October 21, 2020 — The human impulse for bigotry is strong. Lifestyle Medicine, an open access journal, offered up a potent illustration of this yesterday. The journal published a dubious study of a weak association between a poor measure of intelligence and obesity. It’s hard to know why, but scientific merit doesn’t explain it. Nor can any excuse justify […]
June 2, 2020 — Nutrition Live Online 2020 opened with NIH Director Francis Collins and the Presidential Symposium on the ethics of eating. We had expected to be wowed by Director Collins. And of course, he is impressive. However, Harvard’s Anna Grummond impressed us even more. She explained that it’s ethically OK to put warnings on food that might […]
October 27, 2018 — Faced with an inescapable choice, who will live and who will die? That’s the question that researchers put to a massive global sample. It was a hypothetical question prompted by self-driving vehicles. Should the vehicle swerve to avoid hitting a large group of people? Even if it means certain death for a smaller group? Should […]
October 8, 2017 — A more intensely personal subject than body weight is hard to find. Add in the stigma of obesity and the subject becomes even more sensitive. So perhaps it should be no wonder that obesity presents some very hard challenges for respecting a person’s autonomy. The impulse to tell people what we might think is best […]
April 2, 2013 — Hidden irony attracts us. In the midst of a recent New York Times op-ed about studies of inconsistent ethics was data on people who “found it more acceptable to push a fat man in front of a trolley” than others did. It’s not often you see the words “fat man” in a newspaper these days. […]
