October 8, 2021 — With great gifts come great responsibilities. It doesn’t really matter whether you get this message from biblical sources or Spiderman. The imperative is there. If you have a big platform, you better use it to serve a purpose bigger than yourself. It looks like Queen Latifah and Novo Nordisk might be using their platforms to […]
October 3, 2021 — “Child abuse.” When we wrote earlier this week about new data on bariatric surgery in children with severe obesity, that was one visceral response. Ten years ago, Lindsey Murtagh and David Ludwig trotted out the child abuse label with precisely opposite reasoning. They suggested that parents of children with obesity might be guilty of abuse […]
September 17, 2021 — For some time, it’s been clear to mental health professionals that social media could be a problem for teens. Facebook, which owns Instagram, has long minimized the issue. But reporting this week from the Wall Street Journal tells suggests that Facebook knows from its own research that Instagram promotes self-stigma for teenage girls. Slides from […]
September 12, 2021 — The failure of experts unfolding around us right now is spectacular. In health and public policy, experts have stumbled in very visible ways. Thus, public confidence in expertise is shaky and people are doing some absolutely wacky things, harming themselves and others. But why? No doubt, the reasons are many. However, part of the pattern […]
September 11, 2021 — It seems that anger goes far these days. In fact, it crops up in just about every part of the ideological spectrum on a wide variety of topics. On masks, vaccines, racism, and of course, politics, we find people who see things in very polarized ways. The only thing they have in common is anger. […]
September 3, 2021 — For 53 years, Camp Shane was a place where parents sent kids with overweight and obesity. It called itself “a summer weight loss camp…not a fat camp.” But no more. The camp shut down on July 13 with the owner telling reporters that the problem was a staffing shortage. At the time, the Connecticut Office […]
August 19, 2021 — It’s hard to deny that yoga has put an imprint on popular culture – especially popular concepts about fitness and wellbeing. It had an outsized role in defining a now dominant fashion trend – athleisure. Prior to the pandemic, yoga was a roughly ten billion dollar industry. But of course, the pandemic put a dent […]
July 29, 2021 — Two years ago, intermittent fasting was a hot concept. The idea was that periods of fasting could have metabolic benefits and help with weight loss – better than simply restricting calories. Popular interest peaked in early 2020 and has since been declining. Now, a new RCT of intermittent fasting – small, but well controlled – […]
July 21, 2021 — People are dying again. Deaths from COVID-19 are rising in the U.S. for the first time in months. This follows an upward trend in COVID cases that began in early July. Hospitalizations started rising soon after that. And all of this is happening most in places where vaccination rates are low and among people who […]
July 18, 2021 — What is the meaning of this? Two trends in food are on a collision course. On one hand, faith is strong in the idea that minimally processed and whole natural foods are best. But at the same time, food substitutes are rising like rockets. Sales are soaring for meatless meat. Milkless milk is a 2.2 […]
