News Archive for October, 2022

The toughest question about obesity is also the simplest and most basic. Why do we have so much more of it now? In the spirit of H.L. Mencken, most people presume the answer is also simple. People are just eating too much, moving too little, and they should change their ways. Problem solved. But in […]

Sunday at FNCE brought us a fireside chat with Sara Bleich, the first ever Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity. Make no mistake about it, this is big. Because without secure access to genuinely nourishing food, it will be terribly hard to close the gap in health that comes from chronic diseases – including […]

This afternoon at FNCE, Hope Warshaw will be moderating a wide-ranging conversation with David Kessler. He is the FDA commissioner who oversaw the requirement to put Nutrition Facts labels on food back in 1994. That’s when many ideas took shape in the popular imagination about what a healthy food is. Now is a good time […]

Weight loss is a complicated subject these days. For good reasons, many people hesitate to dwell on it. Moral panic about fatness, weight bias and stigma, and concerns about eating disorders have made this subject controversial at times. So as we look at the meeting at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that starts today […]

Publishing research and academic journals is a business that is both important and highly profitable. The business model for this industry could be a whole post of its own, but it’s worth noting that just four companies publish more than half of the world’s academic papers. Elsevier alone published more than half a million peer-reviewed […]

For the last two days we’ve been gathered with a small group of passionate advocates from all over the world, finding ways to collaborate for progress in health policy related to obesity. The change comes in increments. Obesity relates to cultures, food, and health systems that differ significantly all over the world. So finding a […]

Toxic beauty standards are costly – both in terms of health and wealth. This message resonates from a new report funded by the Dove Beauty Bar brand and published jointly with the STRIPED project at the Harvard School of Public Health. This report details the cost of unrealistic beauty standards exploited by a beauty industry […]

Patterns. Much of what helps people form their ideas about the source of rising obesity around the world is the patterns they observe. Right now, patterns of ultra-processed food consumption over time – together with some impressive experimental evidence – leads many people to speculate that rising consumption of these foods might explain at least […]

Health insurers, including Medicare, are regarding obesity meds like Botox Cosmetic, when they should be thinking of them more like a knee replacement. This observation, from a report by Jamy Lee in MarketWatch, sums up the challenge for people seeking obesity care in a health system that pays for the complications of untreated obesity, but […]

From the Annals of Sad but True: “It is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit,” said Guillaume Cabanac. He was commenting of the news last year of hundreds of retractions from special issues in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. This and other recent news suggests that scientific fraud is hardly negligible. But […]