June 10, 2020 — It was just a sketch, made more than 500 years ago. Leonardo da Vinci never intended for anyone to see it. He made it only to satisfy his own curiosity about human proportions. But today the Vitruvian Man is one of da Vinci’s best known works. A work of both math and art, it ranks […]
June 9, 2020 — The expectations are low, so it’s not getting much attention. The 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is trying to wrap up its work on a report. That report goes into a black box at FDA and USDA. Then sometime around the end of the year, the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans will pop out from […]
June 8, 2020 — The headlines are pretty direct about it. “COVID-19 lockdowns make childhood obesity worse,” says a headline from the University of Buffalo. Another report tells us that school closures will drive childhood obesity rates up by 2.4 percentage points. All this sounds very precise and matter of fact. But what it really amounts to is speculation. […]
June 7, 2020 — No fair! So says the Sugar Association. “Big sugar” petitioned FDA last week because they want food labeling to call out non-caloric sweeteners. Not just sugar. You can’t really blame them for trying. Righteous food activists have been beating up on sugar so much, for so long, that per capita consumption of sugar and caloric […]
June 6, 2020 — Age, by far, is the most important risk factor for bad outcomes with COVID-19. But after that, it’s become clear that obesity is an important risk for bad outcomes. In children, of course, serious cases are relatively rare. But lately they have been cropping up more frequently in the U.S. Now, a new report in […]
June 5, 2020 — These are times that present us with extreme but false choices. Lives versus livelihoods. Chaos versus oppression. Add to that list an extreme, false dichotomy on obesity. At one extreme, we have two fat acceptance advocates advocates arguing that concern about obesity is nothing more than an expression of racism. At the other, a conservative […]
June 4, 2020 — Should dietary guidelines tell the public to eat as little saturated fat as possible? This is definitely a hot debate. But we’re not so sure it’s a great one. Perhaps it’s just becoming tiresome. Regardless, what’s clear is that when top experts presented this debate at Nutrition Live Online, it was a great event. In […]
June 3, 2020 — Most people think of obesity as an issue of body weight. But in fact, weight is merely an artifact. It’s a side effect of what’s really going on in the physiology of obesity. In fact, an excess of adipose tissue that harms health is what defines obesity. In turn, one of the key pathways for […]
June 2, 2020 — Nutrition Live Online 2020 opened with NIH Director Francis Collins and the Presidential Symposium on the ethics of eating. We had expected to be wowed by Director Collins. And of course, he is impressive. However, Harvard’s Anna Grummond impressed us even more. She explained that it’s ethically OK to put warnings on food that might […]
June 1, 2020 — Complexity makes the brain hurt. Both nutrition and obesity present challenges that resist simple answers. There is no one healthful way to eat, though many false prophets of nutrition will preach that they have the one true way. Quick fixes for obesity are rare, though many people are eager to tell us that they know […]
