June 1, 2023 — New research provides impressive evidence for the contribution of obesity to the risk of a range of mental health disorders. These include depression, psychosis, eating and personality disorders. The added risk is apparent at all ages, in both men and women. Furthermore, these data suggest that the mental health burden of obesity is greater in […]
September 22, 2022 — Problems are messy, so to solve them, humans quite naturally move to make them tidy. We sort them, label them, and get to work on resolving them. But news this week reminds us that health issues often resist our efforts to sort them out and find tidy solutions. The USPSTF this week published a draft […]
January 10, 2022 — Many of us are on an anxious journey right now. We know that being older, or living with a condition like obesity, means added risks for COVID. So we’ve been careful. But now the Omicron variant adds a bit of uncertainty because it is so contagious and so many people are getting the infection. Yet, […]
October 13, 2021 — In so many ways, COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down, and the disruption continues. Casual – and annoying – talk about pandemic weight gain continues to swirl, thought the data on this tells a very mixed story. But something more serious is getting less attention – a sharp spike in eating disorders for young […]
November 8, 2020 — Even chaos is a business opportunity. So it seems that the market for calm is booming – both as a state of mind and a popular health app. This week the company behind the health app named Calm seized an opportunity. They sponsored those jarring election news alerts on CNN that were delivering the precise […]
October 5, 2020 — A new paper from the Rudd Center reminds us how noxious the weight talk in popular media is right now. Rebecca Puhl and colleagues found that weight stigma during the COVID-19 pandemic is toxic. In young adults, past experience of stigma predict problems in coping now. The risk of binge eating triples. Symptoms of depression […]
September 6, 2020 — Are we anxious? Judging by a huge leap in people filling prescriptions for anti-anxiety meds, the answer is clearly yes. Before COVID-19 was on our minds, those prescriptions were growing by a by a few percentage points, year over year. Once COVID-19 grabbed our attention, they jumped by 34 percent right away. Likewise, Rxs for […]
August 9, 2020 — This is an anxious moment. And this moment is dragging on with seemingly no end in sight. Seeing an angle to advance their agenda, some politicians like to talk about the mental health effects of dealing with COVID-19 as being worse than the virus. But we would prefer to stick with facts. So we pay […]
May 31, 2020 — We’ve mentioned it before. During the lockdown, our instinct has been to get out and walk. We see lots of people out running. We have seen families walking together that we’ve never seen before. And a new working paper (i.e., not yet peer reviewed) offers evidence to suggest physical activity during the lockdown might be […]
April 30, 2020 — The final straw came from the New York Times. Yesterday, Gretchen Reynolds wrote that she had found the perfect study on fitness for our times. It’s all about sprinkling intense four-second workouts throughout your day – miraculous quarantine fitness. Put it together with articles warning us about the “Quarantine-15” and what do you have? Fuel […]
