Posts Tagged ‘health disparities’

ECO2023: Obesity Care Advances Meet Reality

May 18, 2023 — It is impossible to miss. At ECO2023, we are seeing tremendous excitement about advances in obesity care – mixed with concern about what happens when those advances meet with reality. As ECO2023 unfolds, we’re hearing more about the advances that new obesity medicines are offering, but we’re also hearing reminders about the gap between the […]

More Food, Less Joy, and Shorter Lives

March 26, 2023 — Food is medicine, say folks in certain food policy circles, and we have an abundant supply of it – especially in the U.S. So why is it true in this country that we have more food, find less joy in it, and live shorter lives? Eating More, Enjoying It Less, Losing Years of Life American […]

Letting Pregnant Women Die in America

March 17, 2023 — Politicians, activists, and courts are busy fighting about when and whether to permit a woman to have an abortion. But while that tussle continues, very little energy goes into the problem of an extraordinary number of pregnant women who die in America. A new report from the CDC tells us that maternal death rates soared […]

Is Medical Care Becoming a Luxury?

February 8, 2023 — “I can’t afford to spend any more time here [in the hospital]. I don’t have the money.” These are the words of a victim in the mass shooting at Half Moon Bay, California, last month. It points to an uncomfortable truth. Increasingly, medical care is becoming a luxury. Helaine Olen describes it for the Washington […]

Posh Fitness Culture for a Healthy Lifestyle

January 14, 2023 — What exactly is a healthy lifestyle? If you dig into a certain corner of public health research, you are likely to come up with healthy patterns of eating, physical activity, sleep, and stress management as the answer. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, has a different answer for you. Fitness culture defines a […]

Obesity Care for the Few and the Wealthy

December 27, 2022 — It’s nothing new. Overwhelmingly and for a long time it has been true that obesity care is mainly available to the few and the wealthy. This is the inevitable result of multiple forms of bias that collide in the chronic disease of obesity. Healthcare has a bias for serving the the wealthy. Health systems also […]

The Best and Worst of 2022

December 26, 2022 — This has been a good year in so many ways. COVID has moved into the background and people have been reconnecting. We’ve seen remarkable progress in understanding and care for obesity. Of course, we’ve hit some low points that help us to appreciate highlights even more. So here for your consideration is our short list […]

Bariatric Surgery in Youth: Start of a Great Shift

November 15, 2022 — It is indeed happening. A great shift has begun in pediatric obesity care and a new study in Pediatrics measures the beginning of it with an increase in bariatric surgery for youth. Between 2010 and 2017, the rate of bariatric surgeries for pediatric patients doubled, according to this study. But let’s be clear. This is […]

Finding Value in the White House Nutrition Show

September 30, 2022 — With the benefit of a few days to reflect, we can find value in the big White House Conference on Nutrition, Hunger, and Health. Admittedly, it was nice to see obesity clearly identified as one of the diseases – just like hypertension and diabetes – that can result from poor nutrition. But this was never […]

Expansion of Care for People Living with Obesity

September 6, 2022 — A landmark expansion of access to medical care for people with low incomes is more than a decade old now. Where politics have not gotten in the way, Medicaid expansion clearly has had a broad effect on health in America. But something that’s less obvious is the benefit of a quiet, though uneven, expansion of […]