March 4, 2025 — It is about time. The world is waking up to the realization that rising global obesity is not a problem of personal failures. Rather, it is the product of systems with the unintended effect of promoting obesity while denying people care for this chronic disease. At the heart of World Obesity Day 2025 is the […]
November 11, 2024 — It turns out that obesity researchers may be wasting their time. Business professors have discovered a simple explanation for the rise of obesity. High speed internet is fattening. Pouring over the physiology of obesity and data on potential contributors to its prevalence may be unnecessary. A new economic analysis by Lin, Churchill, and Ackermann constructs […]
November 10, 2024 — “It’s hard to wake up this morning . . . and not feel like the truth doesn’t matter anymore.” These are sentiments about public discourse in a recent election, but they shine a light on a fact that guides a great deal of discourse about nutrition and obesity. Facts are always important, but feelings carry […]
August 7, 2024 — The U.S. military has a problem with obesity and frankly has no clue of how to deal with it. The prevalence of obesity in the population has grown so that the services cannot run from the problem. Simply expelling service members because of their size no longer works to maintain military readiness. The supply of […]
March 22, 2024 — This is a striking change. Until now, the steadfast refusal of CMS to allow coverage of any obesity medicine by Medicare has been unwavering. Then two weeks ago, FDA granted a new indication for semaglutide for persons with both heart disease and obesity to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. Now CMS says it’s A-OK […]
January 22, 2024 — Breastfeeding is such a good idea. But unfortunately, it doesn’t do much to prevent obesity. No matter. On the subject of breastfeeding and preventing obesity in children, we have policy-based evidence – the answer is preset. A new paper in Pediatrics lines up with this. Based on yet another finding of an association between breastfeeding […]
November 29, 2022 — Stigma serves as an anchor to policy for reducing obesity in Mexico and it renders those policies ineffective. That’s the view James René Jolin, Lauren Kim, Verónica Vázquez-Velázquez, and Fatima Cody Stanford eloquently present in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology this week. They write: “Recalibrating the prevailing approach to obesity is essential to counteract the stigma […]
November 22, 2022 — This is a note of gratitude to Julia Belluz. In a guest essay for the New York Times, she writes beautifully and accessibly about a great gap. It is the gap between science and popular culture in the matter of obesity. She does it while reporting on the recent Royal Society meeting about the causes […]
August 16, 2022 — An article of faith in the fat acceptance community is the idea that weight stigma causes more harm than obesity itself. In the extreme, there’s a belief that we should do away will any reference to obesity. People hold this belief because they think the health harm ascribed to obesity actually comes from weight stigma. […]
May 29, 2022 — 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 […]
