January 23, 2026 — Usually, when new medicines have been on the market for a time, warnings tend to accumulate in the prescription labeling. So it is a bit unusual to see the FDA move to remove a warning. But recently, that’s exactly what happened with semaglutide and tirzepatide. FDA is making a course correction on warnings about suicidal […]
January 11, 2026 — Twenty years ago, advocacy for people living with obesity was at ground zero. But now, we are entering a third decade of advocacy for the Obesity Action Coalition. We are in a profoundly different position. So we took the day yesterday to consider with leadership in the OAC community where the next two decades of […]
September 18, 2025 — We get a first glimpse of the potential effect of a GLP-1 agonist, semaglutide, in data presented as a late-breaking abstract at the EASD meeting in Vienna this week. This is just a glimpse because it is survey data – self-reported and uncontrolled. With that caveat, though, Timothy Arnaut and colleagues found large reductions in […]
July 9, 2025 — A new review in Nutrition & Diabetes marks an effort to get serious about lifting an important concept – food noise – out of the realm of inane pop diet chatter. Emily Dhurandhar and colleagues take care in defining food noise: “The formal definition of food noise is persistent thoughts about food that are perceived […]
June 7, 2025 — Mental health often, but not always, improves after metabolic and bariatric surgery. But new research tells us that this is not really a direct consequence of weight reduction. Instead, it seems that better mental health very likely comes from the reduction in experiences of weight stigma. In fact, Larissa McGarrity and colleagues found that the […]
May 21, 2025 — We do not think for a minute that Lilly or Novo Nordisk will be pursuing any sort of mental health indication for semaglutide or tirzepatide. But it increasingly appears that the effect of GLP-1 use for either diabetes or obesity is more positive than negative for mental health. A new systematic review and meta-analysis in […]
October 22, 2024 — Adolescence is hard. With respect to mental health, especially of late, the environment is especially harsh. Even harsher if an adolescent is living with obesity. So a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics showing teens with obesity are having fewer suicidal thoughts when they get a GLP-1 is welcome news. Authors Liya Kerem and Joshua Stokar […]
October 21, 2024 — “We conclude that exercise and video gaming have differential effects on the brain, which may help individuals tailor their lifestyle choices to promote mental and cognitive health, respectively, across the lifespan.” This conclusion comes from a preprint published on PsyArXiv. Science, health, and lifestyle reporters got even more bold with their conclusions. For instance, the […]
August 18, 2024 — The mental health of youth is in serious decline around the world – a decline that is a mirror image of rising obesity. These overlapping tragedies may be independent. But common threads are easy enough to find. An editorial from the Lancet Psychiatry distills perspective from the new Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health: […]
May 26, 2024 — Skimming the headlines, it would be easy to think that the combination of mobile phones and social media are responsible for quite a range of our current ills – including mental health and obesity. If you want to dig deeper, you can find a whole tome on the subject from Jonathan Haidt. He has woven […]
