November 11, 2025 — Just skimming headlines about new medicines for obesity and surgery, comparisons seem to be a dominant theme. Some of these headlines tell us surgery is more cost-effective or delivers more durable results. Some of that is certainly true. But the deeper truth surfaces this week in JAMA and JAMA Network Open. Clinical experience and, increasingly, […]
October 27, 2025 — Writer Sarah Jones faces a vivid personal need to reconcile the appealing creed of MAHA with her own recent diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Confronting a diagnosis she clearly did not want, she found herself blaming herself. She did this despite knowing that the disease is more complicated than a simple blame game. This led […]
October 9, 2025 — At the annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons this week, six smart people debated the future of metabolic surgery versus medicines in the treatment of obesity. The interest in this debate is unmistakable. Our newsfeed is full of it. The undercurrent seems to be an implicit contest. Which is best? Which will prevail? […]
September 16, 2025 — Today in Nature Medicine, compelling new research tells that long-term outcomes with metabolic surgery are superior to the outcomes with GLP-1 agonists in persons with diabetes and obesity. These are impressive and important results. But we have to wonder if anyone is really listening. The enthusiasm for advanced obesity medicines is so great that many […]
August 6, 2025 — We have a great privilege this week to spend time in Canberra (and Sydney), delivering two invited presentations and finally meeting up with quite a number of people we have known only virtually. Now in person. The occasion is the annual meeting of ANZMOSS – the Australian and New Zealand Metabolic and Obesity Surgery Society. […]
July 5, 2025 — We do admire folks who are willing to go out on a limb and put work into a subject as tough as the tensions between care for eating disorders and obesity. In a thoughtful new book, Marian Tanofsky-Kraff, Natasha Schvey, Robyn Pashby, and Natasha Burke are turning the page on an unhelpful “food fight.” Though […]
June 16, 2025 — Reject the binary. This cry is a response to simplistic, dichotomous thinking that seems to be ruling the day in so many contexts right now. It’s taking us on quite a number of dead-end journeys. One of these is the false dichotomy that suggests we must choose between providing care for obesity or for disordered […]
May 24, 2025 — In BMJ Public Health, Annabel Davies and colleagues have published a new analysis of interventions to prevent obesity in children. They started with data from two Cochrane systematic reviews published in 2024 (here and here) and applied a Bayesian multi-level meta-regression analysis. What they found were obesity prevention effects that range from being small and […]
July 14, 2024 — It is hard not to think we are seeing a subtle shift in prevailing bias about obesity. Almost a decade ago, Health Affairs saw merit in publishing projections to say that taxes and other restrictions on unhealthy foods and beverages were more important than providing medical care for children with obesity. The argument was that […]
July 9, 2024 — If one is looking for a hint about the cluelessness of the NHS in dealing seriously with obesity, they can find a double dose in reporting on priorities of England’s 42 integrated care boards. First there is the analysis. More than 85% of those boards think obesity is not a priority for health. Two of […]
