Posts Tagged ‘chronic diseases’

The Rising Call to “Treat Obesity First” Starts to Resonate

October 2, 2024 — We are witnessing something rare. It is a sweeping change in how people are looking at a whole spectrum of chronic diseases. They all tie back to obesity: hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, many cancers, liver disease, kidney disease, and joint disease come quickly to mind. Most of the time, the change in perspective comes in […]

Defining Clinical Obesity: Distinguishing Risk from Disease

April 9, 2024 — More than a decade has passed since the American Medical Association confirmed that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. But the rest of the world is still struggling with this idea. Much as we have all started to say obesity is a disease, we more often act like it’s merely a risk factor for other […]

Artificial Intelligence Falls Short on Complex Nutrition Guidance

February 13, 2024 — Artificial intelligence is hard at work, reshaping healthcare delivery, as well as the delivery of profits from healthcare. So what does this mean for the delivery of dietary services? Can Chat GPT and other artificial intelligence technologies help with the complex task of delivering nutrition guidance for health? Maybe. Or maybe not yet. People have […]

More Food, Less Joy, and Shorter Lives

March 26, 2023 — Food is medicine, say folks in certain food policy circles, and we have an abundant supply of it – especially in the U.S. So why is it true in this country that we have more food, find less joy in it, and live shorter lives? Eating More, Enjoying It Less, Losing Years of Life American […]

Letting Pregnant Women Die in America

March 17, 2023 — Politicians, activists, and courts are busy fighting about when and whether to permit a woman to have an abortion. But while that tussle continues, very little energy goes into the problem of an extraordinary number of pregnant women who die in America. A new report from the CDC tells us that maternal death rates soared […]

A Jaw-Dropping Loss of U.S. Life Expectancy

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 […]

2025 Dietary Guidelines: Are We Ready for This?

April 16, 2022 — Yesterday, the USDA opened up the process for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. They invited us all to comment on the questions they will pose to a scientific advisory committee. Then they’ll appoint that committee and put it to work on producing a report. The report goes into the sausage grinder of policy making. […]

Healthy Aging Through Smart, Equitable Obesity Care

March 11, 2022 — Though people may pretend otherwise, aging is a great equalizer. Hubris finds humility as age encroaches on presumptions of invincibility. So with varying degrees of success, we chase the goal of healthy aging. But over the last three decades, obesity has become a major stumbling block to healthy aging, for two reasons. First, the prevalence […]