September 21, 2018 — Perhaps your mother told you cleanliness is next to godliness. That concept found its way into a 1778 sermon by John Wesley. But it’s even older than that. Ancient Babylonian and Hebrew religious texts have the earliest references. Now, CMAJ wants to put cleanliness next to obesity. Could there be a clean connection? An Association with […]
April 7, 2018 — We’ll say it again. You don’t need a scientific reason to hate artificial sweeteners. It’s OK. But even so, people keep coming up with speculation, dressing it up with science, and making unfounded claims about the bad effects of sweeteners. Today, Moises Velasquez-Manoff is telling us in the New York Times that germs love diet soda. […]
May 31, 2017 — Forget the Biggest Loser. Perhaps we should be paying more attention to the smallest losers. We mean the microbes in our guts that serve to digest all of that food we eat. New research is making it clear that the gut microbiome changes profoundly after the most effective widely-used weight loss surgery – gastric bypass. Profound Microbiome […]
November 25, 2016 — How does a mouse study about the role of gut microbes in weight regulation become a study of “yo-yo dieting?” The answer, unfortunately, is heavy-handed academic public relations and sloppy health reporting. The case in point is a perfectly good mouse study published yesterday in the journal Nature. The authors found evidence in mice that […]
October 29, 2016 — ObesityWeek offers a perfect opportunity to chase down hot topics. And one of the hottest in obesity over the past decade has been the link (look out!) between our bugs and guts and obesity. In a session chaired by Obesity Society President Penny Gordon-Larsen, top researchers on the microbiome will give us a thoughtful update on this […]
January 17, 2016 — It sounds faintly like science fiction: A range of societal changes, including use of antibiotics and increasing consumption of food additives, have provoked microbiota aggression and, consequently, may be contributing factors to the increased incidence of obesity and its associated diseases. Have we indeed provoked more aggressive microbes to displace some of the hundreds of trillions of bacteria that peacefully […]
June 28, 2015 — “Our genes certainly haven’t changed as quickly as obesity has increased.” That logic fragment frequently surfaces to justify blaming people living with obesity for their condition. Yet in the population, we see evolving obesity prevalence that is entrenched at levels well above historic levels. The obvious explanation is that our genetic inheritance sets the table for obesity, […]
March 10, 2015 — No, this is not about data that’s garbage, or for that matter, sewage. It’s about looking for meaningful insight about patterns of obesity in an expected place. It’s about scientists finding new evidence about obesity in the sewer. Ryan Newton and colleagues took the unusual approach of examining evidence of differences in the microbiomes of sewage […]
February 28, 2015 — The difference between mice, men, and women is eluding health journalists who are churning out headlines about common food ingredients — emulsifiers — causing obesity, metabolic syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. The study that prompted this enthusiastic reporting probes the effects of two very common emulsifiers — cellulose gum and polysorbate — on the microbiome […]
February 9, 2015 — Fecal transplant has quickly moved from the status of a medical oddity to an accepted, lifesaving therapy for Clostridium dificile colitis. In parallel to its development for c. diff, obesity researchers have been studying the impact of transplanting fecal microbes from animals with obesity to animals without it, and vice versa. So the case report of a […]
