June 14, 2021 — The pursuit of healthy obesity is something of a holy quest or a shell game. The game goes on with some players insisting that obesity is not real. Picking through troves of data they find exceptions to the links between a high BMI and disease risks. “Ah ha! These subjects have no health issues, just […]
June 2, 2021 — As life comes back to a new sort of normalcy in some parts of the world, we are slowly coming to terms with the full effects of the pandemic. The deaths have been front and center – 3.5 million to date. Though that number is still growing in many places, it is slowing in others. […]
May 29, 2021 — Is it still true that seeing is believing? Or in this age of truth decay, is it more likely that people see what they’ve already chosen to believe? We see a lot of this in politics and religion. But it also seems to creep into nutrition research. A case in point would be highly polarized […]
May 23, 2021 — Only 27 percent of adults in the U.S. have a BMI in the range that CDC labels as “healthy or normal.” Most people think that diet and exercise is the best answer for obesity. They think this even though just about everyone with obesity has tried that prescription and most find that it doesn’t fix […]
May 19, 2021 — It’s tough to get people to let go of weight and body size as the defining feature of obesity. But indeed, weight does not define obesity. Nor does BMI. What defines obesity is abnormal or excess fat (adipose) tissue that harms health. Most often, this occurs when someone’s weight is high. Not always, though. In […]
May 18, 2021 — There’s both good news and bad news in a new study of physician attitudes about obesity in Europe. The good news is that, by and large, most physicians in this sample get it. Obesity is a disease they should be treating. The bad news? They’re not really doing it. Dig into the results and what […]
May 16, 2021 — Stroke is generally a problem for older persons. Nonetheless, as much as 15 percent of all strokes happen to people between the ages of 18 and 50. What’s more, incidence is rising for younger people. A new study in Stroke offers good reasons to believe that rising obesity in young persons may account for some […]
April 30, 2021 — As the UK variant (B.1.1.7) became dominant in the U.S., something else started to change. More young people started showing up in the hospital. In fact, COVID wards are filling up with younger patients in Michigan. This may simply be a result of more infections in young people. Teens in Michigan are testing positive at […]
April 25, 2021 — To folks who care for people receiving bariatric surgery, it seems like the world’s best kept secret. But it shouldn’t be. This surgery puts diabetes into remission and reduces the burden of many other diseases that result from obesity. It gives people a better quality of life. And it lets people live longer. So why […]
April 24, 2021 — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. We can point to ways this is true. But if you dig into health disparities, this claim might be harder to support. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) […]
