October 24, 2020 — A tidy narrative attracts the human mind. When they ring true, generalizations are seductive. They wipe away the complex mess of real life. For example, the untidy reality of living through the pandemic lockdown leaves us eager to make sense of it. So a new paper describing a global survey of health behaviors in the […]
October 17, 2020 — We are living in uneasy times. If you want to quantify that, check out the Hedonometer at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. According to their analyses, Twitter was a pretty happy place before 2020. Peter Dodds and colleagues on the Hedonometer project wrote in 2015 that human language has a “universal […]
September 19, 2020 — It’s hard to doubt that we’re living in challenging times. If you need evidence, take a look at data on happiness. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago has been tracking the happiness of Americans. This year, in the midst of a pandemic, we’ve hit an all-time low. In […]
August 9, 2020 — This is an anxious moment. And this moment is dragging on with seemingly no end in sight. Seeing an angle to advance their agenda, some politicians like to talk about the mental health effects of dealing with COVID-19 as being worse than the virus. But we would prefer to stick with facts. So we pay […]
July 18, 2020 — The fitness industry is a bit of a mess right now. That’s because, in many places, health clubs are not very healthy places to be. The great indoors is a great place to share the coronavirus. Especially if you’re sweating and breathing hard. But Jack Raglin, a kinesiology professor at the Indiana University School of […]
July 13, 2020 — There’s quite a buzz in the air about a plan for the UK to overcome obesity. Good for Boris Johnson, who saw the light on obesity after coming face to face with his own mortality. All this because he was briefly the world’s most famous ICU patient with COVID-19. He blamed the severity of his […]
July 3, 2020 — The cost of delayed care for chronic diseases – such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes – is steep in this pandemic. In fact, three separate analyses this week give us a glimpse of excess deaths in the early months of this continuing tragedy. But unfortunately, pinning these numbers down is a tricky business. However, […]
June 21, 2020 — We’ve seen quite a range of responses to the observation that obesity leads to worse outcomes with COVID-19. But most of them are unhelpful. First, of course, was denial. Now we have the anger phase. Over in the U.K., folks are murmuring that we should blame the food industry. Writing in the BMJ, Monique Tan, […]
June 8, 2020 — The headlines are pretty direct about it. “COVID-19 lockdowns make childhood obesity worse,” says a headline from the University of Buffalo. Another report tells us that school closures will drive childhood obesity rates up by 2.4 percentage points. All this sounds very precise and matter of fact. But what it really amounts to is speculation. […]
June 6, 2020 — Age, by far, is the most important risk factor for bad outcomes with COVID-19. But after that, it’s become clear that obesity is an important risk for bad outcomes. In children, of course, serious cases are relatively rare. But lately they have been cropping up more frequently in the U.S. Now, a new report in […]
