February 16, 2025 — “Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S. due to the direct relationship with diet-related chronic diseases,” write Emily Matthews and Emma Kurnat-Thoma for Frontiers in Public Health. At the top of the list of “diet-related chronic diseases” is obesity, because it leads to so many other chronic health problems, disability, and […]
February 6, 2025 — From the category of stuff that can’t be good. a study in Nature Medicine this week documents a spoonful of microplastics accumulating in an typical human brain. Alexander Nihart and colleagues used diverse methods to detect microplastics in various tissues (kidney, liver, and brain) of deceased individuals from 2016 and 2024. They found these particles […]
December 31, 2024 — The best thing about this day is that we can finally say we are done with 2024. We can savor the good news it brought and put the bad behind us. And while you are shaking off that bad news, we want to offer you some bad ideas on obesity, nutrition, and health that perhaps […]
December 9, 2024 — Eat healthy and get your exercise. It is a straightforward framework for dealing with obesity. But that simple prescription of diet and exercise for preventing obesity overlooks a critical factor – the prolonged sitting time very often required by work and school. A recent study of data from young adult twins showed that sitting time […]
December 3, 2024 — “This seems like a landmark paper in my books and a call from the other side of the energy balance equation. We seem built to be a highly physically active species, not sedentary office workers and couch dwellers.” With these words, Professor Emeritus Jennie Brand-Miller seized our attention today. She was writing about a new […]
December 2, 2024 — The drumbeat is growing louder. “Public health policies to reduce ultra-processed food intake cannot wait.” These words from Mathilde Touvier summed up her presentation of evidence on these foods from epidemiologic and public health studies at Imperial College London last week. She opened six hours of scholars, politicians, and advocates presenting a compelling case. Clearly, […]
November 11, 2024 — It turns out that obesity researchers may be wasting their time. Business professors have discovered a simple explanation for the rise of obesity. High speed internet is fattening. Pouring over the physiology of obesity and data on potential contributors to its prevalence may be unnecessary. A new economic analysis by Lin, Churchill, and Ackermann constructs […]
November 1, 2024 — A new study in Obesity caught our attention with a claim that “restricting fast food outlets in areas with a high concentration of such outlets as part of a package of policies to reduce childhood obesity may help to reduce prevalence and inequalities.” So we looked a little closer and found a different story in […]
September 21, 2024 — A new study this week gives us pause for concern about the chemicals entering our body from food packaging. Some of them are endocrine disrupting chemicals that can alter the way our body stores fat. Researchers inventoried a total of 14,000 chemicals in contact with food from packaging and found evidence for 3,601 of them […]
September 3, 2024 — For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has promoted the use of sludge from sewage treatment plants as fertilizer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge – known as biosolids in the fertilizer industry – is rich in nutrients that crops need. Plus, using biosolids for this purpose kept them out of […]
