News Archive for May, 2022

Hope springs eternal. Hype sells better than mere facts. Imagined benefits are better than objective documentation. Thus, plant-based ultra-processed foods that simulate the experience of eating meat are still enjoying a health and environmental halo. But will these plant-based meats actually help to save the planet and our health? The Big Plant-Based Health Halo In […]

It’s pretty easy to find advice to make small changes that stick if a person wants to lose weight – or keep from gaining weight. It certainly sounds authoritative when a PhD psychologist offers up small change theory as a winning strategy: “When you focus on just a couple of small changes at a time, […]

Public health should stop talking about obesity, says a policy brief from University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. “Replace assignments connecting ‘obesity’ and health,” suggests the brief. Cancel the word obesity and weight stigma will fade. That seems to be the thinking there. At the other extreme, we have folks who love to […]

Worldwide sales of fitness trackers increased from US$14 billion in 2017 to over $36 billion in 2020. The skyrocketing success of these gadgets suggests that more people than ever see some value in keeping tabs on the number of steps they take, flights of stairs they climb, time they spend sitting, and calories they burn. […]

The Mayo Clinic has surveyed a large number of consumers in their online diet assessment. From more than 200,000 individuals completing this survey of mindset and motivation, they’ve come to a simple and unsurprising conclusion. It’s all about health. In fact, 83 percent of people in this survey are motivated by health in seeking to […]

The need for new primary care models for obesity is plain. A recent systematic review tells us that primary care providers see it as difficult to discuss with patients, futile, rife with stigma, and more of a social problem. Thus it’s a low priority. But thoughtful people are seeking a way forward. Two contrasting views […]

Drug pricing has been getting a lot of attention for some time now, so it’s no surprise that the prices of obesity medicines would get attention, too. New medicines are coming, competition will be increasing, and one factor in that competition will be prices. The only way to get good value is to consider both […]

It seems to be an article of faith. Millions of low-income Americans live in food deserts and it puts them at higher risk for obesity. That’s a prevalent narrative to explain the link between poverty and obesity. And thus, the narrative works its way into the interpretation of research on programs for fixing food deserts. […]

As we explained yesterday, there’s quite a body of research on the food cues that surround us and keep prodding us to eat. Food marketing embeds itself deeply in our daily lives. We suspect it explains a lot about our obesogenic food environment. Yet changing that environment has proven to be quite a challenge. So […]

Our food environment has changed to contribute to the rise in obesity over the last half century. People disagree about many things in the effort to find policies to reduce obesity. But this presumption is one that most of us can agree upon. The real question, though, is how to define these changes. Are ultra-processed […]