Posts Tagged ‘obesity as a disease’

All Agree on Moving Past BMI, But Differ on the Details

January 23, 2025 — It was easy to see this coming. Our top prediction for the new year was that the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity would be big news and the spark for a big debate. The news splash was unmistakable. From 92 countries all over the world, more than 3,000 persons lined up for the launch event. […]

Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity: It’s All About Health

January 15, 2025 — We’ve been waiting for this. And judging by the initial responses, the world is ready for it. The Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity has made it official: The clinical disease of obesity is all about health. Not size, not appearance, not BMI. This global consensus report published at long last late yesterday in Lancet Diabetes […]

Five Predictions for 2025 in Obesity, Nutrition, and Health

January 1, 2025 — Thankfully, 2024 is behind us now and we have a blank slate for a whole new year ahead of us. But what can we expect? Well, proverbial (probably Danish) wisdom tells us “prediction is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Nonetheless, here are our top five predictions about what we will see in 2025 […]

Diet & Exercise: Primary, Co-Equal, or Simply a Good Idea?

December 27, 2024 — Diet and exercise is a dominant concept in obesity care that’s in the midst of an identity crisis. In The Atlantic, Daniel Engber sums up one point of view, writing: “Ozempic killed diet and exercise. Doctors might be slow to admit it, but Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are making dieting and exercise obsolete.” While […]

WHO Says Carpe Diem! GLP-1 Agonists Can Spark Transformation

December 19, 2024 — This was a pleasant surprise. For years, the World Health Association avoided the idea that obesity is an actual chronic disease. Today we have evidence for a big shift in thinking. Three senior officials from WHO published a viewpoint in JAMA yesterday to clearly say not only that obesity is a chronic disease, but also […]

Metabolic Surgery: Up, Down, or Sideways?

October 28, 2024 — “Our results provide a national contemporaneous estimate of the decline in metabolic bariatric surgery associated with the era of GLP-1 RAs.” Writing in JAMA Network Open last week, Kevin Lin, Ateev Mehrotra, and Thomas Tsai say rates of metabolic surgery dropped 26% in 2023 as use of GLP-1 medicines for obesity more than doubled. Nonetheless, […]

Encumbered by Obesity, BMI, and Medical Groupthink

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 […]

ESC Congress: Everyone Now Claims the Disease of Obesity

September 4, 2024 — If nothing else, the ESC (European for Cardiology) Congress in London this week made one thing clear – everyone in mainstream medicine is now ready to claim the disease of obesity. Cardiologists all over the world are adopting a view we’ve been espousing here for decades. Obesity is not a lifestyle. Not a behavioral problem. […]

Military Readiness at Every Size?

August 7, 2024 — The U.S. military has a problem with obesity and frankly has no clue of how to deal with it. The prevalence of obesity in the population has grown so that the services cannot run from the problem. Simply expelling service members because of their size no longer works to maintain military readiness. The supply of […]

Wrestling with BMI in the Annals of Internal Medicine

July 24, 2024 — It’s nice, really. People are paying attention to obesity, its definition, and the bias they bring to the subject. If you need evidence of this, look no further than a series of three new editorials in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They’re wrestling with BMI and the definition of obesity. The authors present a range […]