Archive for March, 2016

Michelle Obama’s Food Fight: Five Outcomes

March 21, 2016 — Michelle Obama’s food fight made its big debut under the Let’s Move! banner six years ago. The stated purpose — “solving the problem of childhood obesity within a generation” — has turned out to be more aspirational than literal. All the talk about childhood obesity gave way to a focus on healthy eating and food policy. Six […]

Surgery Beats Diet and Exercise for Diabetes Remission

March 20, 2016 — Another study is adding to the evidence that bariatric surgery is probably the best bet we have for diabetes remission. In a randomized, controlled clinical trial, David Cummings and colleagues found that surgery beats diet and exercise for remission of type 2 diabetes. In this relatively small, well-controlled study, 60% of surgery patients had remission of […]

Why Does Everyone Hate BMI?

March 19, 2016 — Everyone seems to hate BMI and yet none of the myriad alternatives get much traction. Two new studies look at one of the core problems — a “U-shaped” relationship between BMI and mortality. At the extremes, low BMI and high BMI are both associated with the risk of an early death. But in the middle, the […]

Do Physicians See Obesity?

March 18, 2016 — If you just look at the data, you might think it’s seldom that physicians see obesity in routine clinical practice. CDC has issued a new report on physician office visits for obesity by adults in the U.S. Given that 38% of adults in the U.S. have obesity and obesity is widely recognized to be the […]

Implausibly High BMI

March 17, 2016 — Methods matter. A new study published today in Obesity shows that the prevalence of severe early childhood obesity may be twice as high as previously thought. This is because of limits for what are considered to be impossibly high BMI values in standard methods for estimating obesity prevalence. Those limits are no longer working right because […]

Contrave Goes Back to Orexigen

March 16, 2016 — Contrave, a combination of bupropion and naltrexone, will be going back to Orexigen, which is the small biotech company that developed it as a treatment for obesity. Takeda, which launched the drug less than two years ago under a licensing agreement with Orexigen, announced Tuesday that it had decided to give up the marketing rights for Contrave in the […]

Most Californians May Have Diabetes or Prediabetes

March 15, 2016 — Here’s a jolt. New data published by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research suggest that 55% of people in California have either diabetes or prediabetes. The headlines generated by this study are sensational, but there’s no obvious reason to doubt the report’s accuracy. In this report, we can glimpse a future filled with chronic […]

Diet for Dollars at Work? Seriously?

March 14, 2016 — Believe it or not, “diet for dollars” at work is becoming a thing that some “wellness” industry entrepreneurs are pushing hard. Employee Benefit News just published tips for starting a diet-for-dollars program from a vendor of such things. David Roddenberry, co-founder of HealthyWage and a seller of cash incentive programs for weight loss, says that “pay […]

Maybe Kid Sisters Can Prevent Obesity?

March 13, 2016 — An intriguing new longitudinal study finds that children with a younger sibling born while they are two to five years old are much less likely to develop obesity. Thankfully, reporters are resisting the temptation to proclaim that kid sisters (or brothers) can prevent obesity. The study, published in Pediatrics, followed 697 children recruited from ten sites in the U.S. and […]

Straw Man Arguments about Obesity and BMI

March 12, 2016 — We occasionally hear from folks who find the notion that obesity is a disease to be quite offensive. In support of this perspective, the argument is that obesity cannot be a disease because everybody knows obesity is simply a label for having a high BMI. In other words, obesity is just a word used to pathologize people […]