March 2, 2021 — Today in Obesity Care Week (OCW2021) the focus is treatment and prevention of obesity. Note that the focus is both. Not one or the other. For decades now, we have watched ineffective talk about a false choice: shall we resolve to treat obesity or prevent it? “We can’t treat our way out of this epidemic,” […]
August 10, 2020 — “I know about people like you.” Twenty-five years after visiting a church in a new community that would would soon be our new home, we still remember those words. Those words come to mind as we read the words of Larry Elliott in the Guardian. Larry Elliott is the economics editor for the Guardian. So […]
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 14, 2020 — In the early reports of patients in the hospital for COVID-19, careful observers noticed an odd pattern. COVID-19 is primarily a respiratory syndrome and smoking badly damages lungs. But hospitalization was not more likely for smokers. In fact, it was less likely. This correlation kept appearing in sample after sample – though with substantial uncertainty. […]
May 11, 2020 — We’ve heard it many times before. Confronted with a daunting medical and scientific challenge, someone comes along to tell us that they can whisk away all that complexity. “I call it a beautiful puzzle,” said one person recently. He was describing how it really won’t be so hard to tame the coronavirus pandemic and get […]
January 27, 2020 — While the planet warms up, our bodies are cooling down. That’s right. Declining human body temperatures are a fact of the last 200 years. A new study in eLife tells us that average body temperatures have cooled by 1.6% over the last 200 birth years. If you thought that 37°C or 98.6°F is the norm […]
July 30, 2019 — Sadly enough, we live in an age of angry tweets and venting spleens. So it is in nutrition and obesity (as well as politics) these days. We’ve found that five subjects – whatever you say – will attract responses that are too hot to handle. In our view, this is a reason to try to […]
April 26, 2019 — Ask any attorney. Safe is a four-letter word. So in light of data that raises some good questions about the risks of a very common food additive – propionate – how should we respond? Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health have found evidence to suggest propionate may alter our metabolism and lead to […]
April 6, 2019 — As Conscienhealth recently wrote, we need more curiosity in the fields of nutrition and obesity. That includes a willingness to challenge our pre-existing beliefs. I submit that this is true in nicotine research, too, even among our most capable researchers. Risk Perceptions Last week, JAMA published a report on trends in relative risk perceptions between […]
