Archive for September, 2023
September 30, 2023 — We hate to be the bearer of bad news. But those pumpkin spice lattes that define the pleasure of fall are both ultra-processed and hyper-palatable. In other words, they spell doom for our dietary health. That is, they do if we accept the current presumption that UPF and HPF explain all that is increasingly unhealthy […]
September 29, 2023 — In case you haven’t been paying attention, FDA issued a new label warning for semaglutide that should remind everyone of a key fact – it’s not suitable for DIY weight loss. The warning went onto the label for the Ozempic brand of semaglutide. It is already there for the Wegovy brand and for the Mounjaro […]
September 28, 2023 — “Conjecture is good, but knowing is better.” This bit of wisdom from the Indiana University School of Public Health came to mind yesterday at the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions, hosted by the National Academy of Sciences. The subject of the day was the relationship between culture and obesity – really quite a fascinating subject. Four […]
September 27, 2023 — Travelling on a train recently you couldn’t help but overhear two women deep in conversation about a mutual obsession with food, including emotional triggers that pushed them towards chocolate and pizza. They shared feeling guilty about a perceived lack of willpower around food and regularly rummaging through the fridge looking for tasty treats to help […]
September 26, 2023 — A leftover from the days of moral panic about obesity is the designation of September as National Childhood Obesity Month. The intentions were good but with prevention as the sole focus, families and youth already living with severe obesity got the message. They did not really count. But at the YWM 2023 Engage convention, OAC […]
September 25, 2023 — “Morning workouts turbocharge the benefits of exercise,” says Psychology Today. A litany of headlines like this have been crossing our screen for weeks now. They are insistent. “The early bird gets the worm – and sees better workout results,” said People magazine. “This is the best time of day to work out if you want […]
September 24, 2023 — A good friend often reminds us about the importance of kindness, and of course, she is right. The world offers us too little kindness too often and we make it better when we add the warmth of kindness to the corner of the world we share. But our friend Gary Foster took it a bit […]
September 23, 2023 — We have a relationship problem with BMI – the body mass index. As with any rocky relationship, we can’t seem to live with it and we can’t seem to live without it either. Professor Robert Kushner described the the good, the bad, and the ugly of BMI better than ever in an opening session of […]
September 22, 2023 — We are at the very beginning of a revolution in obesity treatment. A new perspective article in Nature Medicine points to this and notes that with the great power of new obesity medicines comes great responsibility to fully understand how to best utilize them. All very true. But more to the point, the greatest responsibility […]
September 21, 2023 — Perhaps we should not be surprised. Because the demand for GLP-1 agonists to treat obesity is not the only thing outstripping supply. It seems that the demand for physicians with a certification in obesity medicine is also having a surge. A record number of physicians have applied to take the certification exam this year – […]