February 22, 2024 — “Is the Atlantic diet the new Mediterranean miracle?” This headline (and a host of others like it) says a lot about the ultra-processing of nutrition research by consumer media. It takes a fascinating study about the health effects of a traditional pattern for eating called the Atlantic diet and removes all the nuance. The product […]
May 9, 2022 — This is a big unresolved question for clinical researchers in obesity. When does obesity care bring a longer life? On one hand, it’s pretty clear that people live longer if they have bariatric surgery. But on the other hand, there’s the null result from the Look AHEAD study. It was a big, expensive study of […]
November 19, 2021 — New polling being released today by Morning Consult tells us that Medicare is lagging behind public sentiment on obesity care. Researchers found that 73 percent of the public supports Medicare covering obesity treatment and prevention. What’s more, a similar number (69 percent) says that obesity care should be a top priority for federal healthcare programs. […]
March 18, 2021 — This week, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) published a new draft recommendation on screening for diabetes and pre-diabetes for people with a high BMI. Until now, the recommendation has been to screen everyone with a BMI over 25 at age 40 and up. But the new recommendation, if it becomes final, would expand […]
September 4, 2020 — A powerful new study in the New England Journal of Medicine tell us it’s possible. Health coaches can deliver effective obesity care in mostly Black and underserved populations. In this randomized study, patients achieved and maintained a healthier weight status after two years. But without the intervention of health coaches, the control group did not. […]
October 23, 2019 — We have an effective treatment for preventing diabetes. It cuts the risk by 60 percent in people with prediabetes. For every person on Medicare, it saves $2,650. In just 15 months. But Medicare can’t figure out how to make it available to the people who need it. This is the sad story of implementing the […]
March 18, 2019 — A hot catchphrase in popular culture is mindfulness. But for effective, evidence-based obesity care, we need more than buzzy phrases. Thus we have the emergence of acceptance-based therapy (ABT) as a way to enhance well-established techniques for intensive behavioral therapy. New study results in Obesity add to the evidence that acceptance therapy can help deliver […]
March 1, 2019 — “I just worry about opening the floodgates.” These are the kinds of things you might hear when you talk to folks who’ve never lived with obesity about access to care. But undaunted by such implicit bias, 35 volunteers made more than 100 visits with their elected representatives to ask for real action now on obesity. […]
November 28, 2018 — It sounds pretty easy. A pediatrics professor at the University of Gothenburg says primary care can do a fine job treating childhood obesity. In a press release to promote his new publication, Staffan Mårild says: There’s an attitude that obesity is so terribly difficult to get rid of that you have to send the child to […]
