March 21, 2019 — The simple and prevalent view of obesity is that it results from bad choices in diet and exercise. However, that view omits the role of a major factor – stress. In the Annual Review of Psychology, Janet Tomiyama offers an excellent review of the vicious cycle of stress and obesity. Multiple Pathways The connection between […]
March 11, 2019 — An old and reliable bit of clickbait has just surfaced from a rather obscure journal. In SSM – Population Health, Emla Fitzsimons and Benedetta Pongiglione claim to have “causal evidence” that a mother’s employment effects a child’s BMI. Naturally, British headline writers went nuts. So now we have another round of the obesity blame game […]
March 4, 2019 — It sounded like she was thinking about scrambling eggs. “I don’t want to crack open Medicare Part D for obesity meds,” said this bright young Senate health staffer last week. “Don’t you think a lot of this is coming from depression?” she asked. Such are the questions we hear from some policymakers about obesity care. […]
February 28, 2019 — Choosing is something that people hold dear. Even if we’re not always good at it. So, quite naturally, when people assume that obesity is all about food (not exactly true), they assume that the answer is better food choices. But a new review from Trends in Cognitive Sciences gives us reason to pause and think. […]
February 19, 2019 — UPDATE: Within days of our posting below, Medscape posted the following retraction notice. While we welcome thought-provoking and even controversial points of view in our commentaries and in comments from our readers, we do not endorse weight bias, nor bias towards any group. After careful review, the editors at Medscape have decided to retract this […]
February 11, 2019 — If there’s one assumption about what’s causing the global pandemic of obesity that is nearly universal, it’s the food supply. Some people describe it cautiously. Others not so much. For instance, the recent Lancet Commission report was pretty blunt. “Ultra-processed foods are a key driving force in the global obesity pandemic,” says the Commission. A Simple […]
February 6, 2019 — Last week, the Lancet Commission on obesity offered us a pretty bleak view of the future. The current approach to obesity prevention is failing. Food and fuel industries are dooming us to a future that is overweight, underwater, and malnourished. But what do the data say? Ruopeng An and Shen Zhang provide a systematic review […]
January 27, 2019 — New research in PLOS Genetics provides deeper insight than ever into the role that skinny genes may play in protecting an individual from obesity. Senior investigator Sadaf Farooqi sums it up: This research shows for the first time that healthy thin people are generally thin because they have a lower burden of genes that increase a […]
January 26, 2019 — The language of cause cause and effect is slippery. That’s what we’ve learned this week from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “The Impact of U.S. Free Trade Agreements on Calorie Availability and Obesity: A Natural Experiment in Canada” appeared last May in that journal. This week, the authors of that article explained that “impact” is […]
January 21, 2019 — New research published last week in Cell offers a glimpse of how a critical part of the brain gets wired for obesity very early in life. Sebastien Bouret, a senior author, explains: We know that the brain, in particular an area called the hypothalamus, has a very important role in the regulation of food intake […]
