March 14, 2025 — Twenty-nine years ago, scientists discovered that GLP-1 agonists, acting in the brain, could regulate feeding behaviors. In a keynote address to the Columbia Cornell Obesity Medicine course yesterday, Richard DiMarchi presented a compelling, detailed description of how this all unfolded. Way back in 1996, DiMarchi and colleagues at Lilly sought a patent for using a […]
March 9, 2025 — For many people who toil in pursuit of insights from scientific research, these are stressful times. Mass firings have decimated U.S. science agencies, according to reporting in Science. The chaos has shattered the careers of many scientists and has been especially harsh for vulnerable early career scientists. As this is happening, a climate of fear […]
October 23, 2024 — God bless the people who put their time into the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. It fits the textbook definition of a thankless task. Years of work go into producing a scientifically sound set of recommendations for a new edition of dietary guidelines to emerge sometime next year. But no matter what those recommendations are, people […]
September 16, 2024 — The difference between investigative journalism and opinion writing is enormous. Both are valuable. But not interchangeable. So when Stat News publishes a lengthy opinion piece on pediatric obesity guidelines and labels it as investigative journalism, they are unfortunately dispensing spin. This is the case of a report published yesterday under a headline reading: “Pediatricians’ Obesity […]
August 4, 2024 — Warning: this is a bit of a rant, albeit a good-natured one. The persistent irritant of implicit ignorance about obesity confronts us in virtually every dialogue we have about obesity. Sometimes it gets to be too much. Specifically, it is the presumption woven into almost every conversation about obesity, that obesity is all about bad […]
July 29, 2024 — When the subject of equitable access to GLP-1s arises, contrasting perspectives of what is equitable become apparent. Last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, an analysis of prescription data for GLP-1 agonists made two facts about their use very clear. First, their use for obesity is growing much faster than the use for type […]
July 28, 2024 — It simply feels good to find people who think like we do. We can give voice to strong feelings, we can find validation, and we can join in an amen chorus of affirmation. But unfortunately, we can also get stuck in a dead end – committed to ideas that don’t find acceptance in the real […]
June 21, 2024 — This week in JAMA, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) published an evidence review and recommendation for youth with obesity. In a word, it is disappointing. The task force seems to have completely lost touch with advances in obesity care in young persons. They recommend only that youth with a BMI in the […]
June 2, 2024 — The Obesity and Energetics Offerings from the Indiana University School of Public Health and the University of Alabama at Birmingham NORC certainly got our attention this week with an entry titled “Cherished Hypotheses Meet Hard Facts.” That entry links us to two new systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials to assess prevention of obesity in […]
May 30, 2024 — In a world that systematically denies people access to obesity medicines, the rush of reports that people frequently stop taking them makes us wonder. How does this qualify as news? Why do reporters repeatedly paint a misleading picture of non-compliant patients? Yet, health reporters keep offering up this narrative. The latest prompt for this is […]
