Archive for October, 2019

Make Your Top 10 List for Las Vegas ObesityWeek Now

October 31, 2019 — Get ready for sensory overload. We’re heading to Las Vegas where roughly 5,000 scientists and professionals will focus on obesity next week, all week. It’s overwhelming. So your best bet is to make your top-ten list now. Because once you get to Vegas, you better have a plan. Here’s our top ten to give you […]

Digging Into a Squishy Definition for Ultra-Processed Food

October 30, 2019 — Everyone was ready to head home from FNCE 2019 yesterday morning. Yet a crowd gathered to hear from Kevin Hall and Amber Courville about ultra-processed foods. Theirs is the fascinating study that shows people eat more calories and gain more weight on a diet of processed foods. It’s a study that seems quite important. But […]

Sustainable Diets Are Good, But All Diets Are Bad

October 29, 2019 — FNCE – the world’s largest meeting of food and nutrition experts – is winding up today in Philly. It’s an occasion where more than 10,000 dietitians, food professionals, and policymakers gather. The experience is sensory overload on food and nutrition. Without a doubt, passions run high on nutrition beliefs at this meeting. For instance, the […]

Bariatric Surgery for Youth: Progress and Fear

October 28, 2019 — The American Academy of Pediatrics is out with new guidance that says something a very few teens and their families already know. Surgery can be a safe and effective option for a young person with severe obesity. But health systems, ignorance, and bias make it hard for youth with obesity to get the care they […]

Stigma: The Power and Challenge of Words and Images

October 27, 2019 — Close to 500 science writers gathered at Penn State this weekend for a mix of professional development, scientific briefings, and networking. Within this group, two talented professionals from NIH, Judith Lavelle and Hillary Hoffman, deal with highly stigmatized health conditions every day – HIV, infectious diseases, and immune disorders. But they wanted to do more […]

Jumping Rope, Cognition, Height, BMI, and Scientific Rigor

October 26, 2019 — Does jumping rope help teens with obesity? We’re honestly not too sure. But a study that suggests it might is certainly stimulating some excellent dialogue between scholars. And it points to some surprising questions. For instance: does jumping rope for 75 minutes, twice a week over 12 weeks make teens grow taller? Think better? Become […]

Real Evidence for Steps to Prevent Dementia

October 25, 2019 — Any number of people want to sell you magic steps to prevent dementia. Lumosity had to pay a two million dollar fine in 2016 because it “preyed on consumer fears about age related cognitive decline.” But that hasn’t stopped the company. It’s just being more careful about falsely promoting its game to prevent dementia. Nonetheless, […]

Prescribing and Delivering Better Nutrition

October 24, 2019 — Applying the science of health outcomes research to social determinants of health is bringing surprising insights. In fact, for chronic diseases like obesity, heart failure, and diabetes, delivering better nutrition might do more than merely prescribing medicine can. Also, it seems to seems to offer good value for money. Food Is Medicine? This catchphrase sometimes […]

Does Medicare Care About Preventing Diabetes?

October 23, 2019 — We have an effective treatment for preventing diabetes. It cuts the risk by 60 percent in people with prediabetes. For every person on Medicare, it saves $2,650. In just 15 months. But Medicare can’t figure out how to make it available to the people who need it. This is the sad story of implementing the […]

Explosive Global Growth in Childhood Obesity – So What?

October 22, 2019 — “It’s a shockingly fast increase. It’s hard to think of any development indicator where you see such a rapid deterioration.” So says UNICEF’s Laurence Chandy. He is the lead author of a new report on Children, Food, and Nutrition. That report documents how we have seen a doubling in global childhood obesity and overweight between […]