September 28, 2020 — The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is offering up wisdom for the world on obesity in the New York Times. The whole world is getting fat, he says. But according to him, it’s definitely not a problem of access to healthful foods: “People have got to become wiser about their food choices. And if […]
August 23, 2020 — Sage advice from an attorney about making safety claims for any product: safe is a four-letter word. In other words, an absolute assurance of safety is almost always a lie. So the challenge is to figure out if something is safe enough. For example,consider the “everywhere chemical” known as BPA (bisphenol-A). A new study in […]
August 19, 2020 — There’s no way to gloss over this mess. Nor should we. The Journal of Internal Medicine made a terrible mess when they published a paper on the role of physiology in African American women with obesity. That mess exposes the how blind people can be to racism. We are perhaps even more blind to the […]
August 16, 2020 — Who knew that Boris Johnson was a secret fan of Michelle Obama? If imitation is sincere flattery, we see some flattery of her in the new Better Health campaign coming from the NHS. Let’s Move! has become Let’s Do This! So the UK is on a crash course of self-directed weight loss, with a little […]
August 11, 2020 — Food insecurity may well be the next pandemic that results from COVID-19. But new research in JAMA Network Open tells us that the problem is already here. Candice Myers, Emily Mire, and Peter Katzmarzyk tell us food insecurity doubled between 2000 and 2016 in the U.S. Moreover, with this doubling, obesity rose in close correlation. […]
August 10, 2020 — “I know about people like you.” Twenty-five years after visiting a church in a new community that would would soon be our new home, we still remember those words. Those words come to mind as we read the words of Larry Elliott in the Guardian. Larry Elliott is the economics editor for the Guardian. So […]
July 28, 2020 — For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken wrote this in 1920, well before the the health challenge of obesity flummoxed us. But he described our systematic failures with obesity almost perfectly. Obesity is a problem of complex systems that conspire to harm our health. Simple, […]
July 12, 2020 — For 15 years, the OAC has made the impossible seem doable. Twenty years ago, it seemed impossible to have people with obesity banding together. In fact, one of the smartest thinkers in obesity told us that people would never sign up for such a thing. “Obesity is way too stigmatized,” he said. But nobody told […]
July 6, 2020 — For decades now, we’ve been debating the role of macronutrients in weight gain. But that fierce debate has yielded precious little consensus. Low-fat dietary guidance ruled the land for decades. Right now, low-carb diets seem to have the upper hand. However, in a new webinar, Kevin Hall suggests that neither calories, carbs, nor fat tell […]
June 21, 2020 — We’ve seen quite a range of responses to the observation that obesity leads to worse outcomes with COVID-19. But most of them are unhelpful. First, of course, was denial. Now we have the anger phase. Over in the U.K., folks are murmuring that we should blame the food industry. Writing in the BMJ, Monique Tan, […]
