December 9, 2016 — For the first time in more than 20 years, life expectancy dropped in the U.S. last year. New data from the CDC shows an increase in deaths from eight of its top ten causes. CDC Director Tom Frieden was blunt in his assessment: We’re seeing the ramifications of the increase in obesity. And we’re seeing that […]
December 6, 2016 — When Tom Frieden took over CDC, obesity goals took center stage with six other “winnable battles” in public health. On smoking, teen pregnancy, healthcare infections, and HIV, progress was notable. Progress on obesity goals fell short. The same was true for motor vehicle injuries and food safety. Frieden was frank about the poor progress on […]
June 24, 2016 — A new study in the American Journal of Public Health provides encouraging evidence that community-based obesity prevention can work in disadvantaged black communities to reduce the prevalence of obesity. Youlian Liao and colleagues from the CDC analyzed changes in the prevalence of obesity in communities targeted for the REACH US program. Liao told MedicalResearch.com: In […]
March 18, 2016 — If you just look at the data, you might think it’s seldom that physicians see obesity in routine clinical practice. CDC has issued a new report on physician office visits for obesity by adults in the U.S. Given that 38% of adults in the U.S. have obesity and obesity is widely recognized to be the […]
December 3, 2015 — Yahoo Health provides a perfect example of happy news bias in a headline this week: “The Diabetes Rate Is Actually Declining, Says the CDC.” The problem is that the CDC didn’t say it and it isn’t true. Other reports were not as blatantly wrong as Yahoo Health, but they left the same false impression. The truth is that […]
May 30, 2015 — The passions of the breastfeeding war continue to spill into scientific publications. Another in a long line of publications documenting an association between breastfeeding and lower adiposity appeared this week in the Journal of Nutrition. The authors concluded: These data confirm the importance of exclusive BF and prolonged BF for later cardiometabolic health. But in fact, that’s […]
January 25, 2015 — “Measles in Disneyland” is a sufficiently jarring headline to make us wonder: how do we find ourselves here? Not so many years ago, CDC told us that measles had been eliminated from the U.S. What happened was a noxious mixture of superstition and bias that has led clusters of families — especially in California — […]
November 16, 2014 — UPDATE 11/19/2014: CDC spokesperson Brittany Behm confirms that CDC has taken down this website for review. She said “the recent attention to the LEAN Works! program caused us to put this part of the website at the top of the list for review, hence why it is currently down. The potential misuse of this information […]
September 18, 2014 — BMI is a just a number, but it’s one that people love to hate. A new research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) gives more ammunition to BMI critics. Earl Ford and colleagues from CDC analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to find that waist circumference […]
July 24, 2014 — Arguing about weight is a fool’s errand. But the impulse to tell someone else how much they should weigh lies under the surface of a new analysis published by CDC. Neda Sarafrazi and colleagues from the National Center for Health Statistics found that nearly 48% of boys and 36% of girls with obesity between the […]
