Archive for July, 2020

Sugar in Your Food, Your Blood, and Your Exercise

July 31, 2020 — Nature Metabolism scored big this week with PR for a study on blood sugar and exercise. The study looked at hyperglycemia and exercise training. With lots of attention on Twitter and in the news media, it scored in the 98th percentile for commanding public attention. But the attention it got didn’t line up very well […]

Synergistic Misinformation About COVID and Obesity

July 30, 2020 — Obesity? No problem! Obesity? OMG, you better lose weight or COVID will get you! Remember the information age? It’s been canceled. We are living in the misinformation age. And there’s nothing like a pandemic to fuel the market for misinformation. The intersection of obesity risks and COVID-19 risks is adding to it. Two opposite but […]

Expecting Respect in Healthcare

July 29, 2020 — Presumably, when people choose a career in healthcare, at least one of the motivations is to care for other people. So we might expect that along with caring comes respect in healthcare. But that is not a guarantee, apparently. For some providers, respecting diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, and size seems to be a challenge. […]

Systematic Failures in Dealing with Obesity

July 28, 2020 — For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken wrote this in 1920, well before the the health challenge of obesity flummoxed us. But he described our systematic failures with obesity almost perfectly. Obesity is a problem of complex systems that conspire to harm our health. Simple, […]

The UK Tries a Bait and Switch Obesity Deal

July 27, 2020 — That long-awaited day has arrived and the UK now has a brand new, shiny obesity deal. This “world-leading plan” aims to help people lose weight, beat the coronavirus, and protect the NHS. It bans buy one, get one free deals on food. But apparently, bait and switch is A-OK, if it’s a public policy deal. […]

Cabbage Crowned, Lettuce Loses in Nutrition Correlation

July 25, 2020 — Is nutritional epidemiology suffering from overexposure? A study of veggies and COVID-19 mortality prompts this question. This exercise in nutrition correlation comes from a pre-print. So we can’t blame lax peer reviewers for this one. But the manuscript does make some remarkable claims: For each g/day increase in the average national consumption of some of […]

Making Sense of Obesity and Bad COVID Outcomes

July 25, 2020 — Why? It’s that simple question that toddlers employ against their parents. But it’s pure genius. Maybe we’re past the shock, denial, and anger of coming to terms with COVID-19 and obesity. Clearly, if someone gets COVID-19, having obesity adds to the problem. The risk of severe symptoms is higher, as is the risk of landing […]

A Blind Spot in UK Obesity Planning

July 24, 2020 — Any day now, we will see a new obesity plan for the UK. Some of the loudest voices in the process leading up to this great unveiling have been focused on prevention. But this is a problem that already affects 64 percent of the population in England. In my opinion, this focus reflects simplistic weight […]

Dietary Dark Matter: What Are We Eating?

July 23, 2020 — Do you know what you’re having for lunch? You might think so. But in fact, the food that we are consuming is so complex, that we only have a vague idea of what’s in it. Through a project called FooDB, scientists have cataloged more than 70,000 biologically active chemicals that may be present in our […]

BMI Is Racist and Sexist? Yes, Just as Numbers Lie

July 22, 2020 — Oh my, we do love to hate BMI. Monday on Huffpost, Christine Byrne dispensed the latest argument against this villainous measure. BMI is racist. What’s more, she tells us it’s sexist, too. Definitely, this sounds bad, this composite index of height and weight. Is this a case of an innocent little number worming its way […]