September 12, 2025 — Honestly, we share the underlying concern. Rising global temperature are a threat to our health and welfare. But twisting a scientific paper to make the point doesn’t help. It actually hurts the cause. New research in Nature Climate Change documents an association between added sugar consumption and rising temperatures. That’s a fair question to study. […]
September 2, 2025 — It is eye-popping really. Novo Nordisk issued a press release from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress over the weekend, with extravagant claims for Wegovy versus tirzepatide. Specifically, the claim was that “Wegovy cuts risk of heart attack, stroke or death by 57% compared to tirzepatide.” This is quite an amazing claim to make. […]
August 9, 2025 — Making America Healthy is an industry with very low barriers to entry. Lots of people have fun with it. They also make lots of noise. The trouble is that because of those low barriers to entry, most of them, including some academics, do very little to actually make Americans healthy. Instead, they generate headlines and […]
July 28, 2025 — It is easy to find advice to cut red meat consumption for quite a variety of reasons – including to reduce a person’s risk for weight gain and obesity. AARP advises that “meat is particularly problematic for putting on pounds because it contains protein and saturated fat, both of which promote weight gain.” Obesity is […]
July 16, 2025 — “This study confirms what I’ve been saying, which is that diet is the key culprit in our current epidemic,” says Barry Popkin. He’s talking about a new study in PNAS. With a giant leap of faith, one can use this study for a perfect expression of confirmation bias about the role of diet and exercise […]
May 30, 2025 — To be sure, exercise has many benefits – including the widely accepted benefit of fitness and a longer life. But a new study of causal inference linking fitness to reduced mortality suggests those benefits have been exaggerated. The problem is an old one: Confounding. The senior author of the new study, Marcel Ballin, explains: “We […]
May 6, 2025 — Coffee and chicken are fueling nutrition headlines this week. “Black coffee improves insulin sensitivity in women,” say headlines sparked by one study. “Eating chicken could shorten your lifespan, raise cancer risk,” according to headlines from another study. Coffee good, chicken bad. Got it. Eating Chicken Isn’t Killing You Please, don’t hit the panic button if […]
December 18, 2024 — The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a new, exhaustive report yesterday on alcohol and health. Anticipating pressure for stronger advice against drinking alcohol in the 2025 edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, Congress asked for this report – perhaps to provide a rationale for toning down any such strong advice. More or […]
December 14, 2024 — Let’s be quite clear. This is encouraging news, but it is nothing more than a glimmer of a possibility that there is a drop in U.S. obesity prevalence showing up in 2023. The data come from electronic health records. From a sample of 16,743,822 U.S. adults, Benjamin Rader, Rebecca Hazan, and John Brownstein analyzed 47,939,382 […]
December 7, 2024 — The concept of turning food into medicine mildly repels us. But telling us chocolate is medicine simply goes over the line. Yet here comes a study in the BMJ, spinning off headlines about dark chocolate as a “bittersweet remedy for diabetes risk.” Milk chocolate? Nope. In fact, the authors of this observational study say milk […]
