July 16, 2021 — Tomorrow is the day. At 1 pm, the Obesity Action Coalition will open its tenth annual Your Weight Matters Convention (YWM2021). Many things have changed in the dozen years that ConscienHealth has been working for a better way to reduce the health impact of obesity. But none is more important than the the thriving community […]
June 18, 2021 — What happens when a careful consideration of science collides with strong sentiment in 38,368 dietary guideline comments? The short answer is public policy. Without a doubt, it’s messy. Simply wading through all those comments is a huge task. A new paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition tries to make sense of them, using […]
June 6, 2021 — Health stigma is sneaky. Because of that, it pops up in places where we never expect it. For example, we find the wellness section of the New York Times offering advice to dump friends with depression or obesity. Obesity researchers use stigmatizing cartoons to tell us about their good work. Perhaps these people don’t even […]
May 28, 2021 — It has long been true that health systems delay care for teens with severe obesity. Health plans stall and do their best to avoid paying. Many pediatricians are uncomfortable with the subject. Parents are unsure of what to do and often feel blame for their child’s medical condition. Guilt and blame breed denial and delay. […]
April 26, 2021 — Roughly three-quarters of Americans have excess weight or obesity. So weight is a major daily concern for most people. It’s uncomfortable to talk about and as a consequence, it’s a topic that many will not publicly address. But Connecticut is now an “odd man out” for access to obesity care. For every other state in […]
March 15, 2021 — The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a broken food system, writes Miriam Nelson in the Boston Globe. But she is hardly the only one. A UN Study last week told us that food systems account for a full third of global carbon emissions. The Lancet Commission on Obesity in 2019 morphed into a Global Syndemic commission […]
March 6, 2021 — Every morning, before the sun is up, here at ConscienHealth, we struggle to assemble about 500 words that people who care about obesity, nutrition, and health will want to read. Why do we care enough to do this? In short, we do this because we have found a community that matters greatly. These are people […]
February 3, 2021 — For people living with obesity, feeling invisible is familiar. For anyone, it’s hard to take. But when a person goes from being invisible to being noticed it can be jolting. Losing weight can do that and thus expose the unspoken bias that routinely confronts people with obesity. Suddenly, people who would once look right through […]
January 14, 2021 — It’s safe to say that 2020 was a year of remarkable news headlines. It seemed every day a different issue was catapulted into the discourse of society via the media. One of the best things to come out of a media-prevalent year like 2020 was discussion. Without discussion, we cannot learn from each other. We […]
December 29, 2020 — For decades now, childhood obesity care has been on the back burner because of a false dichotomy. All efforts have gone into prevention – a noble and elusive goal. But in the face of earnest efforts to prevent childhood obesity, the prevalence has relentlessly climbed. Meanwhile, the children affected – now roughly six million with […]
