September 20, 2024 — This year, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award recognizes research on GLP-1 receptor biology that is revolutionizing obesity medicine. This is a revolution that is sending shockwaves through all of healthcare and indeed through society. Revolutions are uncomfortable and many people look at progress such as this with regretful nostalgia or outright fear. So we […]
September 19, 2024 — Maybe you’ve noticed this is an election year. This might explain some of the heat on pricing that both obesity drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are feeling. Both of the U.S. candidates for president are making promises to bring down drug prices. Senator Bernie Sanders and his Senate health committee is turning up […]
September 18, 2024 — People who think of obesity simply as a disease of fatness are walking around with a profound misunderstanding of this disease – it is very much a disease of inflammation. This thread of inflammation ties obesity to diabetes and ties both of those diseases to the complications of COVID. New research on COVID and diabetes […]
September 16, 2024 — The difference between investigative journalism and opinion writing is enormous. Both are valuable. But not interchangeable. So when Stat News publishes a lengthy opinion piece on pediatric obesity guidelines and labels it as investigative journalism, they are unfortunately dispensing spin. This is the case of a report published yesterday under a headline reading: “Pediatricians’ Obesity […]
September 16, 2024 — From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with an actual Nobel prize, the Ig Nobel […]
September 15, 2024 — “Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S. due to the direct relationship with diet-related chronic diseases.” Emily Matthews and Emma Kurnat-Thoma tell us this in a recent article for Frontiers in Public Health. Rationalizing this conclusion is easy enough. In Nutrients, Sareen Gropper defines diet-related disease to incorporate almost all of […]
September 14, 2024 — For reasons that escape us, it has become fashionable to preach that food is medicine. So food marketers are looking for snippets of research they can use to persuade people to buy their latest formulations of food-like and ultra-processed products, Standing in unflinching opposition are food policy advocates who (though they favor the food-is-medicine catchphrase) […]
September 13, 2024 — In a perverse way, it is nostalgic. Yesterday, the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) published the latest edition of their annual series: State of Obesity 2024. Though the subtitle is “Better Policies for a Healthier America,” it seems more like a replay of golden oldies in obesity policy. Reading this report, we come away with […]
September 12, 2024 — The obesity buzz of the day at EASD annual meeting is clearly amycretin. Amycretin is a new oral medication under study for obesity that activates both GLP-1 and amylin receptors. The excitement came because this is the first public presentation of clinical data on amycretin. This news is impressive on two counts. First, the dosage […]
September 11, 2024 — In every way we look at this study, it is a remarkable milestone. With a randomized, controlled trial, Claudia Fox and colleagues have shown that a GLP-1, liraglutide, is effective for obesity in children as young as six years of age. In this year-long study, children who received liraglutide for obesity reduced their body mass […]
