September 30, 2024 — The abrupt and immediate departure of Sima Sistani as CEO of Weight Watchers prompts us to ask: Is the diet industry dead? Weight Watchers grew from its origins in the early 1960s to become the iconic brand that dominated this field. For decades now, the popular impulse to reject diet culture has been growing. In […]
September 29, 2024 — Evidence is mounting linking ultra-processed foods (UPF) to risk of chronic disease. Typically, UPF are foods that are energy-dense, high in fat, sugar, and salt, low in fibre, and with a long shelf life. Examples include biscuits, chips, candy, instant noodles, mass-produced bread, sweetened breakfast cereals, ready-to-eat meals, and reconstituted meats. Dietary recommendations encourage people […]
September 15, 2024 — “Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S. due to the direct relationship with diet-related chronic diseases.” Emily Matthews and Emma Kurnat-Thoma tell us this in a recent article for Frontiers in Public Health. Rationalizing this conclusion is easy enough. In Nutrients, Sareen Gropper defines diet-related disease to incorporate almost all of […]
September 14, 2024 — For reasons that escape us, it has become fashionable to preach that food is medicine. So food marketers are looking for snippets of research they can use to persuade people to buy their latest formulations of food-like and ultra-processed products, Standing in unflinching opposition are food policy advocates who (though they favor the food-is-medicine catchphrase) […]
August 14, 2024 — Do you know precisely what those peaches, blueberries, and oatmeal are going to do to your blood sugar? Should you? Questions along these lines are sweeping the the landscape of wellness trends. So maybe continuous glucose monitors will surpass the the juicing fad that peaked back in 2016. A Vast OTC Market Abbott and Dexcom […]
July 25, 2024 — It has been ten years that diverse stakeholders have been meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions. In our role as advisor to the Obesity Society, we participated in a symposium at the Academy focused on looking back and moving forward. A Fraught History of “Solutions” For looking back, […]
July 20, 2024 — In a perverse way, policies to address obesity have been effective in the U.S. But only for specific communities. As the recognition of obesity as a threat to public health has grown, some communities have grown more resistant to it. Others have not and disparities in obesity have grown steadily – between rural and urban, […]
July 2, 2024 — This is one of the most robust and enduring myths of food policy. The mythology holds that the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods is clear, but many consumers are confused about it. So if we can educate, persuade, cajole, or nudge them toward buying more of those healthy foods and less of the unhealthy […]
June 11, 2024 — Keeping up with virtues and vices in food just keeps getting harder. Planetary health is a virtue to pursue, but ultra-processed food is a vice, and plant-based foods are virtuous unless they are ultra-processed. Then perhaps they become virtuous vices. So confusing. A series of publications this week adds to the confusion. In the American […]
June 2, 2024 — The Obesity and Energetics Offerings from the Indiana University School of Public Health and the University of Alabama at Birmingham NORC certainly got our attention this week with an entry titled “Cherished Hypotheses Meet Hard Facts.” That entry links us to two new systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials to assess prevention of obesity in […]
