September 6, 2023 — A sure way to make a good program look bad is to offer up flawed evidence for its benefits. Then call it the biggest and best evaluation ever. So it is with a study of Food Is Medicine, impaired by a problem with regression to the mean. That little problem does not stop some pretty […]
April 23, 2023 — Camilla Kingdon is president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and she has the cause of the whole childhood obesity thing figured out. “The primary cause is clear,” she writes in the Guardian. It’s poverty. She describes how her thinking has evolved: “In the last few years, I have been forced to […]
October 10, 2022 — Sunday at FNCE brought us a fireside chat with Sara Bleich, the first ever Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity. Make no mistake about it, this is big. Because without secure access to genuinely nourishing food, it will be terribly hard to close the gap in health that comes from chronic diseases – including […]
August 25, 2022 — Perhaps you’ve heard. Next month, the White House will host a new conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. The goal of this conference is promising: “End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.” We like the implicit acknowledgement that obesity […]
March 9, 2022 — The stupid, senseless war in Ukraine is causing massive suffering. For anyone who is paying attention, that much is perfectly clear. Stepping back from the dire, immediate humanitarian crisis, economists are fretting about the shocks coming from oil prices. But the shock to the global food supply will also be huge. Food security will almost […]
October 17, 2021 — FNCE 20201 opens today online. But pre-meeting symposia yesterday set the table for four days of rich information flowing about food and nutrition. COVID is still with us, so the meeting is virtual. Thus an outstanding session on nutrition, equity, and COVID-19 hit the mark especially well. In particular, it drew us into thinking more […]
September 15, 2021 — New data on poverty came out this week and oddly enough, the news was pretty good. Though many aspects of 2020 were really stinky, this data on poverty is pretty sweet. In fact, after accounting for government relief payments, the U.S. poverty rate fell to its lowest rate ever – 9.1 percent. This good news […]
August 16, 2021 — A century ago, the iconic image of hunger was the bread line. Today, it is the line at a food bank, swamped by demand because of the pandemic. And for more than a decade now, the SNAP program has been inadequate for providing healthy nutrition to families facing food insecurity. But today, that will change. […]
June 27, 2021 — “I had a student this year when I was trying to explain the disincentive effects of unemployment insurance – and I was being a good economist and explaining moral hazard, and how this is going to discourage people from working. Student raised his hand and said, is it really moral to use the threat of […]
March 17, 2021 — It might seem surprising, but rising food insecurity may make public health issues with obesity even worse. Even before the pandemic, declines in food security seemed to be a factor in rising obesity prevalence. But now research is emerging to suggest that food insecurity might make obesity harder to shake. A new analysis in Annals […]
