November 20, 2020 — We confess to being fed up with campaigns right now. But three articles in JAMA Pediatrics shine an especially harsh light on childhood obesity campaigns in two forms. One is the PSA approach exhorting families to beware of childhood obesity. The other is the practice of weighing and measuring kids in school and sending BMI […]
November 19, 2020 — Bias about obesity is funny. Because some of the smartest people say the dumbest things when they aren’t thinking. That’s when implicit weight bias comes into view. For example, Governor Andrew Cuomo connected the dots yesterday between cheesecake, COVID, and obesity. But it’s pretty hard to figure out what in the world he was thinking. […]
November 18, 2020 — We don’t mean to pick on this lovely ad campaign by the NHS. Because there’s nothing wrong with promoting healthy lifestyles. But unfortunately, it isn’t going to do a thing to reverse the obesity trends in the UK. It reflects a mentality about confronting obesity that fails over and over. Just do better and make […]
November 17, 2020 — RT-Mart is a hypermarket chain in Taiwan, having a measure of success in mainland China. But last week it set off a furor about fat shaming. For reasons unknowable, the chain replaced the usual S-M-L-XL-XXL clothing sizes with a shaming scheme. Slim, beautiful, rotten, extra rotten, and rotten to the core was the chain’s not […]
November 16, 2020 — The term of art for this is an expression of concern. It sounds very restrained, but it is quite serious. Four papers about the effects of Vitamin D in the Journal of Nutrition recently earned this dubious distinction. Add that to a paper in PLOS ONE that is getting the same sort of scrutiny. In […]
November 15, 2020 — Perhaps you have noticed that people will believe what they want. Objective truth often seems to be a scarce commodity. Right now, arguments about misinformation and disinformation are dominating much of our political discourse. So this seems like a good time to consider that sometimes lies are quite appealing. Because we face daily decisions about […]
November 14, 2020 — Leave fat kids alone. That’s the proposal from Aubrey Gordon in the New York Times, and she makes a compelling case. A war on childhood obesity mutated into a war on fat kids for four decades and accomplished almost nothing good. In fact, it left many kids, such as Gordon, burning up with feelings of […]
November 13, 2020 — We have some screwy ideas about food, nutrition, weight, and health. So naturally, we can fight about it in education. OMG! What are they teaching my child about nutrition and health at school? Today, the New York Times frets that teachers may be teaching children to diet. Welcome to a new chapter of culture wars […]
November 12, 2020 — The American College of Cardiology is serving up anti-inflammatory food. Dig in! In a press release earlier this month, the College told us that an anti-inflammatory diet can lower heart disease and stroke risk. It sounds great, but if you read the press release, you’ll find that these studies are all about modest correlations. Not […]
November 11, 2020 — Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. That’s the stigma-laden medical terminology for a condition also known as hepatic steatosis. This is a chronic disease that most often goes undetected, until it progresses to the inflamed state of hepatitis. But then it gets serious. The inflammation progresses to fibrosis. Liver failure or liver cancer can be the end […]
