March 29, 2024 — A fascinating new study is prompting some very clickable headlines this week. It is all about the interaction of genetic risk for obesity and physical activity. It shows that in people with higher genetic risk scores for obesity, the association between physical activity (using daily step counts as a surrogate) and BMI is different than […]
June 16, 2023 — At the Boston Course in Obesity Medicine, Sadaf Farooqi received the George L. Blackburn Foundation Award and delivered a masterclass of digging deeply into genetics to fully understand obesity. Simultaneously, she co-authored striking new observations about one dimension of this in the New England Journal of Medicine. All in a day’s work for someone intent […]
August 17, 2022 — For a very long time, a basic question about the rising rate of obesity has seemed to frustrate people. Why is it relentlessly rising? Some pundits seem to think people have become stupid, lazy, or undisciplined over the last several decades. “You think cake wasn’t delicious iu 1969?” quipped one self-appointed expert recently. Others are […]
June 16, 2022 — Genes are not destiny. We tire of people who cling to this one side of the false nature versus nurture dichotomy. They’re stuck on the fallacy of thinking that genetic and environmental influences on health must sum to 100 percent. One or the other must be dominant, they seemingly assume. But the truth is that […]
January 17, 2022 — The track record for preventing obesity in childhood is not especially impressive. Could it improve with objective measures to identify babies most at risk for obesity as they grow up? A new study of data from the INSIGHT program has found a new polygenic risk score that might help with this. There’s just one little […]
July 6, 2021 — Cambridge Professor Sadaf Farooqi calls it a tour de force of genetics. Researchers from Regeneron and nine international research centers sequenced genetic exomes in 645,626 persons. With this painstaking research, they’ve found genetic sequences that protect some people from obesity. These sequences hard wire a person for leanness. In a world that prizes a lean […]
June 12, 2020 — The distinction between correlation and causality is basic to any serious scientist. But in PLOS Genetics yesterday, scientists toss it out the window. Yanyan Wu et al found an association between breastfeeding and obesity. Then they lept to claim cause and effect. Right up front in their title, they make the bold claim. “Exclusive breastfeeding […]
November 24, 2019 — Who dunnit? That was the essence of the debate between Sadaf Farooqi and John Wilding at the Society for Endocrinology BES Conference in Brighton, UK. Some very smart people have a tough time wrapping their brains around nature, nurture, and obesity. So Farooqi and Wilding took opposite sides of a simple proposition: This house believes […]
