September 16, 2024 — The difference between investigative journalism and opinion writing is enormous. Both are valuable. But not interchangeable. So when Stat News publishes a lengthy opinion piece on pediatric obesity guidelines and labels it as investigative journalism, they are unfortunately dispensing spin. This is the case of a report published yesterday under a headline reading: “Pediatricians’ Obesity […]
September 8, 2024 — What’s the harm? For many “interventions” to reduce obesity prevalence, this rationale seems to be good enough to spur implementation. Menu labeling is a good example. Restaurants in the U.S. and in numerous other places must publish the number of calories in food portions they sell. This went into effect based upon suppositions. Policy makers […]
July 12, 2023 — Another milestone came this week for the EDIT Collaboration. We published our protocol for a systematic review of behavioral weight management with a meta analysis of the risk factors for disordered eating behaviors in individual participants. Yes, that’s a mouthful. But the point of the EDIT Collaboration is to muster some serious curiosity about the […]
June 23, 2023 — Since January, when the American Academy of Pediatrics released a guideline for treating the disordered physiology of children and youth with obesity, we’ve been inundated with popular psychology influencers concerned about the impact on young persons with disordered eating. Their arguments are quite passionate. “Obesity guidelines for kids terrify me,” says one person with a […]
June 1, 2023 — New research provides impressive evidence for the contribution of obesity to the risk of a range of mental health disorders. These include depression, psychosis, eating and personality disorders. The added risk is apparent at all ages, in both men and women. Furthermore, these data suggest that the mental health burden of obesity is greater in […]
April 27, 2023 — “There’s a huge fatphobia problem in the eating disorder world,” says Shira Rosenbluth. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, an eating disorder therapist, and has her own life experiences with eating disorders. Obesity and eating disorders can appear in the same patients and some research would suggest they frequently do. But for each of […]
April 15, 2023 — New surveillance data from the U.S. Defense Health Agency tells us that the pandemic brought a large jump in diabetes, obesity, and eating disorders in the military. Between 2018 and 2021, the prevalence of obesity rose from 16 percent to 19 percent. The incidence of type 2 diabetes jumped by 25 percent and new cases […]
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 […]
March 16, 2023 — We are living in an age of amplified contention. Anger can be like a muscle that gets stronger when we exercise it. If you doubt that, take a long look at what social media amplifies. So seeing passionate contention at the intersection of obesity and eating disorders might be unsurprising. But it’s not especially helpful […]
