Archive for May, 2019

The Elusive Magic of 10,000 Steps Per Day

May 31, 2019 — We wait for it every day. That magic moment when our fitness band goes nuts with good vibrations to tell us that we’ve crossed the magic threshold of 10,000 steps for the day. But if you dig into it, you can easily learn that the 10,000 step benchmark is more arbitrary than magic. And new […]

Good Question: Why Is Diabetes Incidence Going Down?

May 30, 2019 — This is now unmistakeable. And it seems like a rare piece of good news. For the first time in decades, diabetes incidence is going down. The real question is, why? And the honest answer is nobody knows. A Trend That Started in 2008 Stephen Benoit and colleagues from CDC analyzed U.S. trends in the diabetes […]

A Dose of Honest Reality at the YWM Convention

May 29, 2019 — The annual YWM Convention is one of the most important events of the year for those of us dealing with obesity. We’re grateful to Obesity Action Coalition Chair Michelle Vicari for offering a personal perspective in today’s guest post. If you walk by a news stand, almost every cover of a magazine or book features […]

Apples and Oranges, Tobacco and Sugar

May 28, 2019 — Fruit juice, soda, cigarettes, and vapes. They’re all killing us, but we keep consuming them. Tobacco and sugar are close neighbors on the slippery slope to poor health and premature death. Right? Well, not really. News and journal articles might give you an impression that sugar and tobacco are very similar bad actors. We hear […]

Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice

May 27, 2019 — Can we please retire the mantra of making the healthy choice the easy choice? It’s a great concept. Maybe it’s even a good marketing tagline…if you’re a food marketer. But for reducing obesity, it seems more and more like Eat-Less-Move-More version 2.0. Rather than pointing fingers at people for making “unhealthy choices,” we’ve moved to […]

Selling Avocado Toast for Breakfast

May 26, 2019 — Does less toast and more avocado make for a more satisfying breakfast? Does that mean that we’d all lose a little weight if we made this swap? Thanks to the Hass Avocado Board, we have some actual data to tell us that the answers are yes and maybe not. So feel free to go easy […]

Time for a Holiday – Step on the Scales Please

May 25, 2019 — For some people, this might not sound like much of a holiday. People frequently gain weight when they’re on a holiday. But a new study in Obesity suggests that preventing this might not be terribly complicated. Just step on the scales, please. Every day. Paying Attention Works At least in the short term, this study […]

Can We Walk and Chew Gum and Lose Weight All at Once?

May 24, 2019 — Isn’t dealing with excess weight already hard enough? Now, researchers from Japan want us to walk and chew gum and lose weight all at once. In a randomized controlled trial, Susumu Kanno and colleagues recently showed that walking and chewing gum causes people to burn more fat than just walking without the gum. The authors […]

An Objective Line Between Processed and Ultra-Processed

May 23, 2019 — Objectivity is tough. For a case in point, let’s look at how people are processing new data from Kevin Hall and colleagues on ultra-processed foods. It’s important. For the first time, we have good data to say that these foods can cause weight gain. Before we had speculation. Now we have good, experimental evidence. Some […]

Radical Concept: Medical Care for a Medical Condition

May 22, 2019 — The Veteran’s Administration runs the biggest medical care program for obesity in world. It’s the MOVE! program. Because 41 percent of veterans are living with obesity, this disease has enormous cost implications for the VA system. Not because providing obesity care is expensive. Rather, it’s because the health costs of so much obesity – both […]