October 27, 2020 — Just in time for Halloween, JACC has published another scary study about diet drinks. The study finds an association with cardiovascular disease. It’s great fuel for the health news machine, but not so helpful for informing people about real health risks. CNN says this is part of a “growing body of research” suggesting something scary […]
October 24, 2020 — A tidy narrative attracts the human mind. When they ring true, generalizations are seductive. They wipe away the complex mess of real life. For example, the untidy reality of living through the pandemic lockdown leaves us eager to make sense of it. So a new paper describing a global survey of health behaviors in the […]
October 23, 2020 — October is National Bullying Prevention Month because bullying should never be a part of childhood. So we find ourselves wondering. Can we find the mute button for bullying? Are parents, teachers, and coaches giving bullies an open mic for weight-based bullying? Complicity with Weight-Based Bullying Adults are supposedly in charge. But when it comes to […]
October 22, 2020 — In the face of uncertainty, humans often rely on the ring of truth. Facing a pandemic and big changes to daily life, reports of depression and anxiety grow. Surely this will bring a spike in suicides, people say. Equally certain is the belief that childhood obesity will rise. But sometimes, the ring of truth is […]
October 22, 2020 — We’re just about done with the obesitization of America. But around the world, promoting obesity is very much a work in progress. The Turkana people, for example, are going through this process quite rapidly in Northwest Kenya. Likewise in China, rural populations have begun to see a striking rise in obesity. Is it all about […]
October 21, 2020 — The human impulse for bigotry is strong. Lifestyle Medicine, an open access journal, offered up a potent illustration of this yesterday. The journal published a dubious study of a weak association between a poor measure of intelligence and obesity. It’s hard to know why, but scientific merit doesn’t explain it. Nor can any excuse justify […]
October 20, 2020 — Do dietitians who align themselves with Health at Every Size (HAES, a registered trademark) have less weight bias? Does weight bias training help? New research presented at FNCE aimed to find out. The answers were a bit mixed, though. It all depends upon whether you look at explicit or implicit bias. If a dietitian was […]
October 18, 2020 — At FNCE yesterday, weight bias was very much on the minds of 1,401 participants. That’s how many nutrition professionals tuned into the hour-long session we moderated. Colleen Tewksbury, Kellene Isom, and Rebecca Pearl offered impressive insights on challenging weight bias. Clearly, weight bias is all around us. In fact, a new study finds that 57 […]
October 18, 2020 — New research from Rand and the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington offers a vivid picture of two major health risks colliding. Alcohol use is growing more frequent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, it’s growing heavier. This is not what we need, because alcohol use is already the number one global health risk […]
October 17, 2020 — We are living in uneasy times. If you want to quantify that, check out the Hedonometer at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. According to their analyses, Twitter was a pretty happy place before 2020. Peter Dodds and colleagues on the Hedonometer project wrote in 2015 that human language has a “universal […]
