condition in the U.S. will be more than a trillion dollars when they reach adulthood. In other words, as time passes […]
May 14, 2015 — Investment in obesity research and development is a scarce resource. There’s no supply of money to burn. So the news of the termination of a large, expensive cardiovascular outcomes trial of naltrexone/bupropion (Contrave) is sad news indeed. This was the inevitable result of a mistake involving premature release of interim data from this study. As […]
May 13, 2015 — A new study has us thinking that widening disparities may get in the way of efforts to reverse the the excess of obesity that has developed over the last three decades. Tiffany Powell-Wiley and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study of subjects in the Dallas Heart Study and found that moving to socially and economically deprived […]
May 12, 2015 — If you compare ideas about obesity from the 1950s to some of the current thinking about the subject, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s way past time for rethinking obesity. Key themes of that era still dominate popular thinking today: you’re just eating too much, it’s a simple matter of calories in and calories […]
