June 12, 2025 — It is undeniable that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. When we gather people from all over the world who understand obesity, this is the number one thing everyone can agree upon. And yet, when we sit down to talk about models for health systems delivering obesity care, it is more likely that folks who […]
May 17, 2025 — This should not be so hard. But apparently it is very hard for people to accept, in their hearts, that the disease of obesity is actually chronic. Yes, people will repeat the words that experts and thought leaders have fed them. “It is undeniable that obesity is a complex, chronic disease.” So says the International […]
May 14, 2025 — New studies released yesterday at ECO2025 remind us doctors and other health professionals often miss things that are quite obvious to people living with obesity. For one thing, there is the phenomenon of food noise. It’s very real for many people with obesity. For health professionals, it can seem a bit abstract. Then there is […]
April 24, 2025 — Can obesity prevention be as simple as telling people to chew more slowly? That’s what the principal investigator of a new study published in Nutrients, Professor Katsumi Iizuka, says: “These are easy, money-saving measures that can be started right away to help prevent obesity. “Incorporating the proposed eating behavior into school lunches and other programs […]
November 19, 2024 — Fat cells don’t forget. That simple fact comes from new research published in Nature yesterday which explains a fundamental truth about obesity that eludes most people in their thinking about this condition. It is a chronic disease. Fat cells have an epigenetic memory for obesity they retain even when people lose a lot of weight. […]
September 8, 2024 — What’s the harm? For many “interventions” to reduce obesity prevalence, this rationale seems to be good enough to spur implementation. Menu labeling is a good example. Restaurants in the U.S. and in numerous other places must publish the number of calories in food portions they sell. This went into effect based upon suppositions. Policy makers […]
August 7, 2024 — The U.S. military has a problem with obesity and frankly has no clue of how to deal with it. The prevalence of obesity in the population has grown so that the services cannot run from the problem. Simply expelling service members because of their size no longer works to maintain military readiness. The supply of […]
August 4, 2024 — Warning: this is a bit of a rant, albeit a good-natured one. The persistent irritant of implicit ignorance about obesity confronts us in virtually every dialogue we have about obesity. Sometimes it gets to be too much. Specifically, it is the presumption woven into almost every conversation about obesity, that obesity is all about bad […]
January 18, 2024 — E.B. White is long gone from this life and Block That Metaphor! is dormant at The New Yorker. But we need them back. The Washington Post has a new and twisted metaphor about obesity treatment, casting Ozempic as something like orthodontia. Kate Cohen writes: “I always thought I’d be thin if I were rich. “I’d […]
September 7, 2023 — The Wegovy brand of semaglutide has finally come to the UK this week – albeit in limited quantities. So in the Guardian, Zoe Williams wonders if this will mean the end to blathering about obesity: “Despite this being a breakthrough, it is going to pose an immense challenge to those, in medicine and beyond, who […]
