June 15, 2025 — The previously unquestioned American leadership in science is evaporating. Groundbreaking medical research is stopping abruptly. Research institutes at NIH are disappearing. As this unfolds, the response of many people in supposed roles of scientific leadership has been to duck and take cover. Tell us when it’s over and we can get back to work. Yes, […]
April 2, 2025 — Yesterday was a profoundly sad day for people who care about American greatness in health. With a measure of gratuitous cruelty, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services slashed 10,000 jobs, wiping out a stunning breadth of health expertise at FDA, CDC, and NIH. Robert Califf, an international expert in clinical research and cardiovascular […]
February 14, 2025 — New data from CDC (yes, it’s still there) tells us obesity is still growing steadily in children, while in adults, the growth in prevalence appears to be on pause. But in both children and adults, rates for severe obesity are continuing to grow. These data, published in JAMA yesterday by Samuel Emmerich and colleagues, come […]
November 8, 2024 — Amid a steady stream of news from ObesityWeek, the CDC released new NHANES data this week documenting an ongoing rise in U.S. diabetes prevalence. Between 1999 and 2023, the age-adjusted prevalence of diabetes, diagnosed and undiagnosed, in adults rose from 9.7% to 14.3%. The total prevalence in adults between 2021 and 2023 was 15.8% – […]
September 24, 2024 — This is a milestone we’ve been anticipating. New NHANES data on obesity are out and they mark a shift in the dynamics of obesity rates. We now have data to suggest that the overall rate of obesity – which has been climbing relentlessly for four decades – appears to be leveling out at about 40%. […]
February 21, 2024 — Should this be surprising? Probably not. It had to come to this. But this is a pleasant bend in a long arc toward a more realistic approach for obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three leaders at CDC write in Health Affairs Forefront that we need both prevention and care to […]
September 15, 2022 — Public discourse about obesity is often locked into the wrong debate. On one hand, a common view holds that this is a problem for which prevention is the only real answer. People must have good nutrition and active lives by default so that children will not grow into adulthood with obesity. On the other hand, […]
August 31, 2022 — It is nothing short of jaw dropping – U.S. life expectancy once again dropped by almost two years. This news comes from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, which released provisional stats for 2021 today. Up until 2014, the U.S. had seen steady rises in life expectancy. Then in 2015, we saw a small […]
August 18, 2022 — The tension between science and policy at CDC is inevitable. But that tension has never been in plain view more than during the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, citing a “botched” response to the pandemic, CDC director Rochelle Walensky says that she will launch a sweeping reorganization of the agency. Her announcement was thin on specifics. […]
July 24, 2022 — Institutions of public health are in a tough spot right now. COVID has so battered public trust in the CDC that it has put us into the figure-it-out-yourself phase of this pandemic. Likewise, the public health response to obesity has long been one of both moral panic and ineffective policy prescriptions. Decades of exhortations to […]
