July 25, 2024 — It has been ten years that diverse stakeholders have been meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions. In our role as advisor to the Obesity Society, we participated in a symposium at the Academy focused on looking back and moving forward. A Fraught History of “Solutions” For looking back, […]
July 20, 2024 — In a perverse way, policies to address obesity have been effective in the U.S. But only for specific communities. As the recognition of obesity as a threat to public health has grown, some communities have grown more resistant to it. Others have not and disparities in obesity have grown steadily – between rural and urban, […]
June 2, 2024 — The Obesity and Energetics Offerings from the Indiana University School of Public Health and the University of Alabama at Birmingham NORC certainly got our attention this week with an entry titled “Cherished Hypotheses Meet Hard Facts.” That entry links us to two new systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials to assess prevention of obesity in […]
May 19, 2024 — Food policy advocates are sharing a music video that captures a certain way of thinking. The choruses are nothing but trash talk about obesity and food. “It’s your own damn fault,” says one verse. In the next, “a team of evil scientists through rigorous testing created the most abominable snacks.” So it draws us into […]
April 21, 2024 — Healthy eating and active living. For decades now, programs to prevent obesity have followed the conventional wisdom that pursuing these two ideals will solve the problem. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation pledged a billion dollars to prevent childhood obesity by following this template: “By 2025, we want to ensure that children in America grow up […]
November 24, 2023 — What is the difference between exercise and physical activity? Does it really matter? A recent review in Current Nutrition Reports suggests that this is a distinction that makes a difference. Oxford tells us that exercise is “activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness.” But physical activity is “any form […]
December 9, 2022 — We have four levels in our home – three sets of stairs to climb. So this new study in Nature Medicine yesterday definitely has our attention. Digging into observational activity monitor data from the UK Biobank, Emmanuel Stamatakis and colleagues from all over the world found that short bursts of vigorous activity – like quickly […]
November 30, 2022 — Some of the questions we encounter here come with a lot of ambiguity, but this is not one of them. The U.S. is killing more people who are physically active – pedestrians and cyclists – than any other wealthy country. Clearly, this is not good. Without a doubt, this gives the U.S. a failing grade […]
March 6, 2022 — The law of the instrument suggests that the tool at hand when a problem presents itself seems like the right one to use. When all we have is a hammer, everything looks a bit more like a nail. So we pound it. And in the healthy living industry (aka wellness) we have quite a hammer. […]
March 3, 2022 — For decades now, lots of talk about preventing obesity has been easy to find in public health circles. For the most part, that talk has focused on educating, urging, nudging, or taxing people to adopt healthy eating and active living as a pattern for their lives. But despite all that talk, the prevalence and the […]
