January 22, 2026 — Spending yesterday with some of the top experts in obesity, health policy, and health systems reminded us of something essential that often escapes attention. The static measure of BMI cannot possibly be adequate for assessing the chronic disease of obesity. What brought this thought to mind was an expert in health benefit design who said: […]
March 18, 2025 — We’ve been living with the consensus report of the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity now for two months. Enough time has passed for feelings about the strengths and limitations of this work to take shape. A new commentary in the BMJ yesterday brings a sharp focus to the struggle of defining and dealing with current […]
July 5, 2023 — IARC, the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) responsible for research on causes of cancer, is preparing to issue a determination that aspartame is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” It will have lots of company on their lists of definite, probable, or possible carcinogens. Cell phones, sunlight, red meat, and hot dogs all enjoy this […]
October 18, 2015 — Folks from UCLA are poking a hole in the popular notion that getting enough sleep is a particular problem of modern industrial societies. By studying hunter-gatherers in three remote communities of Africa and South America, they found that even in a pre-industrial society, getting that magic eight hours of sleep is not really typical. Instead, they […]
