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 […]
June 30, 2022 — Okay, this is hardly a final victory, but it sure does feel good. The U.S. House Appropriations Committee released its legislative report on funding for Health and Human Services. It’s a beastly 623 page document that goes over all the spending priorities for the department. However, if you dig deep into it, there’s a paragraph […]
May 29, 2022 — Public health should stop talking about obesity, says a policy brief from University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. “Replace assignments connecting ‘obesity’ and health,” suggests the brief. Cancel the word obesity and weight stigma will fade. That seems to be the thinking there. At the other extreme, we have folks who love to […]
October 29, 2021 — Who would have thought that two years could change so many things? But here we are on the cusp of our second virtual ObesityWeek® since we were all together in Las Vegas in 2019. We’ve seen a lot since then and we have a lot to look forward to in the week ahead, starting Monday. […]
May 11, 2021 — In one intense week, the European Congress on Obesity and the Canadian Obesity Summit are setting the bar high for translating research and guidelines into policies and action. A year ago, new Canadian guidelines emerged. The driving concept was simple – health first, before weight. Then in March, the European Commission redefined obesity. It’s a […]
