November 12, 2024 — For several years now it has been apparent that success in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease has slowed or stopped. This is part of the story of declining U.S. life expectancy that headlines often overlook. New research at the upcoming AHA Scientific Sessions tells us rising obesity might explain much of this trend. In […]
October 18, 2024 — We are seeing a subtle, but important shift in the way scholars of population health are looking at obesity and the people it affects. At one time, the implicit bias was to discount those who already have the disease. There’s little we can do for them was the thought behind this. Sometimes it was even […]
September 26, 2024 — It was an interesting day that we spent talking with health policy makers in the Senate yesterday. Refreshing in a way, because the conversations about obesity are so different from the conversations we were having just a few years ago. Not a single person raised the false issue of “personal responsibility” for “being obese.” Only […]
August 31, 2024 — This is a truly remarkable finding. In the middle of the SELECT study of semaglutide for preventing deaths in people with obesity and heart disease, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. So researchers nimbly adapted and began collecting data on COVID outcomes. They found a big surprise. People who got COVID-19 and were treated with semaglutide had […]
July 5, 2024 — Dietary supplements generated U.S. sales of $177 billion in 2023 and multivitamins are the single most common dietary supplement that people actually take. According to NIH, about one in three of us take one. The use of them goes up with age, perhaps as a response as mortality comes into sharper view. But a new […]
June 7, 2024 — Mandisa Lynn Hundley was an American gospel and contemporary Christian recording artist. Known simply as Mandisa, her death on April 18 this year at the age of 47 was due to complications of class 3 obesity. Though obesity is quite common and its complications are frequent causes of death, Mandisa is a rare example of […]
May 25, 2024 — We’ve been waiting for this. Back in October, headlines flashed the news that Novo Nordisk had stopped a big outcomes study of semaglutide and its effect on kidney failure and death. They stopped it because it had worked so well. Continuing to give a placebo to half the people in the study would have been […]
May 6, 2024 — Sometime in the 1960s, economist Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate, advised colleagues that torturing a set of data can always yield a confession to serve the purpose at hand. As if to prove this adage, a new publication in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology shows us 1,208 ways to analyze NHANES data on all-cause mortality […]
February 29, 2024 — What could explain the observation that self-reports of exercise predict less of a benefit for men than women? In the Journal of the American College of Cardiology researchers nimbly leap to a conclusion that women get greater gains in mortality risk reduction from “equivalent doses” of physical activity. But would men exaggerate their self-reports? When […]
November 26, 2023 — As an article of faith, we like to believe that healthy habits will lead us to a longer life. So of course, it makes sense to develop healthy habits for eating, enjoy an active life, and get enough good sleep every night. But putting a number on the benefit of those habits is not so […]
