Posts Tagged ‘chronic diseases’

A steady stream of headlines makes it obvious. The incomprehensibility of a chronic disease like obesity is overwhelming. The New York Times tells us it’s a hard truth about obesity medicines: “You’ll probably need them forever.” The wellness industry is peddling dubious strategies for an “off-ramp” from GLP-1 therapies with inflated claims about “sustained remission.” […]

U.S. spending on healthcare hit a new record in 2024 – $5.3 trillion. That is a seven percent jump from the prior year, maintaining a longstanding pattern of health spends rising faster than spending on everything else in this economy. But how can it be that, despite all this spending, the burden of chronic diseases […]

Tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Those words are “inoperative” now in the U.S. State Department. New guidance from the top suggests America doesn’t want people with obesity getting a visa enter the country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued a directive to U.S. embassy and consular officials all over the world, […]

The World Medical Association (WMA) has just taken a significant step forward in how the world’s medical community understands and responds to obesity. Its newly adopted Statement on Obesity, approved this week at the WMA General Assembly in Porto, reframes obesity not as a social or lifestyle problem, but as a complex, chronic disease that […]

In good conscience, it is hard to ignore the steady stream of scientific publications that tell us we are putting our children at risk by filling the world with plastics. And yet it seems that the convenience and ubiquity of plastics make it hard to resist. A sweeping new review in Lancet Child and Adolescent […]

Can we think global and act local on chronic diseases and obesity? At the United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, quite a few people gave it a try – with mixed results. At the end of the day yesterday, no one was terribly surprised when U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw a […]

The new MAHA (Making America Healthy Again) report on the health of American children is out and, in a word, things are terrible. In the words of the report, “it presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health.” We have a whole generation at risk because of toxic chemicals, ultra-processed food, unnecessary medical treatments, […]

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 […]

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 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 […]