April 11, 2024 — Two decades ago, the state of Arkansas became the first in the nation to require every school to send parents BMI report cards – also known as fat letters. Back then, in 2003, the obesity rate for children in Arkansas was 17%. Since then, obesity in Arkansas public school students has risen dramatically. In the […]
March 5, 2024 — On this, the second day of Obesity Care Week, let’s step back from all the complexity of obesity and focus on five simple principles that hold great promise for improving the way we care for people with this disease. It really doesn’t have to be so hard. 1. It Is Undeniable That Obesity Is a […]
February 17, 2024 — Reporting for Reuters, Robin Respaut and Chad Terhune tell us that prescription data in the U.S. reveals increasing use of semaglutide for obesity in adolescents. Does this signal a huge surge in pediatric obesity treatment? Or merely a small uptick from almost negligible access to care? That all depends on the story you want to […]
February 2, 2024 — Motivational interviewing is a respected tool for helping people who are seeking care for obesity. It’s all about listening to and supporting a person’s motivations wanting medical obesity care. But yet again, we are learning that motivation is not the magic answer for overcoming obesity. This time, in Pediatrics, Ken Resnicow and colleagues have published […]
January 18, 2024 — E.B. White is long gone from this life and Block That Metaphor! is dormant at The New Yorker. But we need them back. The Washington Post has a new and twisted metaphor about obesity treatment, casting Ozempic as something like orthodontia. Kate Cohen writes: “I always thought I’d be thin if I were rich. “I’d […]
December 18, 2023 — Both reason and emotion play a role in obesity care for young persons. Feelings about this subject are strong. The experience of living with obesity is intense for families, children, and youth. Recent reporting makes this clear. Equally clear is reporting and new data that tell us we’re not coping with it very well. Severe […]
November 30, 2023 — For the last two days, we have been both observing and participating in an NIH meeting on pharmacotherapy for obesity in children and youth that has been quite a pleasant surprise. Scientists, clinicians, parents, and young persons came together in a stimulating exchange of ideas. Perhaps the most notable dialogue focused on a desire to […]
October 10, 2023 — “The findings have important implications for future intervention research in terms of the effectiveness of intervention components and characteristics … It is important that policy makers continue to recognise the school setting as a vehicle for tackling childhood obesity.” These conclusions from a systematic review and meta-analysis of effectiveness for school-based interventions in child obesity […]
September 26, 2023 — A leftover from the days of moral panic about obesity is the designation of September as National Childhood Obesity Month. The intentions were good but with prevention as the sole focus, families and youth already living with severe obesity got the message. They did not really count. But at the YWM 2023 Engage convention, OAC […]
September 14, 2023 — Epidemic, pandemic, syndemic, crisis, emergency: well-meaning people attach these words to obesity in general and often to childhood obesity in particular. Two decades ago, Cara Ebbeling, Dorota Pawlak, and David Ludwig proclaimed in Lancet that childhood obesity was a “public health crisis” and prescribed a “common sense cure.” But a new perspective published yesterday in Pediatrics […]
