August 5, 2022 — This news snippet definitely caught our eye. All over the world – even on the mountains of Tibet and Antarctica – it’s raining PFAS. In fact, there’s so much PFAS in rainwater all over the world that rainwater is no longer safe to drink. This news comes from an analysis published by the American Chemical […]
July 29, 2022 — Genuinely, we admire the persistence of David Ludwig. Today in the Washington Post, he has an opinion piece about his opinion piece in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Once again he wants to sell the world on his concept that carbs and insulin are more important for understanding obesity than simply thinking about energy […]
July 27, 2022 — It’s a lot. Writing for USA Today, Karen Weintraub has produced a deep dive into diverse thinking about the complexity of obesity. If you thought USA Today was a place for McNuggets* of superficial reporting, think again. In six parts, with more than 18,000 words, Weintraub has done quite well in painting a picture of […]
July 16, 2022 — On the first full day of YWM Engage, it was plain that this was a different sort of convention for OAC. It was smaller. The group was being very cautious because this rotten pandemic, though it’s less of a threat, isn’t over. So the agenda got right down to the business of bringing everyone up […]
July 13, 2022 — When we wrote recently about stress as an important factor in rising obesity, the natural question popped up. Hasn’t stress always been with us? And of course it has been. But it turns out that it’s pretty easy to find indications that stress is indeed increasing in parallel with obesity. In fact, the American Psychological […]
July 9, 2022 — Obesity prevalence is rising all over the world. But in different cultures and different countries, tremendous variations in obesity are striking. Countries of eastern Asia tend to have very low obesity prevalence. Japan, for example, has an obesity rate of just five percent, according to the World Obesity Federation. Meanwhile, obesity prevalence stands at 43 […]
June 27, 2022 — “I would argue that chronic stress may be the single most common cause of obesity in modern society – even more common than food.” With these words at the opening of Obesity Treatment 2022, Lee Kaplan suggested that we should think about the possibility that we’re looking in the wrong places for the root cause […]
June 21, 2022 — While many researchers are having scholarly debates about their competing models for obesity, they focus primarily upon how food is doing it to us. Is it the excessive supply of hyper-palatable, ultra-processed food? Or is it all about carbs and insulin? But nowhere in these lovely models is there any focus on factors that go […]
June 19, 2022 — All models are wrong, but some are useful. Quite a distinguished collection of obesity researchers are working hard to prove that these words of a great statistician – George Box – were precisely correct. One group, led by David Ludwig, suggests that their carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM) for obesity “better reflects knowledge on the biology of […]
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 […]
