January 19, 2025 — Narratives in health reporting tend to cluster. This is how we get diet fads. It’s also why stories about how bad BMI is have gotten enough traction to drive people to extreme views about it. Lately, we’ve noticed a new cluster forming. Let’s call it the premature death notices for diet and exercise. In Vox […]
December 9, 2024 — Eat healthy and get your exercise. It is a straightforward framework for dealing with obesity. But that simple prescription of diet and exercise for preventing obesity overlooks a critical factor – the prolonged sitting time very often required by work and school. A recent study of data from young adult twins showed that sitting time […]
April 3, 2024 — We’re stuck. This assessment sums up frustration with efforts to reduce the harm of obesity and diabetes in public health. For many decades we have remained fixated on a paradigm that tells us obesity and diabetes are rising because our patterns of diet and exercise are all wrong. Writing in the Guardian, Amy McLennan tells […]
January 27, 2024 — Zeal is thrilling. “The solution is at hand” for type 2 diabetes, says Professor Roy Taylor. “If a person has T2DM, they have become too heavy for their own body.” Losing weight with his very low calorie diet will put that diabetes into remission, he says. “A simple bottom line.” Except that a new study […]
May 2, 2023 — “Especially for children, diet and lifestyle must remain at the forefront of obesity prevention and treatment.” This conviction, summing up a new editorial in JAMA, beautifully captures the discomfort that the availability of more effective treatments for obesity causes. The belief persists that diets and exercise are the right way to reverse obesity. So the […]
October 1, 2021 — Can healthy people with good nutrition and exercise skip the COVID-19 vaccine? A research scientist and fitness enthusiast explains why the answer is no. I’m a fitness enthusiast. I also adhere to a nutrient-dense, “clean” eating program, which means I minimize my sugar intake and eat a lot of whole foods for the purpose of […]
April 10, 2020 — Prescriptions for diet and exercise have worked so well for preventing obesity that some folks are selling them for fighting COVID-19. Headlines suggesting this strategy are popping up too often in lifestyle and health reporting. For example, the Wicked Local News in Beverly, Massachusetts, tells us: While not much is known yet about fighting COVID-19, […]
