June 11, 2025 — Honestly, we cannot figure out why this basic fact of obesity treatment seems so hard for so many people to grasp. New, advanced medicines for obesity don’t work well when a person doesn’t take them. A new study in Obesity drives this point home. Hamlet Gasoyan and colleagues found that discontinuations and sub-optimal dosing of […]
May 17, 2025 — This should not be so hard. But apparently it is very hard for people to accept, in their hearts, that the disease of obesity is actually chronic. Yes, people will repeat the words that experts and thought leaders have fed them. “It is undeniable that obesity is a complex, chronic disease.” So says the International […]
January 19, 2025 — Narratives in health reporting tend to cluster. This is how we get diet fads. It’s also why stories about how bad BMI is have gotten enough traction to drive people to extreme views about it. Lately, we’ve noticed a new cluster forming. Let’s call it the premature death notices for diet and exercise. In Vox […]
November 5, 2024 — This should not be so hard. New research at ObesityWeek 2024 tells us that chronic care for the chronic disease is truly compelling. Specifically, we are talking about the results of three years of treatment with tirzepatide presented yesterday from the SURMOUNT-1 study. In this study of more than a thousand adults with pre-diabetes, three […]
October 28, 2024 — “Our results provide a national contemporaneous estimate of the decline in metabolic bariatric surgery associated with the era of GLP-1 RAs.” Writing in JAMA Network Open last week, Kevin Lin, Ateev Mehrotra, and Thomas Tsai say rates of metabolic surgery dropped 26% in 2023 as use of GLP-1 medicines for obesity more than doubled. Nonetheless, […]
July 12, 2024 — Reuters has a news flash for us. People are quick to quit taking GLP-1 medicines. In an “exclusive” story, the Reuters report comes from a analysis from Prime Therapeutics and Magellan Rx (Prime/MRx) – a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM). The headline finding is that 85% of people who start on GLP-1 medicines have quit taking […]
January 30, 2024 — It created quite a stir last week when Epic Research published an analysis suggesting that weight regain in the real world does not look the same as a placebo-controlled trial. After all, regain is quite an important subject. Obesity is clearly a chronic disease, requiring chronic care. But lots of people try to avoid this […]
December 13, 2023 — “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,“ wrote John Maynard Keynes. But Keynes was obviously not a doctor. So his words don’t hold much sway over people who have questions about obesity medicines with impressive short-term results. But for those people, a new study […]
October 2, 2023 — To be sure, we are making progress. Nonetheless, it’s reasonable to ask if we are yet taking the chronic disease of obesity seriously. Or are we just playing at it? Writing in The Lancet, Priya Sumithran, Francis Finucane, and Ricardo Cohen suggest we may still be doing more of the latter: “How we handle obesity […]
April 10, 2023 — Writing in the Guardian, Jon Ungoed-Thomas tells us he’s stumbled upon a simple solution for diabetes and obesity. A low-carb diet will cure them both! In an observational study of patients in a general practice who volunteered to religiously follow a low-carb diet, they found that patients could lose weight and put diabetes in remission. […]
