September 14, 2024 — For reasons that escape us, it has become fashionable to preach that food is medicine. So food marketers are looking for snippets of research they can use to persuade people to buy their latest formulations of food-like and ultra-processed products, Standing in unflinching opposition are food policy advocates who (though they favor the food-is-medicine catchphrase) […]
April 13, 2024 — In The Conversation this week, Emma Beckett tells us that drugs for treating obesity won’t cure it, “but they might make us more fat-phobic.” Her rationale is simple enough. All the buzz “plays into ideas of fat stigma and fat phobia.” No matter that doctors, scientists, and the FDA all say otherwise, she says these […]
December 3, 2023 — We are living in an age of low trust. Without trust, many problems in public policy confront us – polarization, disinformation, and roadblocks to progress in public health. Unhealthy cynicism begins to crowd out the healthier approach to inquiry, skepticism. The advice to trust, but verify, gives way to broad claims that everything is rigged […]
October 31, 2023 — “If you want to improve your resistance to pain, lose weight, and just scream very loudly, take a trip to a cinema near you.” This soundbite from the BBC World Service at the end of sober news reports mainly about the war in Gaza came from a credible source. But it seemed more like something […]
September 20, 2023 — Apparently big food is not scary enough. The Washington Post wants you to know that it’s really big tobacco that is selling you those noxious and addictive Teddy Grahams to destroy the health of your children. For this report, they rely on a paper by Tera Fazzino and colleagues. This continues a tradition of using […]
February 28, 2023 — To be sure, fear of change is understandable. The number of people living with obesity and suffering its complications has grown large. Achieving a balance between treating a problem like obesity and preventing it is tricky. To make it worse, we are living in a time when the media has figured out that fear and […]
January 27, 2023 — We count on newspapers for coming up with sensational headlines to inflame passions. Opinion pages seldom disappoint. But those flames of passion very often bring more heat than light. Such was the case yesterday when the New York Times published a sensational headline for an opinion article by a HAES activist, Virginia Sole-Smith. She wants […]
October 31, 2021 — Many fears are plaguing us right now. A virus is still killing more than five thousand people every day around the world – more than a thousand daily in the U.S. Some people are fearful of spending time indoors with others who are unmasked or unvaccinated. Others are fearful of the masks and the vaccines. […]
August 8, 2021 — Anger is circulating freely these days. It’s nothing new. But harnessing anger and its close cousin – fear – is a skill social media algorithms seem to have mastered. Thus, politicians see an opportunity and anger grows. Punitive public policy scores points with constituents stoked by anger and fear. It seldom solves problems, though. In […]
January 1, 2021 — In a world of divisions, one sentiment seems to unite us: joy in being done with 2020. Thus we say that we look to this new year with a measure of hope for better days ahead. Even for a stern realist, hope is important. Monica Hesse explains: I am not a superstitious person and I […]
