Archive for May, 2015

Belief Requires No Evidence

May 11, 2015 — Belief and knowledge become easily confused in matters of nutrition, obesity, and health. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with strong beliefs. But believing something to be true is very different from knowing it, and that’s where the problem lies. We have a lot of strong beliefs about what should work to prevent or treat obesity, […]

Healthy and Unhealthy Wellness Programs

May 10, 2015 — Can you tell the difference between healthy and unhealthy wellness programs? If you’re not sure, the Canadian Obesity Network (CON) and the American Heart Association are both offering some perspective. In the Spring issue of Conduit, CON focuses upon obesity in the workplace and provides some detailed perspective on designing a healthy workplace wellness program and related issues of […]

Disclosing Added Sugar: Candy vs Yogurt

May 9, 2015 — If you’re looking for a clue to why the definition of “healthy eating” is such a tricky subject, just take a look at the fight about disclosing added sugar on nutrition labels. Yesterday, Mars — the makers of M&M’s — announced that they support FDA’s proposal for added sugar labeling. Meanwhile, the yogurt industry is […]

Apples and Oranges, Diabetes and Obesity

May 8, 2015 — Headlines this week have been suggesting that a little extra weight might be good for people with type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately, they’re comparing apples and oranges and confusing the relationship between diabetes and obesity. The confusion comes from a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that compares the outcomes of people who have type 2 […]

Chase the Conspiracy, Lose the Facts

May 7, 2015 — It seems that conspiracy theories are so appealing that sometimes they lead people to lose the facts. So it was recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine when Aseem Malhotra and colleagues published an editorial blaming the food industry for misinformation about the role of exercise in obesity, saying: Many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely […]

School Food Policies: Good News, Bad News

May 6, 2015 — In JAMA Pediatrics this week, we got some good news and bad news about school food policies. The good news is that laws and regulations to remove junk foods from schools might indeed be helpful. The bad news is that the benefits appear to be unevenly distributed. Kids with social and economic disadvantages might not get much […]

Infectious Obesity

May 5, 2015 — On the closing day of the Canadian Obesity Summit, Obesity Society President Nikhil Dhurandhar challenged people to consider the concept of infectious obesity. He is the perfect person to issue this challenge because of his pivotal work to establish the relationship between obesity and adenovirus 36 (Ad36). In addition to the link between some cases of obesity and […]

Eradicating Sweetened Beverages

May 4, 2015 — A pretty solid consensus seems to exist around the notion of reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Consumers are cutting back on drinking them. Even beverage makers are finding ways to formulate, package, and promote their products to reduce the amount of sugar people are drinking. But no such consensus seems to exist on the ultimate […]

One Size Cannot Fit All in Childhood Obestiy

May 3, 2015 — A new discussion paper from the Institute of Medicine makes a compelling case for recognizing that one size cannot fit all in addressing childhood obesity. The rate of childhood obesity has reached 17%, with about a third of those children having severe obesity. One study showed that the rate of conversion from childhood obesity to severe […]

Giving Voice to People Living with Obesity

May 2, 2015 — Giving voice to people living with obesity is a theme that is running through the Fourth Canadian Obesity Summit in Toronto. On every day of the meeting, people living with obesity have been playing an active and visible role in the agenda presenting personal reflections, presenting their own research, and giving interviews to media attending […]