News Archive for August, 2016

On the closing evening of the OAC YWM2016 convention in Washington, an impressive group of our heroes won well-deserved recognition. The highest honor went to Nikki Massie, who earned recognition as the OAC Member of the Year. Famous as the Bariatric Foodie, she has built an amazing following through her blog, her books, and most of all through her […]

Pop neuroscience has an astounding assortment of people offering up observations about lighting up the brain when people see appealing food – or any other stimulus that makes their point. But connecting those dots to some real scientific insight comes a little more slowly. A new publication in Appetite does an excellent job of tying together some […]

A study published today in Obesity shows just how slow the adoption of obesity innovation is in clinical care. Catherine Thomas and colleagues analyzed prescribing data for new SGLT2 diabetes treatments introduced in 2013. They compared it to data for new obesity treatments that were introduced beginning in late 2012. Many alternatives were already available […]

For decades, the common dogma of energy balance stated that weight gain or loss is a simple matter of “calories in and calories out.” On the second day of YWM2016, Steve Blair called for a rethinking of “nonsense presented repeatedly without any data to back it up.” At the top of his list for such nonsense, he […]

The popular interest in food addiction is impossible to miss. A search for scholarly articles on the subject yields thousands of references in 2016 alone. A check for news items produces hundreds of thousands. Amazon will serve you more than seven thousand books on the subject. So Nicole Avena and Nina Crowley met with an […]

Faith – defined as an enduring belief in something that cannot be directly observed or proven – has played an undeniable role in human history that continues to this day. In the face of uncertainty or incomplete answers, we instinctively fall back on ideas that provide meaning and direction as we search for truth. And so it is that […]

Patient-centered puffery rules the day in health policy jargon right now. Patient-centered medical homes are all the rage. But they’re falling short of delivering a panacea for primary care. Consumer-driven health plans are popular with many employers as a means to bring consumers into healthcare decision making. The reality has involved a lot of cost shifting and […]

A new scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) calls for a dramatic cut in sugar for kids. In a scientific statement published this week, AHA recommends that children between 2 and 18 consume no more than 25 grams of added sugar per day. That’s a reduction of two-thirds from the estimated 75 grams […]

The fear of “medicalizing obesity” repeatedly surfaces in writing about obesity and never fails to impress. It surfaces in discussions with health plans worried about about “opening the floodgates” to evidence-based access to care for obesity. It surfaces even in scholarly publications. The latest example is a remarkably naive publication in health: an interdisciplinary journal. In a […]

Who knew that we have a global epidemic of narcissism, much less that it might be fueling growth in the prevalence of obesity? Bruno Lemaitre floats this intriguing hypothesis in the upcoming October issue of Medical Hypotheses. He describes documentation for the growth in “status-striving individualism” and a diminished sense of community in Western populations that is spreading […]