News Archive for May, 2024

It’s difficult to make predictions – especially about the future. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see that the new 2025 edition of dietary guidelines will disappoint ultra-processed hardliners. The rhetoric from that sector sounds increasingly like something from a highly polarized presidential campaign. We pity the nutrition scientists and clinicians who have the hard job […]

In a world that systematically denies people access to obesity medicines, the rush of reports that people frequently stop taking them makes us wonder. How does this qualify as news? Why do reporters repeatedly paint a misleading picture of non-compliant patients? Yet, health reporters keep offering up this narrative. The latest prompt for this is […]

Progress comes in surprising ways. Proving this point, we now have a crude cartoon – South Park – telling the world that fat jokes are too offensive and stupid to be funny. One of the primary characters, Kyle, delivers this new enlightenment in a speech to his school cafeteria: “I was wrong. I used to […]

This moment has been a long time coming. Solid evidence that people live longer, healthier lives when they receive effective treatment for obesity is adding up. On Friday, we learned that semaglutide cuts kidney failure and death in diabetes. Then, over the weekend, Nature Medicine published a study showing that semaglutide may prevent kidney disease […]

The top dishes for this Memorial Day in the U.S. are hamburgers, hot dogs, barbecue ribs, grilled chicken, corn on the cob, coleslaw, and potato salad. Homemade, none of it (except maybe the hot dogs) belongs to the current boogeyman category of ultra-processed food. Nor does it qualify as the bedrock of a healthy diet. […]

Skimming the headlines, it would be easy to think that the combination of mobile phones and social media are responsible for quite a range of our current ills – including mental health and obesity. If you want to dig deeper, you can find a whole tome on the subject from Jonathan Haidt. He has woven […]

We’ve been waiting for this. Back in October, headlines flashed the news that Novo Nordisk had stopped a big outcomes study of semaglutide and its effect on kidney failure and death. They stopped it because it had worked so well. Continuing to give a placebo to half the people in the study would have been […]

At a hearing this week fo the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Representative Robin Kelly asked the Director of the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, what the agency is doing to ensure that drug labeling adequately protects the safety of people with obesity: “Patients with obesity are frequently excluded […]

“This is a dream come true.” In her opening presentation yesterday to a diverse group of experts in cardiology, endocrinology, and healthcare, the renowned Donna Ryan was marveling at the broad interest surfacing in serious obesity care – reaching far beyond the limited bubble where it stayed for decades. The American College of Cardiology assembled […]

In a certain way, Ozempic and TikTok were made for each other. One is the most viral social media of the moment. The other is an omnipresent sensation in medical therapy. Both of them fill a vacuum in popular culture. For TikTok, the vacuum might be boredom – though we admit that this assessment comes […]