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 […]
December 21, 2023 — No two ways about it. This has been a big year of milestones in obesity and health. We and many others are still processing what we have witnessed in these past 12 months. But one way to gain perspective is to look at 2023 stats for the posts on ConscienHealth that you, a wise group […]
October 18, 2023 — We’re starting to feel pity for the poor, tortured metric of BMI. Put BMI into your Google search box and the top suggestion is “BMI inaccurate.” The top news about BMI right now comes from Nature and it explains “Why BMI is flawed – and how to redefine obesity.” And therein lies the problem. BMI […]
October 12, 2023 — We’re packing for Dallas and looking forward to soaking up as much innovation, science, and policy as we can when all the world’s top experts gather to share their best thinking at ObesityWeek 2023. There’s a lot to absorb in just four days, so advance planning is the key. Here are ten sparks from the […]
September 23, 2023 — We have a relationship problem with BMI – the body mass index. As with any rocky relationship, we can’t seem to live with it and we can’t seem to live without it either. Professor Robert Kushner described the the good, the bad, and the ugly of BMI better than ever in an opening session of […]
July 20, 2023 — Obesity care is suffering from a blinding distraction – BMI and weight loss. It’s not hard to find critiques of this. The American Medical Association recently cautioned physicians against the misuse of BMI as a surrogate for health and obesity. PLOS One has a new paper telling us BMI may not necessarily increase mortality independently […]
June 15, 2023 — BMI seems to be everyone’s favorite target for abuse these days. Depending on whom you listen to, it’s racist, sexist, useless, or useful. Nobody really stands up for it, except as an simple, objective measure of weight for height. Now, the AMA decided to caution doctors about the misuse of BMI as a surrogate for […]
April 5, 2023 — BMI is one of those topics in the obesity realm where many people agree in many ways. Yet it can inspire some passionate arguments. A prime example of these disagreements came right to the top of the workshop on BMI at the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions at the National Academies yesterday. In quick succession, we […]
March 5, 2023 — Defining obesity is a tricky enterprise for the simple reason that we are all easily fooled by appearances. But obesity is not a disease of size or appearance. It’s a disease of dysregulated adipose tissue. This fact doesn’t stop people from thinking – falsely – that they can size up a person’s metabolic health based […]
January 5, 2023 — One of the easy predictions to make for 2023 is that it will be a year of hot debates about obesity. We have plenty of hot topics to choose from, but one of the hottest is what to do with BMI. It is firmly planted in the landscape of discussions about obesity because it can […]
