September 19, 2025 — This week has been a flood of news from the EASD meeting in Vienna. Yesterday, the big news was an impressive win for kids 10-17 with type 2 diabetes in a study of tirzepatide. Researchers presented the SURPASS-PEDS trial and simultaneously published it in Lancet. At the end of the 30-week trial, tirzepatide in two […]
September 3, 2025 — The magical Mirror of Erised can drive people mad by showing them their deepest desires. Judging by the flood of papers in recent days, it seems that one such desire is to find consensus for a clinical definition of obesity. In the past week alone, three such publications have crossed our screens. In the past […]
July 8, 2025 — Half a year has passed since the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity published its attempt to build a global consensus around a definition for obesity that distinguishes clinically significant obesity from preclinical obesity. Three new publications in Annals of Internal Medicine make it clear that this task is incomplete. Despite heroic efforts, consensus for distinguishing […]
April 21, 2025 — It is really easy to beat up on the lowly BMI. The Lancet Commission on clinical obesity gently kicked it to the curb by saying BMI “can both overestimate and underestimate adiposity” and thus declared its obsolescence as a singular measure for excess adiposity. “Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body […]
January 17, 2025 — Obesity is linked to many common diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease and knee osteoarthritis. Obesity is currently defined using a person’s body mass index, or BMI. This is calculated as weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of height (in metres). In people of European descent, the BMI for […]
January 8, 2025 — Drug development for obesity may well be in a golden age. In large part, this is because the scientific understanding of obesity has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Unfortunately, little or none of that is reflected in new draft guidance from FDA, issued yesterday for public comment, on developing the next generation of […]
September 22, 2024 — The scientific understanding of obesity is progressing with impressive speed. But the translation of scientific insight into clinical benefits is slow by comparison. Most clinicians (along with the public) are stuck. We’re encumbered by an inadequate definition of obesity, overreliance on BMI, and medical groupthink. Straining for a Clinical Definition In an excellent essay for […]
July 24, 2024 — It’s nice, really. People are paying attention to obesity, its definition, and the bias they bring to the subject. If you need evidence of this, look no further than a series of three new editorials in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They’re wrestling with BMI and the definition of obesity. The authors present a range […]
July 6, 2024 — We’ve been hearing quite a lot about this on many levels. For years now, obesity thought leaders and even the public have had an increasingly sour relationship with BMI. It’s been misused, abused, detested, and even accused of racism. Yes, the love is gone. On Friday, the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) […]
April 9, 2024 — More than a decade has passed since the American Medical Association confirmed that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. But the rest of the world is still struggling with this idea. Much as we have all started to say obesity is a disease, we more often act like it’s merely a risk factor for other […]
