December 9, 2023 — Yesterday, we had the opportunity to offer (and gain) perspective on stigma and discrimination related to obesity. It came in the rich context of a three hour discussion on “Ethics, Equity, and Stigma in Obesity Treatment and Policy.” The Division of Medical Ethics of NYU School of Medicine co-sponsored the discussion with the Comprehensive Program […]
September 22, 2023 — We are at the very beginning of a revolution in obesity treatment. A new perspective article in Nature Medicine points to this and notes that with the great power of new obesity medicines comes great responsibility to fully understand how to best utilize them. All very true. But more to the point, the greatest responsibility […]
August 17, 2023 — A recently published report by the Institute for Government offers a succinct dissection of UK obesity policy in the past 30 years in the UK, culminating with recommendations for reform. Context and Complexity As a fairly new clinical academic, caring for real people and trying to produce relevant research to influence change, I am relatively […]
May 15, 2023 — We’re headed to Dublin this week for the European Congress on Obesity – ECO2023. At a pace that will surely be overwhelming, we expect to encounter some of the world’s best researchers, clinicians, and patient advocates bringing us new insights. This comes at an exciting time for the field because advanced treatment options are causing […]
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 […]
January 17, 2023 — The food policy spin machine was in overdrive a few years ago, promoting food labeling policies enacted in Chile. “Latin America’s war on obesity could be a model for U.S.,” gushed the Washington Post. Pointing to a new study in PLOS Medicine, Barry Popkin told the Post that the food labeling law in Chile was […]
September 24, 2022 — “There is more to obesity than meets the eye,” write James René Jolin and Fatima Cody Stanford in the Postgraduate Medical Journal. But too often, visible behaviors and appearances guide our responses to this disease. So we end up wondering why the result of earnest efforts to reduce it in both individuals and the population […]
August 20, 2022 — Fast food and junk food are slippery and pejorative terms that many people equate with a risk of obesity. Most people – even people who routinely consume it – presume that fast food is not good for health. With the release of Super Size Me in 2004, we seemed to hit a peak in the […]
August 16, 2022 — An article of faith in the fat acceptance community is the idea that weight stigma causes more harm than obesity itself. In the extreme, there’s a belief that we should do away will any reference to obesity. People hold this belief because they think the health harm ascribed to obesity actually comes from weight stigma. […]
July 6, 2022 — Twelve years ago, a very popular First Lady of the United States launched an ambitious campaign to solve the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation. Two papers in Pediatrics yesterday suggest to us that those efforts did not yield the promised solution. In sum, these data tell us that after Let’s Move! began, the […]
