September 20, 2021 — The concept of food addiction holds strong sway in popular culture. You can find tips for overcoming it. WebMD will tell you how to diagnose and treat it. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke has a book to sell you. In Dopamine Nation, she describes the source of addictive behaviors linked to food, phones, and sex. It was […]
September 19, 2021 — The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) is out with its annual report on obesity. The headline? It’s bad and getting worse. But any mention of the lived experience for real persons with obesity is absent. Empathy doesn’t fit with a strategy focused on catastrophizing the problem of too many people living with obesity. The implicit […]
September 18, 2021 — In our weight-obsessed culture, the talk about weight gain during the pandemic has been incessant. So the presumption is that obesity has risen in the pandemic. But the data to tell us if this is true is slow to emerge. And like everything else about this pandemic, it’s very likely that the effects have been […]
September 17, 2021 — For some time, it’s been clear to mental health professionals that social media could be a problem for teens. Facebook, which owns Instagram, has long minimized the issue. But reporting this week from the Wall Street Journal tells suggests that Facebook knows from its own research that Instagram promotes self-stigma for teenage girls. Slides from […]
September 16, 2021 — Much energy these days seems to go into navigating between extreme views of important subjects. COVID-19 is a paralyzing threat or nothing to worry about. Vaccines are all we need to keep us safe from the pandemic or they’re lacking in safety and effectiveness. Having obesity will utterly destroy a person’s health, or it’s just […]
September 15, 2021 — New data on poverty came out this week and oddly enough, the news was pretty good. Though many aspects of 2020 were really stinky, this data on poverty is pretty sweet. In fact, after accounting for government relief payments, the U.S. poverty rate fell to its lowest rate ever – 9.1 percent. This good news […]
September 14, 2021 — Simplicity sells while complexity crashes. So for years, a simple idea has dominated our thinking about obesity. It is merely a matter of letting the balance of calories in and out – energy balance – get out of hand. For decades, scientists have known that the story is more complex, but simplicity has staying power. […]
September 13, 2021 — We’ve known all along that 10,000 steps per day is a goal for physical activity that came to us out of thin air. People latched on to it because it was a nice, round number. It was memorable. But the fact is that it’s arbitrary. In fact, evidence now tells us that one size does […]
September 12, 2021 — The failure of experts unfolding around us right now is spectacular. In health and public policy, experts have stumbled in very visible ways. Thus, public confidence in expertise is shaky and people are doing some absolutely wacky things, harming themselves and others. But why? No doubt, the reasons are many. However, part of the pattern […]
September 11, 2021 — It seems that anger goes far these days. In fact, it crops up in just about every part of the ideological spectrum on a wide variety of topics. On masks, vaccines, racism, and of course, politics, we find people who see things in very polarized ways. The only thing they have in common is anger. […]
