News Archive for May, 2025

Artificial intelligence sometimes produces artificial information that has no connection to reality. The term of art for this phenomenon is AI hallucinations. This week we learned that at least some parts of the MAHA report might have sprung from such hallucinations. It listed references that don’t exist and conclusions for other references that were not […]

To be sure, exercise has many benefits – including the widely accepted benefit of fitness and a longer life. But a new study of causal inference linking fitness to reduced mortality suggests those benefits have been exaggerated. The problem is an old one: Confounding. The senior author of the new study, Marcel Ballin, explains: “We […]

A new analysis from Milliman has a revelation for health plan managers complaining loudly about the burdensome costs of GLP-1s blowing up their budgets. They’re doing it wrong. Expenses for GLP-1s that can dramatically improve the health of persons with obesity simply do not have to break the bank for a health plan. In fact, […]

“If you don’t have a solution for me, then it’s not a problem.” This concise statement of wisdom distilled from human behavior explains why it has been so hard for so many years to have people pay attention to obesity in any constructive way. Doctors largely ignored it and rarely diagnosed it. Patients denied it. […]

“It’s absolutely insane to try to keep up with it all,” says obesity medicine physician Laura Davisson. She is talking about the impossible maze of requirements that so-called health insurance plans set up to prevent people from securing coverage for medicines to treat obesity. It leads us to ask: Are health plans insuring profits more […]

The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology is not where we typically get insights on obesity. But from this year’s meeting, another hint emerges that treating obesity treatment may prevent some of the cancer that arises from obesity. This hint comes from a large and seemingly careful study of 170,030 persons with […]

Are we cynical? For many of us, the answer is clearly yes. News feeds give us ample reasons for general distrust of the motives of others, for thinking that self-interest is driving the actions of policymakers. Misinformation, conflicts of interest, and an apparent disregard for facts are impossible to ignore. Skepticism is certainly warranted, but […]

In BMJ Public Health, Annabel Davies and colleagues have published a new analysis of interventions to prevent obesity in children. They started with data from two Cochrane systematic reviews published in 2024 (here and here) and applied a Bayesian multi-level meta-regression analysis. What they found were obesity prevention effects that range from being small and […]

The new MAHA (Making America Healthy Again) report on the health of American children is out and, in a word, things are terrible. In the words of the report, “it presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health.” We have a whole generation at risk because of toxic chemicals, ultra-processed food, unnecessary medical treatments, […]

The game is over. Today is the day legal semaglutide compounding at scale ends by decree from the FDA. Compounding pharmacies have known this day was coming since February when the agency determined that the shortage of semaglutide from Novo Nordisk was over. Well-informed patients who have depended upon compounding for affordable access to a […]