October 21, 2020 — The human impulse for bigotry is strong. Lifestyle Medicine, an open access journal, offered up a potent illustration of this yesterday. The journal published a dubious study of a weak association between a poor measure of intelligence and obesity. It’s hard to know why, but scientific merit doesn’t explain it. Nor can any excuse justify […]
October 20, 2020 — Do dietitians who align themselves with Health at Every Size (HAES, a registered trademark) have less weight bias? Does weight bias training help? New research presented at FNCE aimed to find out. The answers were a bit mixed, though. It all depends upon whether you look at explicit or implicit bias. If a dietitian was […]
October 18, 2020 — At FNCE yesterday, weight bias was very much on the minds of 1,401 participants. That’s how many nutrition professionals tuned into the hour-long session we moderated. Colleen Tewksbury, Kellene Isom, and Rebecca Pearl offered impressive insights on challenging weight bias. Clearly, weight bias is all around us. In fact, a new study finds that 57 […]
October 18, 2020 — New research from Rand and the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington offers a vivid picture of two major health risks colliding. Alcohol use is growing more frequent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, it’s growing heavier. This is not what we need, because alcohol use is already the number one global health risk […]
October 17, 2020 — We are living in uneasy times. If you want to quantify that, check out the Hedonometer at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. According to their analyses, Twitter was a pretty happy place before 2020. Peter Dodds and colleagues on the Hedonometer project wrote in 2015 that human language has a “universal […]
October 16, 2020 — We understand. Surgery is daunting. Bias against people living with obesity is rampant. Some friends and family will criticize. Some doctors will discourage. Health plans often make it hard. So many people feel reluctance about seeking bariatric surgery. But a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine reminds us. This is not right. […]
October 15, 2020 — The list of ways we woulda, coulda, shoulda prevented obesity keeps growing. In PLOS Medicine this week, another study is spawning headlines about a really effective tool for preventing obesity. The claim is that banning ads for unhealthy food can do the trick. The headlines are promising. For example, PLOS issued a press release that […]
October 14, 2020 — Objectivity is something that gets a lot of attention here. We prize, pursue, and advocate for it. Especially in matters of health, nutrition, and obesity. Conventional wisdom suggests that objective numbers for health outcomes are important tools for this pursuit. But are we kidding ourselves when we rely on numbers for objectivity? Professor Deborah Stone […]
October 13, 2020 — On a recent visit to our least favorite dentist, with a mouth full of cotton, we heard this: “People die all the time. This coronavirus thing is not such a big deal.” A new report in JAMA, tells us just how wrong she was. Deaths indeed do happen all the time. But from March to […]
October 12, 2020 — At first glance, it’s a fascinating study. An intermittent fast, gut microbiota, and an effect on the risk for heart disease – the title of this new study in JCEM pushes all the right buttons. But a look under the surface tells a different story. The primary outcome measures for this study were BMI and […]
