June 6, 2020 — Age, by far, is the most important risk factor for bad outcomes with COVID-19. But after that, it’s become clear that obesity is an important risk for bad outcomes. In children, of course, serious cases are relatively rare. But lately they have been cropping up more frequently in the U.S. Now, a new report in […]
June 3, 2020 — Most people think of obesity as an issue of body weight. But in fact, weight is merely an artifact. It’s a side effect of what’s really going on in the physiology of obesity. In fact, an excess of adipose tissue that harms health is what defines obesity. In turn, one of the key pathways for […]
October 3, 2016 — A casual reading of consumer health advice provides a mountain of tips about “stress-busting” diets. Health.com, for instance, offers up “12 superfoods for stress relief.” But a new study suggests that we might have this concept reversed. In a randomized controlled trial, investigators observed that stressors might blunt the benefits of a healthful meal. The researchers randomized their subjects between […]
May 30, 2016 — While many people are still stuck on BMI and body size, basic research is building a deeper understanding of obesity as a systemic disease. At the European Society of Human Genetics last week, Taru Tukiainen presented another piece of the puzzle derived from the Genotype-Tissue Expression Project. Tukiainen and colleagues studied the relationship between BMI […]
June 19, 2015 — One of the most common questions about obesity is: how did we get all this obesity? And the answer is seldom satisfying because it’s so complicated and so much remains unknown. Yesterday at the 2015 Blackburn Obesity Course in Boston, Lee Kaplan defied that generalization and presented a compelling distillation of what is known about […]
June 8, 2015 — One of the hot concepts in the pseudo-science world of pop dietary advice is the anti-inflammatory diet. At Amazon.com, you can find more than 300 books related to anti-inflammatory diets. Interestingly, many of these books tie this concept to another trendy concept — clean eating. But unlike “clean eating,” the anti-inflammatory diet starts with a scrap […]
July 16, 2014 — The understanding that inflammation and obesity are linked in an important and complex relationship is growing with a constant stream of publications that simultaneously provide answers and raise questions. Robert Considine provides a helpful commentary on one more link between systemic inflammation and obesity — activated monocytes — in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Paired […]
June 11, 2014 — The interaction between gut bacteria, obesity, diet, and physical activity just keeps getting more interesting and complex. New research suggests that physical activity may interact with diet to promote more diverse gut bacteria in athletes, compared to less active controls. Unfortunately, the reporting on this research glossed over the complexity of this three-way interaction. Headlines went […]
May 9, 2014 — Brain inflammation is a mechanism that is gaining a lot of attention to help explain why obesity is so difficult to treat. Anyone affected by obesity can tell you how difficult sustained weight loss can be through diet and physical activity alone. The hypothalamus is a region of the brain well known (by scientists, at least) to […]
April 28, 2014 — Content updated and moved here. Neuropeptide Receptors in Thalamic Brain Tissue, photograph © Wellcome Images / flickr Subscribe by email to follow the accumulating evidence and observations that shape our view of health, obesity, and policy.
