January 12, 2026 — Justin Sung and Dana Small are two neurobiologists offering us some very basic wisdom. It is wisdom with roots in a sophisticated understanding of biology. We should take care not to lose the pleasure of food. In PLOS Biology, they offer a very cogent argument in defense of the pleasure of food. Their bottom line […]
December 22, 2025 — We’ve had a lot to write about this year and you, our readers, have been doing a lot of reading. This running commentary is simply a labor of love. We don’t sell advertising or anything else here, but we do take pleasure when you read what we write and we do pay attention. So with […]
December 9, 2025 — Professor Naveed Sattar has a modest proposal for us. He chairs the UK government’s obesity healthcare goals and says smaller portions might hold the key to reducing obesity in women, children, and shorter persons. Sattar writes in Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: “When only one portion size is offered, women, children and individuals of shorter stature […]
December 7, 2025 — It seems that everywhere we turn, we hear another story about ubiquitous exposure to PFAS – a class of endocrine disrupting chemicals that shows up in water, food, drugs, cosmetics, clothing, and household items. It is part of “pollution’s hidden weight in the obesity epidemic.” This perspective comes from a recent comprehensive examination in Current […]
December 1, 2025 — Soybean oil is the most common cooking oil in the American food supply. By far. If you are consuming a lot of ultra-processed foods, you are consuming a lot of soybean oil. Now, the University of California at Riverside says that a new study links soybean oil to obesity. Specifically, scientists at the university have […]
October 6, 2025 — In good conscience, it is hard to ignore the steady stream of scientific publications that tell us we are putting our children at risk by filling the world with plastics. And yet it seems that the convenience and ubiquity of plastics make it hard to resist. A sweeping new review in Lancet Child and Adolescent […]
September 24, 2025 — The Washington Examiner tells us we can prevent millions of cases of obesity and thousands of strokes simply by dropping twice-a-year time changes. “Study says.” Discover magazine says so, too. The Washington Post is a little more restrained. “We’d all be a little less prone to obesity and strokes if we ditched the switch.” Ditch […]
August 17, 2025 — A new study in Obesity provides another piece of the puzzle of the influence of PFAS in obesity. PFAS is shorthand for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. People also refer to them as “forever chemicals” because they accumulate in our environment and our bodies. The new study tells us that PFAS exposure in teens having metabolic […]
August 11, 2025 — Here’s something to ponder. Floating in the North Atlantic, there are more metric tons of nanoplastics than the combined mass of all mammals living on dry land. That’s a lot. This observation comes from a recent study in the journal Nature. Unfortunately, we cannot be certain of the impact of this ubiquitous pollution on human […]
July 28, 2025 — It is easy to find advice to cut red meat consumption for quite a variety of reasons – including to reduce a person’s risk for weight gain and obesity. AARP advises that “meat is particularly problematic for putting on pounds because it contains protein and saturated fat, both of which promote weight gain.” Obesity is […]
