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 […]
January 23, 2022 — Increasingly, we find ourselves burdened by TMI about health, much of which we cannot trust. Such an overload of dubious information makes it hard to make good decisions. Evidence of this is everywhere we turn. People are dying needlessly from COVID after choosing to refuse vaccination. And to be sure, the subject of obesity, weight, […]
September 24, 2021 — Limited approval . . . heated debate . . . setback for booster plans. The pathway to rolling out booster shots has been torturous, for sure. But let’s be clear. As the dust clears, the approval of booster shots for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is hardly limited. Everyone over 65 can get it. Under 65, the […]
June 10, 2021 — New data on deaths for 2020 from CDC present a stark picture. The rate of deaths due to heart disease rose by more than three percent in 2020. This has happened only one other time in the last 20 years. In 2015, the death rate rose by less than a percent. Even more dramatically, the […]
April 11, 2021 — By and large, people can deal with anything they can talk about. But if they can’t talk about it, they can’t deal with it. Talking through a problem is the first step to solving it. Until now, though, racism in healthcare has been a problem that no one wants to talk about. Writing in the […]
December 15, 2020 — It’s been a busy week of new statistics on obesity from CDC. The Centers released new data on childhood obesity trends for the U.S. Of course, the overall trend is up. Almost one in five youth (19 percent) ages 2-12 have a BMI in the range of obesity. But it’s worth digging a bit deeper […]
December 14, 2020 — New stats on overweight, obesity, and severe obesity are out from the CDC. We already knew the topline numbers for obesity. On that score, the U.S. reached a record high of 42.3 percent in 2018. But this new release paints a more complete picture. Overall, it suggests we might maxing out on the combined prevalence […]
