December 4, 2023 — By the end of this month, we will be seeing lists of what’s in and what’s out for the coming year. For people whose minds drift toward liver disease, we have an entry. Fatty liver is out and steatotic liver is in. NAFLD goes to the dustbin, replaced by MASLD, while MASH takes over from […]
October 7, 2023 — We have mixed feelings about a new report in JAMA this week about GLP-1 agonists and the associated risk of gastrointestinal adverse events. On one hand, this is helpful data. It is a reminder that despite all of the sensational reporting about “weight loss miracles,” these drugs are serious medicines that require careful prescribing and […]
October 2, 2023 — To be sure, we are making progress. Nonetheless, it’s reasonable to ask if we are yet taking the chronic disease of obesity seriously. Or are we just playing at it? Writing in The Lancet, Priya Sumithran, Francis Finucane, and Ricardo Cohen suggest we may still be doing more of the latter: “How we handle obesity […]
August 8, 2023 — Folks who have not detected a shift in public discourse about obesity are simply not listening. In that shift, we detect some easing in longstanding bias about this disease. But perspective is difficult. Is the proverbial glass half full with progress to celebrate? Or is the remaining void a reminder that overcoming weight bias and […]
August 5, 2023 — Back in February, we noted a study documenting the effects of a childhood obesity program that, according to its authors, “shows promise.” Since then, much has happened with this study. Scholars from the School of Public Health at Indiana University in Bloomington took a closer look at the statistics in this paper. The authors corrected […]
July 31, 2023 — The subject of sweeteners stirs emotions almost constantly. The World Health organization has been on a tear lately, suggesting the the sweetener aspartame might be carcinogenic and that non-sugar sweeteners have “deadly long-term consequences.” Some experts will even suggest non-nutritive sweeteners can cause weight gain. So we welcome the appearance of a more balanced view, […]
June 16, 2023 — At the Boston Course in Obesity Medicine, Sadaf Farooqi received the George L. Blackburn Foundation Award and delivered a masterclass of digging deeply into genetics to fully understand obesity. Simultaneously, she co-authored striking new observations about one dimension of this in the New England Journal of Medicine. All in a day’s work for someone intent […]
June 7, 2023 — Overheated rhetoric in nutrition is nothing new. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) set a high bar yesterday. In a press release, the organization rang alarm bells, saying that “big dairy” is on its way to “making school meals less healthy by allowing whole milk.” Oh my. Is the persistent fear of […]
June 5, 2023 — One of the neat tricks of semaglutide and tirzepatide is their unexpected ability to shift the frames of bias through which we look at obesity and human behavior. Neuroscience and behavioral psychology have long told us the human desire for food is not purely a matter of choice. Yet in addressing obesity, weight bias and […]
May 29, 2023 — Expert opinion holds that ultra-processed food is not a good thing. So it’s quite natural to expect that helping people resist the convenience and taste of this ubiquitous type of food will help with dietary health outcomes. So natural that it’s quite easy to dismiss inconvenient, unexpected findings. A little ultra-processing of study results in […]
