News Archive for April, 2021

As the UK variant (B.1.1.7) became dominant in the U.S., something else started to change. More young people started showing up in the hospital. In fact, COVID wards are filling up with younger patients in Michigan. This may simply be a result of more infections in young people. Teens in Michigan are testing positive at […]

One reason that obesity can be such a difficult topic is because people link it to appearance. Thus we live in a culture where people presume they can diagnose a person’s health based on body image. Looking healthy becomes a surrogate for being healthy. People do very unhealthy things to reach for a healthy appearance. […]

Let’s start with a basic fact. More than five million youth and children in the U.S. have severe obesity. This is not about chubby cheeks or appearance. This is about young bodies with biological patterns of fat tissue setting them up for lifetimes of poor health. These are lives that untreated obesity will cut short. […]

Big change creeps up on us. Is the American Heart Association moving away from implicit bias that obesity is a simple matter of bad behavior? Reading a new scientific statement from AHA, it seems like it. In fact, this statement makes it plain right up front. “Obesity is a multifactorial disease” is how it opens. […]

Roughly three-quarters of Americans have excess weight or obesity. So weight is a major daily concern for most people. It’s uncomfortable to talk about and as a consequence, it’s a topic that many will not publicly address. But Connecticut is now an “odd man out” for access to obesity care. For every other state in […]

To folks who care for people receiving bariatric surgery, it seems like the world’s best kept secret. But it shouldn’t be. This surgery puts diabetes into remission and reduces the burden of many other diseases that result from obesity. It gives people a better quality of life. And it lets people live longer. So why […]

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. We can point to ways this is true. But if you dig into health disparities, this claim might be harder to support. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) […]

Call us quaint. But we believe medical journals should publish research grounded in facts and evidence. Not speculation. Especially in the midst of a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than three million people around the world. BMJ, though, has a different approach. This week the BMJ group has a paper promoting magical […]

Let’s start at the end. Sleep is important. New publications remind us that inadequate sleep is a risk factor for both dementia and obesity. That risk mingles with other risks. Too little sleep brings problems with mood, physical function, and immunity. Those effects show up pretty quickly. But longer term effects are harder to pin […]

Perhaps you know this feeling: muddling, struggling, dragging. Neither depressed nor flourishing. After a year of this pandemic, many people find themselves in this COVID state of mind. In fact, a global study of mental health in the pandemic lockdown by Andrew Gloster et al found that fully half of the people studied had only […]