June 17, 2019 — Everything is effective. Give somebody a potent drug and it will surely do something to them. Enact a health policy and it will surely have an effect. In fact, the effects will surely be many – both desired and undesired. But for both drugs and health policies, the target is health. So we’d best be […]
June 6, 2019 — Talk is cheap. And frankly, we’re fed up with cheap talk about childhood obesity. Yes, we need effective prevention. But we don’t have it. Want proof? Look at the relentless rise in childhood obesity prevalence. So in the meantime, we need to start caring for kids, teens, and families who are living with obesity. And […]
June 5, 2019 — For nearly five decades now, beef consumption has been dropping. Poultry has risen. Why? Because of a steady stream of warnings that red meat raises the risk of heart disease. But a new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition raises questions about this conventional wisdom. In a randomized, controlled study, researchers found no […]
June 4, 2019 — Canada’s latest dietary guidelines make it clear. Cut the sugar. Avoid any other sweeteners. Water should be what you’re drinking. And also, enjoy your food. Dietary guideline writers don’t have much of a taste for sweetness these days. But humans do. How shall we cope? The Rising Bias Against Sweeteners The prevailing bias holds that […]
June 3, 2019 — Disclosing how much added sugar is in a food product is a good idea. Claiming it “will save millions of lives and billions of dollars” is not. Wandering away from the truth never is. But in Circulation last month, Yue Huang et al are bold to say they only have one worry about the precision […]
June 2, 2019 — Universal basic income is generating some buzz in this election cycle. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is pushing this idea of a guaranteed income for every adult. No strings attached. But Alaska already has it. Since 1983, the state’s Permanent Fund Dividend has provided an annual, unconditional, and universal income to Alaskans. What’s more, economists are […]
June 1, 2019 — Fast and easy is not an option for obesity care, unfortunately. Smart and reasonably effective options exist, but this is a chronic disease. Nobody can snap their fingers and make it go away. That’s probably why Vivus recently found itself in trouble with FDA for claiming three times faster weight loss with Qsymia. FDA Warning […]
May 31, 2019 — We wait for it every day. That magic moment when our fitness band goes nuts with good vibrations to tell us that we’ve crossed the magic threshold of 10,000 steps for the day. But if you dig into it, you can easily learn that the 10,000 step benchmark is more arbitrary than magic. And new […]
May 30, 2019 — This is now unmistakeable. And it seems like a rare piece of good news. For the first time in decades, diabetes incidence is going down. The real question is, why? And the honest answer is nobody knows. A Trend That Started in 2008 Stephen Benoit and colleagues from CDC analyzed U.S. trends in the diabetes […]
May 29, 2019 — The annual YWM Convention is one of the most important events of the year for those of us dealing with obesity. We’re grateful to Obesity Action Coalition Chair Michelle Vicari for offering a personal perspective in today’s guest post. If you walk by a news stand, almost every cover of a magazine or book features […]
