March 4, 2025 — It is about time. The world is waking up to the realization that rising global obesity is not a problem of personal failures. Rather, it is the product of systems with the unintended effect of promoting obesity while denying people care for this chronic disease. At the heart of World Obesity Day 2025 is the […]
February 6, 2025 — From the category of stuff that can’t be good. a study in Nature Medicine this week documents a spoonful of microplastics accumulating in an typical human brain. Alexander Nihart and colleagues used diverse methods to detect microplastics in various tissues (kidney, liver, and brain) of deceased individuals from 2016 and 2024. They found these particles […]
August 25, 2024 — When neuroscientists coined the phrase brain plasticity, they were certainly not thinking about microplastics accumulating in our brains. But unfortunately, it seems this is a phenomenon with implications we need to study. New NIH-funded research, published as a preprint, suggests these tiny particles are building up at an alarming rate. But it does not tell […]
November 7, 2023 — A lifetime of exposure to endocrine disruptors can begin before a person is even born, and may put that person on a path to obesity and health complications. This is the implication of a new study in Environmental Health Perspectives. First author Parisa Montazeri explains: “Our findings underscore the potential impact of early-life chemical exposures […]
July 18, 2023 — Barbie Girl (the song) told us life in plastic is fantastic, but the knowledge that we’re swimming in microplastics gives us reason for second thoughts. These tiny particles of plastic are accumulating in the oceans (even the Arctic), in the air, in the soil, in our food, and even in our bodies. This is an emerging […]
April 21, 2023 — Could it be that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals such as PFAS has more of an effect on body weight and adiposity than diet? Philippe Grandjean and colleagues this week published a new study in Obesity that points to this possibility. Grandjean tells us: “We’ve previously shown that children with increased PFAS concentrations tend to […]
October 27, 2022 — Most of us who think about food systems have a vague sense that our diet has a meaningful impact on the health of the planet. Beef is typically thought to be a bad actor. Eating more plant based foods should help. But an ambitious new study in Nature Sustainability aims to assign specific numbers to […]
August 5, 2022 — This news snippet definitely caught our eye. All over the world – even on the mountains of Tibet and Antarctica – it’s raining PFAS. In fact, there’s so much PFAS in rainwater all over the world that rainwater is no longer safe to drink. This news comes from an analysis published by the American Chemical […]
April 25, 2022 — Why? This is the basic question that remains unanswered after four decades of rising obesity. Why do we see such a persistent rise in obesity prevalence – all over the world? Broadly, we can lump the suspects into four groups: food, stress, physical environment, and chemicals. Of course, the most common presumption is that it’s […]
September 2, 2021 — Better living through chemistry is a catchphrase that takes us back to a time before obesity was really taking off in America. DuPont dropped that phrase in 1982. But the chemistry that may help bring us more adiposity is starting to get some serious attention. Writing in Obesity Reviews, Kelly Brownell and Tim Lobstein are […]
