July 17, 2023 — A recent thread in the ongoing public discourse about new, advanced obesity medicines relates to how long people should take them and how long they actually do take them. The revelation that started this is data from a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) indicating that two-thirds of patients typically stop taking them within a year. So […]
January 23, 2020 — People with a cause like to hook it up with childhood obesity. Breastfeeding is good for both mother and child. But it doesn’t magically prevent childhood obesity – no matter how many times advocates try to suggest it does. Likewise, overusing antibiotics is a huge problem – mainly because it leads to huge problems with […]
October 6, 2017 — It’s unmistakeable. Change is coming to the business of fattening up livestock and selling meat for human consumption. Many factors are bringing change, but antibiotics are in sharp focus right now. A report in Science calls for bold global action. The authors recommend caps on antibiotic use, reductions in meat consumption, and a user fee […]
September 9, 2017 — How did chicken take over the world’s diet? Industrial farming is a big part of it. But secret sauce is 63,000 tons of antibiotics every year. This insight comes from Maryn McKenna in her new book – Big Chicken. Before those innovations, hens were just leftovers from egg production and “a chicken in every pot” […]
January 28, 2017 — A new study published this week in Obesity raises an important question. Can reducing antibiotic misuse for infants be an effective obesity prevention strategy? This study by Melissa Poulson and colleagues is the first study ever to measure how much prenatal and early childhood antibiotic use might contribute to the risk of obesity. Using the […]
March 24, 2015 — Perhaps you thought that use of antibiotics in farm animals was headed in the right direction — down. We did. Apparently we were wrong. Despite recent encouraging news in the U.S., a new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) documents soaring use of antibiotics for the production of meat in […]
November 21, 2014 — Two more studies this week suggest that early life experiences — even before birth — may well shape a child’s risk for obesity. Antibiotics, C-sections, and childhood obesity appear to be linked. In a study published by the International Journal of Obesity, researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that antibiotics in […]
October 3, 2014 — How hard can it be to figure out that we’ve had enough — no, too much — of unnecessary antibiotics? If you need one more reason to believe, look no further than the study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics. Charles Bailey and colleagues conducted a carefully-constructed observational study to compare the risk of obesity […]
August 16, 2014 — An elegant study of bugs, drugs, and obesity in mice suggests antibiotics early in life can the stage for obesity. It could be that the use of antibiotics in young children — much of which is widely acknowledged to be unnecessary — can cause considerable harm later in life. Professor Jodi Lindsay of St. George’s […]
December 13, 2013 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration acted this week to ban antibiotics for fattening livestock. Over a period of three years, the FDA is asking manufacturers of antiobiotics for livestock to change their labeling to effectively make it illegal to use them for the purpose of fattening livestock. FDA says that the companies that make […]
