March 28, 2020 — Being certain sometimes means being certainly wrong. For decades now, we’ve assumed that childhood obesity is a problem that stems unhealthy eating. “One of the best strategies to reduce childhood obesity is to improve the eating and exercise habits of your entire family,” says the Mayo Clinic. But a new study in JAMA tells us […]
March 2, 2020 — Today for Obesity Care Week, the focus is weight bias, which lies at the core of our problems with making progress against obesity. It’s the core problem because it frustrates us in two ways. First of all, intellectual bias about obesity itself leads some very smart people to think (and say) some very dumb things […]
February 27, 2020 — We are swimming in a sea of implicit weight bias. At its most basic, the bias is this: obesity is a behavioral problem. When we tell people, no, it’s a problem of physiology, most often they can’t accept it. Tell them it’s highly heritable and they often spit back at us. “Genes are not destiny!” […]
February 19, 2020 — A new study this week in Pediatrics for the first time shows that children with late bedtimes have a higher risk of obesity. That association is even stronger if a child has parents with obesity. It’s not totally clear what this tells us – if anything – about cause and effect. But it’s reasonably clear […]
February 17, 2020 — Why do we have so much obesity? One possible answer is evolution. By this, we don’t mean human evolution. Rather, we mean commercial evolution – of an obesogenic food supply. Many have suggested that the problem lies with addictive foods. Michael Moss tells a slick story about the evil food industry engineering hyperpalatable food that […]
February 16, 2020 — It’s a disquieting thought. Pollution in our fat is a real, measurable thing. But that’s precisely why it deserves a closer look. Vicente Mustieles and Juan Arrebola explain in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Fat tissue is an important endocrine organ. And it’s also the place in our bodies where endocrine disrupting chemicals […]
February 8, 2020 — Today we have the privilege of presenting at the Methodist Health System Digestive Institute Symposium in Dallas. Mixed in with some truly distinguished experts on gastroenterology, we’ll be exploring evolving policies on obesity. But most important, we’ll be examining why progress in reducing obesity has been so elusive. And above all, how can we make […]
January 27, 2020 — While the planet warms up, our bodies are cooling down. That’s right. Declining human body temperatures are a fact of the last 200 years. A new study in eLife tells us that average body temperatures have cooled by 1.6% over the last 200 birth years. If you thought that 37°C or 98.6°F is the norm […]
January 23, 2020 — People with a cause like to hook it up with childhood obesity. Breastfeeding is good for both mother and child. But it doesn’t magically prevent childhood obesity – no matter how many times advocates try to suggest it does. Likewise, overusing antibiotics is a huge problem – mainly because it leads to huge problems with […]
January 9, 2020 — We ought to be the masters of our own fate. Pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Get up and do what needs to be done. And you know what? Most people do their best. However, this little inspirational talk is no substitute for medical facts. And the fact is that obesity is a highly heritable, […]
