April 28, 2021 — Let’s start with a basic fact. More than five million youth and children in the U.S. have severe obesity. This is not about chubby cheeks or appearance. This is about young bodies with biological patterns of fat tissue setting them up for lifetimes of poor health. These are lives that untreated obesity will cut short. […]
November 30, 2020 — Free vitamin D supplements will be sent to over two million clinically vulnerable people in the UK this winter. Over 80% of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 are vitamin D deficient compared with the general population. In a small study, a high dose of vitamin D appeared to reduce the severity of COVID-19. While some scientists […]
November 18, 2020 — We don’t mean to pick on this lovely ad campaign by the NHS. Because there’s nothing wrong with promoting healthy lifestyles. But unfortunately, it isn’t going to do a thing to reverse the obesity trends in the UK. It reflects a mentality about confronting obesity that fails over and over. Just do better and make […]
October 23, 2020 — October is National Bullying Prevention Month because bullying should never be a part of childhood. So we find ourselves wondering. Can we find the mute button for bullying? Are parents, teachers, and coaches giving bullies an open mic for weight-based bullying? Complicity with Weight-Based Bullying Adults are supposedly in charge. But when it comes to […]
August 18, 2020 — For the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, this was a relatively easy question. Americans typically consume too much added sugar. So the committee recommends a lower limit. In the 2015, the limit was ten percent of total calories from added sugars. But now the committee says that limit should come down to six. Not so fast, […]
July 28, 2020 — For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken wrote this in 1920, well before the the health challenge of obesity flummoxed us. But he described our systematic failures with obesity almost perfectly. Obesity is a problem of complex systems that conspire to harm our health. Simple, […]
July 8, 2020 — If you work with the numbers long enough, you can get the answer you want. In Health Affairs, researchers claim to have found “a 47 percent reduction in obesity prevalence” due to the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. Now that’s impressive evidence for the value of school nutrition! Reducing childhood obesity prevalence is indeed an impressive […]
June 7, 2020 — No fair! So says the Sugar Association. “Big sugar” petitioned FDA last week because they want food labeling to call out non-caloric sweeteners. Not just sugar. You can’t really blame them for trying. Righteous food activists have been beating up on sugar so much, for so long, that per capita consumption of sugar and caloric […]
June 2, 2020 — Nutrition Live Online 2020 opened with NIH Director Francis Collins and the Presidential Symposium on the ethics of eating. We had expected to be wowed by Director Collins. And of course, he is impressive. However, Harvard’s Anna Grummond impressed us even more. She explained that it’s ethically OK to put warnings on food that might […]
June 1, 2020 — Complexity makes the brain hurt. Both nutrition and obesity present challenges that resist simple answers. There is no one healthful way to eat, though many false prophets of nutrition will preach that they have the one true way. Quick fixes for obesity are rare, though many people are eager to tell us that they know […]
