April 12, 2024 — Do our brains respond differently to food cues when we’re feeling lonely or socially isolated? New research from UCLA certainly suggests this may be true. Researchers from UCLA published findings in JAMA Network Open last week from an analysis of functional MRI (fMRI) scans of 93 women with varying levels of self-reported social isolation. The women […]
April 9, 2023 — Hello darkness, my old friend. Welcome to the sound of silence. Social networks, conceived to connect and inform us, have evolved in a way to polarize and misinform us. Loud voices dominate public narratives on a wide range of subjects and leave us little room for the development of well-informed and nuanced views. Certainly we […]
April 6, 2023 — The agendas people have for food and eating behaviors can make us dizzy. One rallying cry is that food is medicine. Presumably, that makes eating therapeutic. But not if we do it in a problematic way. Then we have an eating disorder. In fact, recent analyses of data from the Global Burden of Disease say […]
August 22, 2022 — Believe it or not, the amount of energy we’re chewing up when we eat is both significant and important to understand. It’s significant because chewing can raise the rate at which our bodies burn energy by 10 to 15 percent. Just last week, Adam van Casteren published a paper quantifying this for the first time […]
October 13, 2021 — In so many ways, COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down, and the disruption continues. Casual – and annoying – talk about pandemic weight gain continues to swirl, thought the data on this tells a very mixed story. But something more serious is getting less attention – a sharp spike in eating disorders for young […]
October 9, 2021 — Reporting on non-caloric sweeteners has more in common with reporting on religion than science reporting. We see a constant churn of reporting about studies by people who are looking for evidence to support a belief that sweeteners must be bad for you. The latest headline from NPR on this subject tells us these sweeteners “may […]
January 3, 2021 — Food addiction is a concept that sticks to the popular psyche. Yet it remains scientifically controversial. True believers will tell you that eating addictive food “lights up” parts of the brain involved in addiction. But then, just about anything that brings a person pleasure does that. So this is not an especially persuasive argument to […]
November 6, 2020 — The Obesity Journal Symposium at ObesityWeek is a reliable source of new insights. This year’s edition was yesterday and it did not disappoint. Four new papers covered a diverse range of topics with excellence. But two of them are especially notable for challenging some popular thoughts about obesity. First, Emma Stinson et al tells us […]
September 29, 2020 — The headlines paint a stark picture. Time-Restricted Eating Doesn’t Work for Weight Loss says the UCSF news story. Based solely on the the conclusions of this one study, we should get over it. Time-restricted eating offers no advantages for weight loss. This new, well-controlled study in JAMA Internal Medicine says so. Suddenly the benefits of […]
August 11, 2019 — Maybe the screen can wait. A pair of recent studies tell us that distracted eating might lead people to consume more calories at a meal. Plus, there’s no evidence that people compensate with fewer calories at the next meal. So that extra food could add up over time. Thus it might be smart to put […]
