January 6, 2025 — As an article of faith, it is easy to find advice to avoid sweetness in the foods we eat. Canada’s Food Guide, for instance, tells us that “regularly eating foods that taste sweet can lead to a preference for sweet foods.” This is a common presumption. It is one of the rationales we see for […]
January 5, 2025 — In Nature Medicine on Friday, a striking new study from Brazil suggested that a conditional cash transfer program might have a strong effect on reducing incidence and mortality from tuberculosis in persons with extreme poverty and disadvantaged ethnic backgrounds. In fact, researchers documented more than a halving of risk. It’s quite popular to argue that […]
January 4, 2025 — The ongoing debate about the clinical definition of obesity is soon to get more intense. But already, it tells us pretty clearly that obesity is defined by more than excess weight. New research in Nature Medicine comes at this subject from an entirely different direction. Using proteomics, Lasse Maretty and colleagues find that the effects […]
January 2, 2025 — Will savings from reduced food and beverage spending be sufficient to cover the cost of obesity medicines? Will these medicines transform the patterns of a whole range of consumer purchases? Speculation about GLP-1s, consumers, and economics is rampant right now. It’s popping up in both serious economic reporting and academic journals. The speculation is only […]
December 28, 2024 — To make a list of really hard problems in health and obesity care is easy. It is a daunting list. Inequities, access to care, explosive growth in costs, and byzantine payment systems are just a few of the issues that come to mind. But a new paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine suggests […]
December 27, 2024 — Diet and exercise is a dominant concept in obesity care that’s in the midst of an identity crisis. In The Atlantic, Daniel Engber sums up one point of view, writing: “Ozempic killed diet and exercise. Doctors might be slow to admit it, but Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are making dieting and exercise obsolete.” While […]
December 26, 2024 — This has been quite a year. We’ve seen endless death and destruction in Ukraine and the Middle East. People expressed discontent with the status quo in elections all over the world. But most notably for our readers – more than 100,000 of you this year – the progress on obesity and health has been nothing […]
December 22, 2024 — For the first time in 30 years, FDA has handed the food industry a better tool for marketing their products as “healthy.” But that’s not all. The agency is also working on a seal – an FDA-approved symbol – food marketers can put on their products if they meet the agency’s definition for healthy food. […]
December 21, 2024 — For patients with obesity and sleep apnea, FDA approved a first yesterday. Tirzepatide became the first ever drug with an FDA-approved indication for treating sleep apnea in persons with obesity. The data for this data appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year. Atul Malhotra and colleagues found: “In two trials, the […]
December 19, 2024 — This was a pleasant surprise. For years, the World Health Association avoided the idea that obesity is an actual chronic disease. Today we have evidence for a big shift in thinking. Three senior officials from WHO published a viewpoint in JAMA yesterday to clearly say not only that obesity is a chronic disease, but also […]
