Posts Tagged ‘diet’
January 26, 2025 — The most pervasive way of thinking about obesity is to simply regard it as “a diet-related disease.” But a new paper in Nature Food suggests we may be misleading ourselves. That’s because of a fundamental problem in the data that links patterns of diet to obesity and health. An impressive collection of scientists examined the […]
December 27, 2024 — Diet and exercise is a dominant concept in obesity care that’s in the midst of an identity crisis. In The Atlantic, Daniel Engber sums up one point of view, writing: “Ozempic killed diet and exercise. Doctors might be slow to admit it, but Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are making dieting and exercise obsolete.” While […]
September 30, 2024 — The abrupt and immediate departure of Sima Sistani as CEO of Weight Watchers prompts us to ask: Is the diet industry dead? Weight Watchers grew from its origins in the early 1960s to become the iconic brand that dominated this field. For decades now, the popular impulse to reject diet culture has been growing. In […]
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 […]
March 14, 2024 — Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder affecting young women, with effects that can span from adolescence to life after menopause. It is a complex condition and despite being so common, it’s still poorly understood. Quite often, obesity occurs coincidentally with PCOS. This coincidence has led to the kind of mistakes that […]
January 4, 2024 — It is beginning to seem like an anachronism. January has long marked the beginning of “diet season.” Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Atkins, and many other businesses depend on this annual weight loss ritual to rack up their biggest sales of the year. Diet resolutions typically stick for only a few months, though. Some time […]
September 27, 2023 — Travelling on a train recently you couldn’t help but overhear two women deep in conversation about a mutual obsession with food, including emotional triggers that pushed them towards chocolate and pizza. They shared feeling guilty about a perceived lack of willpower around food and regularly rummaging through the fridge looking for tasty treats to help […]
August 23, 2022 — To start an impassioned discussion on nutrition is easy. Bring up non-nutritive sweeteners. Some people see them as a plague in the food supply. Others insist upon evidence to back up such dire claims and can see only fragments propping up presumptions about harms that are yet to be documented. But once again, a study […]
July 27, 2022 — It’s a lot. Writing for USA Today, Karen Weintraub has produced a deep dive into diverse thinking about the complexity of obesity. If you thought USA Today was a place for McNuggets* of superficial reporting, think again. In six parts, with more than 18,000 words, Weintraub has done quite well in painting a picture of […]
May 27, 2022 — The Mayo Clinic has surveyed a large number of consumers in their online diet assessment. From more than 200,000 individuals completing this survey of mindset and motivation, they’ve come to a simple and unsurprising conclusion. It’s all about health. In fact, 83 percent of people in this survey are motivated by health in seeking to […]