January 10, 2026 — “People who come off slimming jabs regain weight four times faster than dieters.” The year is young, but already we have this contender for the dumbest headline of the year about obesity. It is helpful only as a reminder of how pervasive the implicit bias about obesity and its treatment is. Slimming Jabs? The headline […]
January 4, 2026 — The new year has brought a new natural experiment on the effects of restricting availability of “non-nutritious” foods. That’s a euphemism for junk foods. Policymakers who are opposed to regulating the availability of junk food – “a threat to freedom” – have no reluctance about regulating the freedom of people who need food assistance. Thus, […]
December 29, 2025 — “Obesity, in particular, stands out as a modifiable risk factor,” says a recent article on modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors for breast cancer. Why is this phrase, so often used to define obesity, such an irritant? This is a catchphrase with a lot of history and it’s that history that is the source of friction. […]
October 9, 2025 — At the annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons this week, six smart people debated the future of metabolic surgery versus medicines in the treatment of obesity. The interest in this debate is unmistakable. Our newsfeed is full of it. The undercurrent seems to be an implicit contest. Which is best? Which will prevail? […]
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 […]
