August 8, 2022 — A fascinating debate is unfolding in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It’s mostly about publication bias, but the bottom line question is not so esoteric. Can a nudge make meaningful behavior change happen in a wide variety of situations? Late last year, Stephanie Mertens and colleagues published a meta-analysis of nudging […]
August 6, 2022 — Can we find an intervention to reduce the prevalence of obesity across the population? Marion Nestle tells us one-size-fits-all obesity prevention doesn’t have much promise in her view: “My interpretation of the current status of obesity prevention research is that any single policy intervention is unlikely to show anything but small improvements. Pessimists will say […]
August 3, 2022 — According to a press release from the University of Sheffield, it sounds like the city of London pretty much has obesity prevention figured out. All they had to do is ban adverts for junk food from public transport. Voilà! With that simple act, says the press release, London has prevented nearly 100,000 cases of obesity, […]
July 31, 2022 — Every discussion, every meeting that touches on childhood obesity brings a difficult mixture of encouragement and frustration. The encouragement comes from engagement with good people who have a genuine desire to do the right thing for our children. Everybody wants to see the next generation of children be healthier and have more opportunities than those […]
July 12, 2022 — It seemed like a good idea at the time. Back in 2008, there was a headlong rush to require restaurant menu calorie labeling by decree. New York City tried it first. Other cities and states followed quickly. Tired of fighting it in a dizzying array of local venues, the restaurant industry came on board with […]
July 6, 2022 — Twelve years ago, a very popular First Lady of the United States launched an ambitious campaign to solve the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation. Two papers in Pediatrics yesterday suggest to us that those efforts did not yield the promised solution. In sum, these data tell us that after Let’s Move! began, the […]
May 30, 2022 — It’s pretty easy to find advice to make small changes that stick if a person wants to lose weight – or keep from gaining weight. It certainly sounds authoritative when a PhD psychologist offers up small change theory as a winning strategy: “When you focus on just a couple of small changes at a time, […]
May 24, 2022 — It seems to be an article of faith. Millions of low-income Americans live in food deserts and it puts them at higher risk for obesity. That’s a prevalent narrative to explain the link between poverty and obesity. And thus, the narrative works its way into the interpretation of research on programs for fixing food deserts. […]
May 6, 2022 — As we prepare to put a bow on ECO2022, it’s plain that some things in obesity are changing rapidly. But others are not. Though the reality of coping with it is still far from ideal, the options are getting much better. The scientific understanding of it has grown sharper, but messages to the public aren’t […]
April 3, 2022 — Policies to address obesity across the whole population often make perfect sense to the people who are promoting them. But often, they run into resistance from people looking at obesity from a very different place. Writing in the Guardian, Clare Finney offers a case in point: “For the 1.25 million men and women with eating […]
