Posts Tagged ‘health’

Block That Metaphor! Ozempic Orthodontia

January 18, 2024 — E.B. White is long gone from this life and Block That Metaphor! is dormant at The New Yorker. But we need them back. The Washington Post has a new and twisted metaphor about obesity treatment, casting Ozempic as something like orthodontia. Kate Cohen writes: “I always thought I’d be thin if I were rich. “I’d […]

The Tension Between Trust and Healthy Skepticism

January 7, 2024 — We are living is a time of concern about mistrust, misinformation, and polarization. Edelman has been warning us for years now about deepening distrust that promotes misinformation because people do not know what to believe. It promotes polarization because they come to trust only people with beliefs similar to their own. As we confront misinformation, healthy […]

The Gap in Lifespan Grows Between Men and Women

November 21, 2023 — Men are coming up short in life expectancy. In fact, the gap in lifespan between men and women is now the widest it has been in three decades. Why? The short answer is COVID. But the truth is that it is more than just COVID. The pandemic took more lives from men because their underlying […]

YWM Engage: Kindness, Especially to Yourself, Matters

September 24, 2023 — A good friend often reminds us about the importance of kindness, and of course, she is right. The world offers us too little kindness too often and we make it better when we add the warmth of kindness to the corner of the world we share. But our friend Gary Foster took it a bit […]

The Gaps in Wealth and Poverty, Obesity and Health

August 21, 2023 — If you are paying attention to the disparities in wealth, poverty, health, and obesity, you might note that there’s good news and bad news to be found right now. On the good news side of things, the global inequality of wealth shrank in 2022. That happened for two reasons. People in some of the poorest […]

More Food, Less Joy, and Shorter Lives

March 26, 2023 — Food is medicine, say folks in certain food policy circles, and we have an abundant supply of it – especially in the U.S. So why is it true in this country that we have more food, find less joy in it, and live shorter lives? Eating More, Enjoying It Less, Losing Years of Life American […]

The Best and Worst of 2022

December 26, 2022 — This has been a good year in so many ways. COVID has moved into the background and people have been reconnecting. We’ve seen remarkable progress in understanding and care for obesity. Of course, we’ve hit some low points that help us to appreciate highlights even more. So here for your consideration is our short list […]

Why Current Weight Is (Almost) Meaningless

October 13, 2022 — Weight continues to be a subject for hot debate in popular culture. Most people live somewhere between the extremes of fat shaming and fat activism, just navigating life and sometimes feeling judged because of implicit ideas that people have about the normal human diversity of body size and shape. For population health, it’s indeed a […]

Sweeteners: Different Effects in Different People?

August 23, 2022 — To start an impassioned discussion on nutrition is easy. Bring up non-nutritive sweeteners. Some people see them as a plague in the food supply. Others insist upon evidence to back up such dire claims and can see only fragments propping up presumptions about harms that are yet to be documented. But once again, a study […]

A Boom in Fitness Trackers, a Bust in Fitness

May 28, 2022 — Worldwide sales of fitness trackers increased from US$14 billion in 2017 to over $36 billion in 2020. The skyrocketing success of these gadgets suggests that more people than ever see some value in keeping tabs on the number of steps they take, flights of stairs they climb, time they spend sitting, and calories they burn. […]