January 11, 2025 — Yes. This is a relief. We are in the midst of what used to be called “diet season.” Yet we are not getting an onslaught of advice about Atkins, paleo, vegan, or an assortment of obscure dietary approaches for fast weight loss. Instead, we are getting tips for healthy eating – such as this advice […]
December 31, 2024 — The best thing about this day is that we can finally say we are done with 2024. We can savor the good news it brought and put the bad behind us. And while you are shaking off that bad news, we want to offer you some bad ideas on obesity, nutrition, and health that perhaps […]
December 22, 2024 — For the first time in 30 years, FDA has handed the food industry a better tool for marketing their products as “healthy.” But that’s not all. The agency is also working on a seal – an FDA-approved symbol – food marketers can put on their products if they meet the agency’s definition for healthy food. […]
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, […]
