September 22, 2024 — The scientific understanding of obesity is progressing with impressive speed. But the translation of scientific insight into clinical benefits is slow by comparison. Most clinicians (along with the public) are stuck. We’re encumbered by an inadequate definition of obesity, overreliance on BMI, and medical groupthink. Straining for a Clinical Definition In an excellent essay for […]
September 18, 2024 — People who think of obesity simply as a disease of fatness are walking around with a profound misunderstanding of this disease – it is very much a disease of inflammation. This thread of inflammation ties obesity to diabetes and ties both of those diseases to the complications of COVID. New research on COVID and diabetes […]
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 7, 2023 — We have mixed feelings about a new report in JAMA this week about GLP-1 agonists and the associated risk of gastrointestinal adverse events. On one hand, this is helpful data. It is a reminder that despite all of the sensational reporting about “weight loss miracles,” these drugs are serious medicines that require careful prescribing and […]
November 22, 2022 — This is a note of gratitude to Julia Belluz. In a guest essay for the New York Times, she writes beautifully and accessibly about a great gap. It is the gap between science and popular culture in the matter of obesity. She does it while reporting on the recent Royal Society meeting about the causes […]
August 27, 2022 — Doppelgängers are having a moment. These are people who look alike, despite being nominally unrelated. Canadian artist François Brunelle is commanding attention all over the world for his I’M NOT A LOOK-ALIKE! photography project, which he started in 1999. At the same time, a study this week in Cell Reports tells us that looks, genes, […]
