Posts Tagged ‘anti-obesity campaigns’

At the EASL Congress 2024 in Milan, we witnessed quite a splash of new data on both survodutide and tirzepatide for MASH. Friday and Saturday gave us two headline presentations at the meeting and two publications in the New England Journal of Medicine. Lilly pronounced itself “very pleased” with the results of their SYNERGY-NASH study […]

Reading about the heated and not terribly well-reasoned arguments people are having about obesity prompts a sad conclusion. A history of ineffective and, at times, harmful anti-obesity campaigns may have poisoned the well of public sentiment about obesity. People have such strong feelings that facts and reason become irrelevant. Aggrieved Advocates for People with Eating […]

Talk is cheap. But history tells us that cheap talk doesn’t solve wicked problems. That’s true whether the problem is the relentlessly rising health harms of obesity or the current hot topic – inflation. The notoriously hollow Whip Inflation Now campaign of Gerald Ford seems like a model for equally ineffective campaigns aspiring to overcome […]

Public health should stop talking about obesity, says a policy brief from University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. “Replace assignments connecting ‘obesity’ and health,” suggests the brief. Cancel the word obesity and weight stigma will fade. That seems to be the thinking there. At the other extreme, we have folks who love to […]

Two years ago, 69 percent of Americans believed what the CDC had to say. Now, that number is 44 percent. After seven decades, CDC sat atop a pyramid of influence in public health. But today, top-down public health decrees meet with skepticism as often as with trust. We are living in an era when distrust […]

The chronic disease of obesity is tough to wrap our heads around. On one hand, many people consider themselves to be amateur experts. Consumer media – and our spam folder – is full of glib advice about how to “lose belly fat.” Advice about foods that cause weight gain is everywhere. But the truth is […]

The “War on Obesity” has claimed many victims, but made little progress against the disease itself. This  approach to obesity has done a fine job of setting up a war inside our own heads – self-stigma. “Weight stigma is widespread, damaging and difficult to eradicate,” writes Rebecca Puhl in the Washington Post. In fact, the […]

The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) is out with its annual report on obesity. The headline? It’s bad and getting worse. But any mention of the lived experience for real persons with obesity is absent. Empathy doesn’t fit with a strategy focused on catastrophizing the problem of too many people living with obesity. The implicit […]

Nothing rankles quite so much as exploiting kids living with obesity for raw political purposes. Right now, a conservative group is using  images of kids with obesity in a campaign against companies that speak out on voting rights. In this case, they are targeting Coca-Cola with political attack ads, calling the company Woka-Cola. But to […]

Healthcare and policies on obesity serve people with wealth and privilege. The disparities are great in the U.S. But they exist everywhere. Just look at childhood obesity in the U.K. Consider the ten percent of children with the most social and economic deprivation. They have three times higher rates of obesity compared to the ten […]