News Archive for July, 2022

Every discussion, every meeting that touches on childhood obesity brings a difficult mixture of encouragement and frustration. The encouragement comes from engagement with good people who have a genuine desire to do the right thing for our children. Everybody wants to see the next generation of children be healthier and have more opportunities than those […]

It’s hard to argue with something dubbed “the sunshine vitamin” – more specifically, vitamin D. It’s been generating headlines and controversy for years now. The vitamin D fan club described it like a panacea, good for preventing bone fractures (of course), but also ills ranging from infections to diabetes and cancer. Because of its association […]

Genuinely, we admire the persistence of David Ludwig. Today in the Washington Post, he has an opinion piece about his opinion piece in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Once again he wants to sell the world on his concept that carbs and insulin are more important for understanding obesity than simply thinking about energy […]

State and federal experts on health are quite happy to talk about the serious health concern of obesity. But we can’t help wondering about the action that results from that talk. So it’s worthwhile to take a good look at what state health plans do for people affected by obesity. According to a new study […]

It’s a lot. Writing for USA Today, Karen Weintraub has produced a deep dive into diverse thinking about the complexity of obesity. If you thought USA Today was a place for McNuggets* of superficial reporting, think again. In six parts, with more than 18,000 words, Weintraub has done quite well in painting a picture of […]

Yesterday, the National Academies Roundtable on Obesity Solutions hosted a workshop on engaging communities to address structural drivers of obesity. Midway in the workshop, a rare moment of candor popped up. Someone from the audience asked, how do we move toward programs that deliver an actual effect on obesity prevalence in the population? Rafael Pérez-Escamilla […]

“We’ve been working at this for so many years and nothing has changed!” These words came from a frustrated advocate for reforming obesity policy and care at a recent strategic planning meeting. He had a point. Progress is maddeningly slow on obesity. But major changes are happening – even if they aren’t obvious at a […]

Institutions of public health are in a tough spot right now. COVID has so battered public trust in the CDC that it has put us into the figure-it-out-yourself phase of this pandemic. Likewise, the public health response to obesity has long been one of both moral panic and ineffective policy prescriptions. Decades of exhortations to […]

We’ve all spent well more than two years in a weird state of being intensely connected through technology, yet feeling disconnected from people. Zoom is a great tool, but it has its limits. Research on mental health and technology can support just about any bias you bring to the subject. Maybe it’s connecting us while […]

Every week from the Obesity and Energetics Offerings, we get sharp reminders. Headlines about nutrition and obesity science very often don’t stand up to a careful look at what the study behind the headlines actually found. This charade, though, has a serious downside. As two studies in the last week show, it perpetuates a fiction […]