January 3, 2023 — Every Friday, we get a little bundle of joy in our inbox from the Obesity and Energetics Offerings. It’s a thought-provoking compilation of a week’s worth of new publications related to obesity and biological energy regulation. One feature of it that seldom fails to bring a smile is the Headline vs Study. This week was […]
November 5, 2022 — It’s been quite a week in San Diego and we hope that everyone is safely home or on their way. So with the wrap-up of OW2022 yesterday, here are a few thoughts we’ll take home with us from this remarkable week. 1. Pediatric Obesity Care Is Set to Leap Forward It’s hard to miss this […]
October 22, 2022 — Perhaps the most basic question behind this week’s extraordinary meeting at the Royal Society is how did we wind up with so much obesity? John Speakman addressed this on the final day, explaining that the thrifty genotype hypothesis has been popular ever since James Neel proposed it 60 years ago. But it turns out that […]
February 3, 2022 — We are pretty much done with the label of healthy obesity, because it is a perfect oxymoron. If a pattern of adiposity is healthy, then it’s not obesity. But newly published in eLife is a more thoughtful approach to this subject. This study seeks to untangle the metabolic effects of higher adiposity from other effects […]
January 17, 2022 — The track record for preventing obesity in childhood is not especially impressive. Could it improve with objective measures to identify babies most at risk for obesity as they grow up? A new study of data from the INSIGHT program has found a new polygenic risk score that might help with this. There’s just one little […]
May 3, 2021 — Obesity is a highly heritable condition. But in the general population, genes only explain about 40 to 50 percent of the variability in BMI. How can both of these things be true? Work to understand the causes of obesity spans a century. So scientists have learned a great deal about the genetic inheritance of obesity […]
April 19, 2019 — Facts are stubborn because they’re real. Two new studies in Cell today shine a light on a basic fact about obesity that we’ve known for decades. Obesity is a highly heritable condition. Roughly 70 percent of a person’s risk of obesity is driven by the genes they inherit. But some people work awfully hard to […]
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 […]
December 16, 2018 — GWAS is an acronym that’s hard to avoid if you read much about obesity research. It’s shorthand for genome-wide association studies. And for the last several months, some of the brightest people in obesity research have been debating the merits of hammering away at GWAS that focuses on BMI. Does GWAS research miss the mark […]
October 6, 2018 — The eternal debate grinds on. What determines our destiny more? Nature or nurture? And where does that leave the important matter of free will? When the subject is obesity, this debate is especially contentious. The most common – but incorrect – understanding of obesity holds that it is a failure of willpower. Nature and nurture take a […]
