Archive for August, 2022

A Jaw-Dropping Loss of U.S. Life Expectancy

August 31, 2022 — It is nothing short of jaw dropping – U.S. life expectancy once again dropped by almost two years. This news comes from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, which released provisional stats for 2021 today. Up until 2014, the U.S. had seen steady rises in life expectancy. Then in 2015, we saw a small […]

Medicalization, Pharmaceuticalization, and Nonsensification

August 30, 2022 — We are living in a profoundly disorienting time. Because of this, we are learning that people have the capacity to rationionalize just about anything. People are plunging into rabbit holes where they encounter mazes of rationalizations about conspiracies all around them. It’s a great tool for politicians who find themselves on shaky ground. But now […]

Chia Seeds: Ancient Food and Social Media Fad

August 29, 2022 — Here we go again. Chia seeds are back for another round of faddish popularity. This ancient grain popped up on TikTok recently – attached to an #InternalShower hashtag. It’s promoting chia seeds mixed with water and lemon for a supposedly cleansing experience. To be clear, we’re not fans of any kind of “cleansing” dietary experience. […]

Evidence-Free Zone: Body Weight in Pop Culture

August 28, 2022 — It’s either depressing or enlightening. When the subject of body weight comes up in pop culture, it brings us into an evidence-free zone. Pop diets compete with anti-diets. Obsessive diet regimens compete with people telling us that we should fuggedaboutit and move on to intuitive eating. Eat whatever your body tells you it wants in […]

When Similar Looks, Genes, and Behavior Align

August 27, 2022 — Doppelgängers are having a moment. These are people who look alike, despite being nominally unrelated. Canadian artist François Brunelle is commanding attention all over the world for his I’M NOT A LOOK-ALIKE! photography project, which he started in 1999. At the same time, a study this week in Cell Reports tells us that looks, genes, […]

A New Combination Therapy Hits the Mark

August 26, 2022 — Progress keeps coming in the pharmacotherapy for obesity. This week, Novo Nordisk announced that its new combination therapy of semaglutide and cagrilintide hit all its marks in a 32-week phase 2 study of patients with diabetes and excess weight. The combination – Novo is calling it CagriSema – worked better than either semaglutide or cagrilintide […]

Can the White House Nutrition Conference Help?

August 25, 2022 — Perhaps you’ve heard. Next month, the White House will host a new conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. The goal of this conference is promising: “End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.” We like the implicit acknowledgement that obesity […]

A 77% Pandemic Spike in Type 2 Diabetes of Youth

August 24, 2022 — In so many ways, it’s become plain that children have carried a big burden in the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, there have been disruptions to their social and educational lives. They’ve suffered trauma from losing parents and caregivers. And then there’s the documented rise in obesity. But just last week came some of the most […]

Sweeteners: Different Effects in Different People?

August 23, 2022 — To start an impassioned discussion on nutrition is easy. Bring up non-nutritive sweeteners. Some people see them as a plague in the food supply. Others insist upon evidence to back up such dire claims and can see only fragments propping up presumptions about harms that are yet to be documented. But once again, a study […]

Humans Chewing Up Energy When We Eat

August 22, 2022 — Believe it or not, the amount of energy we’re chewing up when we eat is both significant and important to understand. It’s significant because chewing can raise the rate at which our bodies burn energy by 10 to 15 percent. Just last week, Adam van Casteren published a paper quantifying this for the first time […]