Archive for June, 2022

House Appropriations Calls for Obesity Meds in Medicare

June 30, 2022 — Okay, this is hardly a final victory, but it sure does feel good. The U.S. House Appropriations Committee released its legislative report on funding for Health and Human Services. It’s a beastly 623 page document that goes over all the spending priorities for the department. However, if you dig deep into it, there’s a paragraph […]

Spotlight on Weight Stigma in Popular Media

June 29, 2022 — Today in New York, the Media Empathy Foundation is unveiling an unusual report and, hopefully, starting a conversation. Both the report and the conversation are all about weight stigma in popular media. Because popular media has a way of shaping popular culture and right now, weight stigma is pervasive in all media channels: news, entertainment, […]

Qsymia: FDA Approval Expands Options for Teens

June 28, 2022 — Today we will take every little bit of good news we can. So the word that FDA is adding one more obesity treatment option for teens with Qsymia, though incremental, is certainly good news. In approving the drug for this use, FDA noted that the teens taking it lost between five and seven percent of […]

Rising Obesity: Could Stress Matter More Than Food?

June 27, 2022 — “I would argue that chronic stress may be the single most common cause of obesity in modern society – even more common than food.” With these words at the opening of Obesity Treatment 2022, Lee Kaplan suggested that we should think about the possibility that we’re looking in the wrong places for the root cause […]

Health at Every Size® or One Size Fits All?

June 26, 2022 — Health at Every Size® is both an idea and a trademark. The trademark is owned by the Association for Size Diversity and Health. The idea is all about a view of health independent of a person’s weight. So folks who travel in the HAES® orbit take a dim view of the word obesity – even […]

What Does a New Era of Obesity Care Look Like?

June 24, 2022 — For decades now, Lee Kaplan and Caroline Apovian have led what was known as the Blackburn Course in Obesity Medicine every year at Harvard in June. This year, the name of the course has changed to Obesity Treatment 2022. It has moved to the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, where Richard Rothstein has joined Kaplan […]

A Perfect Storm of Bias in Medical Care for Obesity

June 24, 2022 — It’s rare to find a robust conversation about medical care for obesity and the bias that gets in the way. But that’s exactly what the 1A podcast delivered yesterday. Fatima Cody Stanford, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and Kamilah Weems joined the show to talk about the perfect storm of bias that gets in the way of good […]

The Imperative for Progress in Pediatric Obesity Care

June 23, 2022 — It is, quite simply, inspiring to spend an entire day with with a team of people dedicated to doing nothing but advancing the care of young persons living with obesity. We had this privilege yesterday at the University of Minnesota Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine (CPOM). These are people dedicating themselves to bringing progress to […]

Fanciful Reasoning About Health in an Age of Low Trust

June 22, 2022 — Americans this year will spend about $35 billion on dietary supplements. All over the world, spending will add up to more than $150 billion. What will it do for us? Not much, says the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force in a new report released yesterday about the value of these supplements for preventing heart disease and […]

Are Social Factors Driving the Growth in Obesity?

June 21, 2022 — While many researchers are having scholarly debates about their competing models for obesity, they focus primarily upon how food is doing it to us. Is it the excessive supply of hyper-palatable, ultra-processed food? Or is it all about carbs and insulin? But nowhere in these lovely models is there any focus on factors that go […]