January 29, 2023 — Reading about the heated and not terribly well-reasoned arguments people are having about obesity prompts a sad conclusion. A history of ineffective and, at times, harmful anti-obesity campaigns may have poisoned the well of public sentiment about obesity. People have such strong feelings that facts and reason become irrelevant. Aggrieved Advocates for People with Eating […]
November 11, 2022 — Are college sports having an issue with body image and health? Mental health of elite athletes received a great deal of attention during the Tokyo Olympics. Simone Biles captured public attention as she struggled with the subject. New reporting, though, points to more specific problems with body image and health in college sports, especially among […]
October 1, 2022 — Boredom is unpleasant for a reason – our brain wants action from us. It is a signal that, whatever we’re doing, something isn’t right. We’re not engaged with it or we’re not finding meaning in it. We need to change course. So one way or another, we will respond to that discomfort prompting us for […]
September 22, 2022 — Problems are messy, so to solve them, humans quite naturally move to make them tidy. We sort them, label them, and get to work on resolving them. But news this week reminds us that health issues often resist our efforts to sort them out and find tidy solutions. The USPSTF this week published a draft […]
September 4, 2022 — The Greek fabulist Aesop recognized it thousands of years ago. No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. But now we have experimental evidence to back him up. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley conducted a series of four experiments showing that small acts of kindness have much bigger effects than people realize. They tell […]
August 24, 2022 — In so many ways, it’s become plain that children have carried a big burden in the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, there have been disruptions to their social and educational lives. They’ve suffered trauma from losing parents and caregivers. And then there’s the documented rise in obesity. But just last week came some of the most […]
August 13, 2022 — Two new studies in Pediatric Obesity point to a common theme. It seems that healthcare providers, parents, and youth all, for various reasons, may be avoiding the subject of adolescent obesity. It is a difficult subject for all three groups – largely because of concerns about emotional well-being. Whether parents and youth talk about or […]
July 19, 2022 — We’ve all spent well more than two years in a weird state of being intensely connected through technology, yet feeling disconnected from people. Zoom is a great tool, but it has its limits. Research on mental health and technology can support just about any bias you bring to the subject. Maybe it’s connecting us while […]
July 13, 2022 — When we wrote recently about stress as an important factor in rising obesity, the natural question popped up. Hasn’t stress always been with us? And of course it has been. But it turns out that it’s pretty easy to find indications that stress is indeed increasing in parallel with obesity. In fact, the American Psychological […]
May 5, 2022 — This news from ECO2022, sadly, is not surprising. At an outstanding session on mental health and stigma, Sally Abbott presented new research on the implicit weight bias. In fact, she measured it in healthcare providers from UK bariatric services. These were mostly dietitians, psychologists, and nurses. More than 40 percent of these HCPs held implicit […]
