March 23, 2019 — It’s great to have new options for obesity meds. Since 2010, FDA has approved four of them. But the fact is that the mainstay of obesity meds is still something that’s older than dirt – phentermine. And new data suggests that it can work safely and effectively when used as a chronic med for this […]
March 21, 2019 — The simple and prevalent view of obesity is that it results from bad choices in diet and exercise. However, that view omits the role of a major factor – stress. In the Annual Review of Psychology, Janet Tomiyama offers an excellent review of the vicious cycle of stress and obesity. Multiple Pathways The connection between […]
March 20, 2019 — Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco have discovered that tobacco companies once owned food and beverage companies. Philip-Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and then Kraft in 1988. This arrangement lasted until 2007 when Philip-Morris sold all of its ownership of Kraft and the old General Foods brands. RJ Reynolds acquired Pacific […]
March 19, 2019 — Here’s a jolt of reality from research at the NYU School of Medicine. Among the students who are ready to go into the clinic for their clerkships, most of them believe that controllable factors are very important causes of obesity. But most of them think that biological and genetic factors are not very important. This […]
March 18, 2019 — A hot catchphrase in popular culture is mindfulness. But for effective, evidence-based obesity care, we need more than buzzy phrases. Thus we have the emergence of acceptance-based therapy (ABT) as a way to enhance well-established techniques for intensive behavioral therapy. New study results in Obesity add to the evidence that acceptance therapy can help deliver […]
March 16, 2019 — Really? We’re going to do this again? In JAMA, a new pooled analysis of six observational studies found an association between eating more eggs and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and death. This finding comes just four years after scientific experts reached a consensus that “cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” […]
March 13, 2019 — Precision nutrition is a concept with an almost irresistible allure. It borrows on the cachet of precision medicine. On top of that, frustration with the presently imprecise nature of nutrition science makes the promise of precision personalized diets especially appealing. So in pursuit of this idea, a new study in Nutrients offers some tantalizing clues. […]
March 12, 2019 — Crisis. It’s a time of intense difficulty. Or it’s a time when a difficult, important decision must be made. And finally, it can be a turning point toward either failure or recovery. For decades now, all the talk about childhood obesity has been about crisis. That crisis talk is spreading around the world as childhood […]
March 11, 2019 — An old and reliable bit of clickbait has just surfaced from a rather obscure journal. In SSM – Population Health, Emla Fitzsimons and Benedetta Pongiglione claim to have “causal evidence” that a mother’s employment effects a child’s BMI. Naturally, British headline writers went nuts. So now we have another round of the obesity blame game […]
March 9, 2019 — Is food a problem or a pleasure? In promoting healthy choices, could it be that we actually nudge people in the opposite direction? New research in Psychological Science suggests, once again, that this might be the case. Nicolette Sullivan and colleagues conducted a series of experiments to arrive at this finding. In short, they found […]
