News Archive for February, 2020

What is the first thing people do when they resolve to shed some excess weight? Often they head to the gym. Self-help articles are full of suggestions for the best way to exercise for weight loss. Unfortunately, that stuff is mostly misleading. The relationship between exercise and weight is complicated. As we’ve written before, exercise […]

Here we go again. New data from CDC on obesity prevalence gives us more of the same bad news we’ve been getting for decades. More rising prevalence. The rate of adult obesity in the U.S. rose above 40 percent for the first time ever, reaching 42.4 percent in 2018. For severe obesity, the prevalence is […]

We are swimming in a sea of implicit weight bias. At its most basic, the bias is this: obesity is a behavioral problem. When we tell people, no, it’s a problem of physiology, most often they can’t accept it. Tell them it’s highly heritable and they often spit back at us. “Genes are not destiny!” […]

We hear lots of arguments about diagnosing obesity. Some people say it’s all about BMI. Sometimes they use this as a straw man argument for saying that BMI has flaws, so obesity isn’t really a thing. But other people are putting forward thoughtful proposals for diagnosing and staging the chronic disease of obesity. One such […]

The FODMAP diet is useful to help manage irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), but it’s becoming more popular. Now bloggers and so-called health gurus have jumped on board, claiming it can treat everything from acne to weight loss. While it would be great if the diet did help to manage these hard-to-treat conditions, these claims are […]

Bless their hearts. Really. We know they mean well. Three health policy gurus have a new viewpoint in JAMA Pediatrics on childhood obesity treatment. They explain “how children and families make daily obesity-related decisions.” Because they’re “not rational.” So you have to “keep it simple” for them. Thus, behavioral economics can provide a wonderful little […]

People seem to be getting the message. Stop the sugar. Sugar is bad. A recent study tells us that traffic light labels are a good way to get that message across to consumers. Even if they don’t know much about healthy nutrition, they’re getting the message about sugar. In fact, these findings did not surprise […]

Food and health fashion never ceases to amaze. Remember Slim Jims? Those processed meat sticks, shelf-stable forever, that people used to buy out of desperation at a convenience store? Well, suddenly they’re trendy and you can even buy upscale, grass-fed versions. We never would have guessed that processed meat sticks could become health food. A […]

Most often, when the media mangles science, the blame goes to the health reporter. Reporters either misinterpret the research or don’t think critically about how PR is spinning the results. But this week, we have an exceptional case of a top-tier journal publishing conclusions to a study that the data simply do not support. The […]

Just in case you’ve grown tired of fighting about meat, Walter Willett and David Ludwig would like to have a word with you about milk. With a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, they tell us we don’t need so much of it: In our opinion, the current recommendation to greatly increase consumption […]