February 10, 2025 — The remarkable advances of the last few years in understanding and responding to obesity all comes from insight into a place in your brain that’s about the size of an almond. It is your hypothalamus. In Nature last week, researchers from Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute published a detailed map of the human hypothalamus. […]
April 24, 2024 — Clickbait is a new spin on an old thing. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll used to be the formula for drawing eyes to advertising. Now the hottest clickbait is sex, alcohol, and GLP-1 drugs. People magazine tells us this month that GLP-1 agonists “may impact the desire to drink alcohol or have sex.” Oh […]
April 12, 2024 — Do our brains respond differently to food cues when we’re feeling lonely or socially isolated? New research from UCLA certainly suggests this may be true. Researchers from UCLA published findings in JAMA Network Open last week from an analysis of functional MRI (fMRI) scans of 93 women with varying levels of self-reported social isolation. The women […]
February 20, 2024 — The potential for benefits to brain function with effective obesity treatment is becoming difficult to miss. In particular, a new observational study of brain function in a cohort of patients receiving metabolic surgery for treatment of obesity is drawing much attention right now in JAMA Network Open. It suggests the possibility of a lasting benefit […]
December 31, 2023 — “We have found a way to soothe the pain of living in this society by stimulating the reward pathway with unhealthy foods just as people do with alcohol and drugs.” This blunt obserservation landed in our inbox with a thud from obesity scientist and clinician Caroline Apovian last week. A counterbalance to the optimistic talk […]
December 19, 2023 — For some time now, scientists have noted that GLP-1 agonists have effects on more than just blood sugar and body weight. They seem to have an effect on systemic inflammation. For more than a decade, researchers have been exploring their anti-inflammatory effects. But a key question has remained: exactly how do GLP-1 agonists help with […]
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 […]
