Author Archive

New Clothes, Better Food, Less Weight Watching, More Health

September 10, 2024 — Consumer spending is by far the biggest driver of U.S. economic growth. So you can be sure that businesses are paying close attention to the disruption in longstanding consumer behavior patterns that GLP-1 medicines are bringing. People are buying new clothes, better food, spending less on weight watching, and more on health. Make no mistake. […]

Losing Patience with Drug Labels Dismissing People with Obesity

September 9, 2024 — The American College of Clinical Pharmacology is meeting in Bethesda this week. On the opening day, ACCP convened a symposium to address critical questions about how drugs work in people with obesity. What can we – industry, FDA, and scientists – do better? Because all too often, drug labels to guide safe prescribing are effectively […]

Accounting for the Harm of Menu Labeling with Minimal Benefits

September 8, 2024 — What’s the harm? For many “interventions” to reduce obesity prevalence, this rationale seems to be good enough to spur implementation. Menu labeling is a good example. Restaurants in the U.S. and in numerous other places must publish the number of calories in food portions they sell. This went into effect based upon suppositions. Policy makers […]

The Gap in Patient Assistance for Obesity Medicines

September 7, 2024 — Recently, Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen did a rare interview with NBC News to talk about the high price of obesity medicines that are proving to be so important for so many people. It seemed like a dress rehearsal for his coming appearance at a Senate hearing on the subject. He brought up the […]

Obesity Care at Scale Will Profoundly Change Health Systems

September 6, 2024 — Think about it. Profound change is coming to healthcare and health systems because of the imperative for obesity care at scale. Right now, we are seeing only a faint glimmer of the changes that lie ahead. That’s because the biggest struggles with this change are very basic. Lilly and Novo Nordisk are straining to produce […]

Making Chocolate More Planet Friendly While Adding Less Sugar

September 5, 2024 — What’s not to like about this? Swiss food scientists have devised a process for making chocolate that is more planet friendly and requires less added sugar. If you ever felt guilt about enjoying a little bit of chocolate, let it go. Less Waste The main thing here is crop waste. Typically, most of the cocoa […]

ESC Congress: Everyone Now Claims the Disease of Obesity

September 4, 2024 — If nothing else, the ESC (European for Cardiology) Congress in London this week made one thing clear – everyone in mainstream medicine is now ready to claim the disease of obesity. Cardiologists all over the world are adopting a view we’ve been espousing here for decades. Obesity is not a lifestyle. Not a behavioral problem. […]

Polluting the Food Supply with PFAS

September 3, 2024 — For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has promoted the use of sludge from sewage treatment plants as fertilizer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge – known as biosolids in the fertilizer industry – is rich in nutrients that crops need. Plus, using biosolids for this purpose kept them out of […]

Rational and Irrational Exuberance About GLP-1 Medicines

September 2, 2024 — It’s true. We have been getting some pretty good news about GLP-1s lately. In persons with prediabetes and obesity, tirzepatide was 94% effective at preventing the development of diabetes. In the SELECT study, semaglutide for obesity might have cut COVID fatalities by a third. So a little exuberance about the potential of GLP-1 medicines is […]

Fading Traction for the Anti-Science Dimension of HAES

September 1, 2024 — How is the Health at Every Size (HAES) movement coping with advances in obesity science? The need for fighting weight bias is as great as ever. But relevance of the anti-science dimension of HAES – suggesting that obesity is not a valid health concern – is fading. It simply doesn’t hold up well in light […]