February 1, 2026 — It’s a perfect straw man argument. To make the case that dietary guidelines with the personal stamp of RFK Jr. are revolutionary, HHS has resurrected the long-defunct food pyramid and turned it upside down. It perfectly satisfies the impulse to tell the nutrition establishment that they’re wrong about everything. But folks who know a thing […]
January 31, 2026 — If you were confused this week by headlines proclaiming that “nearly half of Americans will have obesity by 2035,” don’t feel bad. It means you are paying attention. Because this proclamation flies in the face of headlines from last year telling us obesity rates are declining in the U.S. So what gives? The New Research […]
January 30, 2026 — Good luck if you want to make sense of headlines about health insurance and coverage trends for GLP-1 medicines. Peruse the headlines and you can find just about any narrative you want. “Rising health premiums push more small business to drop coverage,” according to Inc. “Employers are opting out of covering GLP-1s,” claims Hines, a […]
January 29, 2026 — We are in the midst of what used to be known as diet and weight loss season. And now the Super Bowl is coming up. Instead of diet ads this year, our video feeds are full of ads for telehealth and GLP-1s. Some of them are annoying. But when Serena Williams comes on screen to […]
January 28, 2026 — Yesterday, Roche announced topline results from a phase two study of a new injectable dual agonist medicine for obesity. The drug, CT-388, delivered a reduction in body weight of 22.5% after 48 weeks at the highest dose tested (24 mg). Placebo-subtracted weight loss was 18.3% and at 48 weeks, patients taking the drug were still […]
January 27, 2026 — Observational studies have suggested for some time that obesity might raise the risk of dementia for a person with obesity. But observational studies have limitations. They can suggest a hypothesis. Not prove causality. So the news of evidence from a Mendelian randomization study that obesity can cause vascular dementia is important. Methods and Findings This […]
January 26, 2026 — People who know a thing or two about nutrition continue to puzzle over the strange dish of commerce and politics served up in the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In a new editorial for the BMJ, Marion Nestle, one of the most influential authorities in the world on food policy, is blunt. Political and commercial […]
January 25, 2026 — Reporting for the Washington Post, Daniel Gilbert tells us “the next frontier in weight-loss drugs is one-time gene therapy.” Setting aside his misuse of the “weight-loss” misnomer, should we take him seriously? How much can we expect from gene-based therapies for obesity? Scientifically Substantial The body of peer-reviewed evidence for genetic therapies in obesity is […]
January 24, 2026 — Increasingly, it looks like calorie counting is dead. Remember 100-calorie snack packages? They came and went early in this millenium. They were the snack food industry response to then President George W. Bush pushing against a rising tide of obesity. Back then, obesity experts speculated that those packs “might be one potentially successful approach to […]
January 23, 2026 — Usually, when new medicines have been on the market for a time, warnings tend to accumulate in the prescription labeling. So it is a bit unusual to see the FDA move to remove a warning. But recently, that’s exactly what happened with semaglutide and tirzepatide. FDA is making a course correction on warnings about suicidal […]
