July 11, 2023 — The emergence of advanced medicines for obesity is teaching us a lot about the overlapping mechanisms that drive desires for alcohol, food, and more. Desire, it seems, is more than just a feeling. It is the product of biological processes that our bodies regulate. But those processes can clearly go astray, and desire for food, […]
June 19, 2023 — An appealing narrative is seductive. Recently, we tripped over a case study in this basic fact when a new study in Nature Metabolism stirred up considerable attention from health reporters with claims about “severely impaired” brain responses to nutrients in humans with obesity. But in retrospect, there’s an plausible argument that the analyses were impaired […]
June 13, 2023 — We are in the midst of a great deal of cognitive dissonance about obesity. Part of the boilerplate description is that it is simply a dietary disease. But recent scientific and therapeutic advances tell a different story – that obesity is just as much a disease of altered brain function as it is a dietary […]
June 5, 2023 — One of the neat tricks of semaglutide and tirzepatide is their unexpected ability to shift the frames of bias through which we look at obesity and human behavior. Neuroscience and behavioral psychology have long told us the human desire for food is not purely a matter of choice. Yet in addressing obesity, weight bias and […]
March 8, 2023 — We would classify this as a report of a side effect. But it’s not really an adverse event. It seems that for some people, the use of semaglutide has prompted less alcohol use. In the New York Times, Dani Blum describes the experience of one patient: “In August 2022, Eva Monsen’s endocrinologist prescribed Ozempic [semaglutide] […]
November 14, 2022 — Two patients. This fits our definition of a small pilot study and Nature Medicine published it recently. In this study, Rajat Shivacharan and colleagues treated binge eating disorder and severe obesity in two patients, using responsive deep brain stimulation. It involves the placement of tiny electrodes in the brain, connected to a pulse generator implanted […]
October 18, 2022 — Yesterday was the first of three days exploring the best scientific thinking in the world on the causes of obesity. From the start, it was plain that obesity presents a puzzle. Physiology, genes, and signals regulate the storage of energy in adipose tissue and thus obesity. But one thing was clear after 12 scientists through […]
May 22, 2022 — Our food environment has changed to contribute to the rise in obesity over the last half century. People disagree about many things in the effort to find policies to reduce obesity. But this presumption is one that most of us can agree upon. The real question, though, is how to define these changes. Are ultra-processed […]
October 9, 2021 — Reporting on non-caloric sweeteners has more in common with reporting on religion than science reporting. We see a constant churn of reporting about studies by people who are looking for evidence to support a belief that sweeteners must be bad for you. The latest headline from NPR on this subject tells us these sweeteners “may […]
July 10, 2021 — Most people – even many healthcare professionals – simply don’t get it. Because the popular concept of bariatric surgery is that it prevents people from eating – just by altering your gut. But the reality is that it works very differently. Bariatric surgery changes the signaling between the brain and the gut in ways that […]
