January 14, 2023 — What exactly is a healthy lifestyle? If you dig into a certain corner of public health research, you are likely to come up with healthy patterns of eating, physical activity, sleep, and stress management as the answer. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, has a different answer for you. Fitness culture defines a […]
June 1, 2022 — When “health plans” tell someone seeking treatment for obesity it’s a vanity thing, we are not fooled. They simply don’t want to pay the bill. Health plan? Not really. It’s a lot like car insurance. It pays for a wreck. Not so much for preventing one. Writing in the New York Times today, Gina Kolata […]
March 15, 2022 — The pandemic isn’t done with us yet. Cases are rising a bit in Europe and it’s anyone’s guess where this is heading. But certainly, it appears that many of us are done with the pandemic. Does this mean the boom in meal kits will fade? Will it turn out that they were just a pandemic […]
May 17, 2021 — At the height of the pandemic in 2020, mindfulness had quite a moment. In some corners of the world, the peak of the pandemic may have passed. Has the peak of interest in mindfulness passed, too? If our searches on Google are any indication, this may be the case. Perhaps people are more interested in […]
January 9, 2021 — We seem to be living in boom times for home fitness – at least for the folks selling it. In 2019, people wondered if Peloton would be a flash in the pan. After a 2019 IPO at 29 dollars per share, its stock price dropped by more than 30 percent in early 2020. But that […]
December 23, 2020 — China is going to eliminate food waste and fight obesity in a single stroke of regulation. How, you ask? Operation Empty Plate will expand into law. China will make it a crime to promote food waste, including overeating. The hilarity of naive efforts to regulate food marketing never disappoints. Stiff Fines for Bad Marketing Right […]
November 8, 2020 — Even chaos is a business opportunity. So it seems that the market for calm is booming – both as a state of mind and a popular health app. This week the company behind the health app named Calm seized an opportunity. They sponsored those jarring election news alerts on CNN that were delivering the precise […]
October 29, 2020 — The New York Times seems to think that even our refrigerators are polarized. Let’s just say they have a bias that favors polarization. Political agitation is good for their business model – just as it is for Fox News. But seriously, the Times collected more than a thousand images of refrigerators through a mobile phone […]
September 28, 2020 — The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is offering up wisdom for the world on obesity in the New York Times. The whole world is getting fat, he says. But according to him, it’s definitely not a problem of access to healthful foods: “People have got to become wiser about their food choices. And if […]
September 9, 2020 — Eight years of change packed into one month. COVID-19 has changed food shopping. All of a sudden, everything about the ways we hunt and gather our meals is different. For one thing, we’re making fewer trips and more clicks. But we’re buying more and buying in new ways. Professor Anna Nagurney tells the New York […]
