December 4, 2023 — By the end of this month, we will be seeing lists of what’s in and what’s out for the coming year. For people whose minds drift toward liver disease, we have an entry. Fatty liver is out and steatotic liver is in. NAFLD goes to the dustbin, replaced by MASLD, while MASH takes over from […]
October 9, 2023 — Words matter. The language we use to describe and discuss obesity conveys and sometimes betrays our understanding of this complex, chronic disease. It betrays that understanding because our implicit biases about obesity are sometimes at odds with our explicit, rational knowledge of it. With a new paper in Gastroenterology Clinics of North America, Ted Kyle, […]
October 1, 2023 — Words matter. They convey both facts and feelings and the wrong words create misunderstandings that are sometimes irreparable. Because of this, we notice the imbalance in public discourse about new medicines for obesity that more often casts them as weight loss drugs than as medicines for the care and treatment of obesity. Fortunately, others are […]
June 14, 2023 — Recent advances in the scientific understanding of obesity has led to more frequent public rejection of explicit weight bias, but implicit bias and stigma remains a serious impediment to health. Language is a potent tool that frames our understanding of obesity. But too often, even in scientific publications, it reflects bias against people with obesity […]
June 15, 2021 — Bias makes us human. It can even help us thrive by recognizing patterns in our lives. But of course, bias is sneaky, reinforcing patterns that keep people down for no good reason. So it is with weight bias – which some people believe causes more harm than obesity itself. One of the ways that weight […]
June 13, 2021 — Adiposity, chubbiness, corpulence, corpulency, embonpoint, fat, fatness, fattiness, fleshiness, grossness, plumpness, portliness, pudginess, pursiness, rotundity, weight. These are Merriam-Webster’s words for obesity. The words attached to weight evoke strong emotions. But they are mostly unpredictable. In fact, new research in Clinical Obesity tells us that people disagree widely in their feelings about weight-related words. However, […]
January 19, 2020 — It is a telling choice of words. More than half of black women over age 20 are categorized as obese, wrote Joseph Williams. Half of America will be considered obese within this decade, says Alyssa Bethencourt. Oliver Williams writes that 18.9 per cent of children in Year 6 are classified as overweight or obese. These […]
