September 18, 2024 — People who think of obesity simply as a disease of fatness are walking around with a profound misunderstanding of this disease – it is very much a disease of inflammation. This thread of inflammation ties obesity to diabetes and ties both of those diseases to the complications of COVID. New research on COVID and diabetes […]
September 15, 2024 — “Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S. due to the direct relationship with diet-related chronic diseases.” Emily Matthews and Emma Kurnat-Thoma tell us this in a recent article for Frontiers in Public Health. Rationalizing this conclusion is easy enough. In Nutrients, Sareen Gropper defines diet-related disease to incorporate almost all of […]
August 31, 2024 — This is a truly remarkable finding. In the middle of the SELECT study of semaglutide for preventing deaths in people with obesity and heart disease, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. So researchers nimbly adapted and began collecting data on COVID outcomes. They found a big surprise. People who got COVID-19 and were treated with semaglutide had […]
January 20, 2024 — We do admire the tenacity of folks who promote the virtues of a plant-based diet. But that admiration stops when we move on to the dimension of scientific rigor and objectivity. In BMJ Nutrition, Prevention, and Health, a group of researchers are claiming that plant-based diets “may be considered protective against COVID-19 infection.” The only […]
August 18, 2023 — “Of the following what do you think is the number one threat to American public health at this moment?” Given a list that included guns, alcohol, cancer, COVID, obesity, opioids, smoking, driving, or something else, three top choices were clear. Opioids (chosen by 26%), obesity (23%), and guns (20%) outpaced everything else. The others were […]
June 12, 2023 — In many ways, COVID seems to be in the rear view mirror. Travel, meetings, and busyness have cranked up to a level that makes it seem like the pause we took for the pandemic is a distant memory. But not for folks who develop long COVID – which is about ten percent of people who […]
December 25, 2022 — We’re well on our way to closing out one more in a string of extraordinary years. These have been times of remarkable challenges, changes, and, perhaps surprisingly, great generosity. Through three years with a pandemic in the foreground and now the background, people of all ages have suffered – all in different ways. The losses […]
September 8, 2022 — It really is becoming hard to remember just how we were clutching at straws to cope with the pandemic two years ago when all we had to prevent COVID was social distance and masks. No vaccines or Paxlovid. One of the straws we were clutching then was vitamin D. Both our ex-President and Tony Fauci […]
July 30, 2022 — It’s hard to argue with something dubbed “the sunshine vitamin” – more specifically, vitamin D. It’s been generating headlines and controversy for years now. The vitamin D fan club described it like a panacea, good for preventing bone fractures (of course), but also ills ranging from infections to diabetes and cancer. Because of its association […]
July 8, 2022 — In a word, yes. COVID vaccines are still protecting people with obesity. Two new studies remind us that, although people with obesity are more vulnerable to this virus, the immune response is still good in this population. This is true of the immune response to infection as well as the protection afforded by vaccination. A […]
