March 23, 2023 — We face a pivot point for public health strategies to prevent obesity. The advent of advanced medicines for obesity treatment brings critical questions. Can we find better strategies for preventing obesity at the entrance to causal pathways for it? Or will we instead depend solely on medical interventions to reduce the harm it causes? These […]
March 21, 2023 — Both colon cancer and obesity are rising in young people. In fact, a new report in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians suggests colorectal cancer is on the way to becoming the deadliest cancer for people under 50. While colon cancer death rates are dropping for older persons, they are headed in the opposite direction […]
March 18, 2023 — The search for effective prevention strategies in obesity is daunting. For decades now, researchers have been casting about for effective ways to educate, nudge, or cajole groups of people into moving more and eating less or better. Trying to influence a group of people means that controlled studies of interventions can wind up being cluster-randomized […]
March 6, 2023 — For the health of the U.S. population, this is a bad sign. While healthcare has done well to bringing down the prevalence of high cholesterol in young persons, diabetes and obesity are surging. Hypertension? It’s in between – neither rising nor falling in persons 20 to 44 over the timespan from 2009 to 2020. These […]
March 3, 2023 — An interesting collision of stories is playing out in the media today. It comes at the end of Obesity Care Week and on the eve of World Obesity Day. On one hand, the Economist proclaims that “new drugs could spell an end to the world’s obesity epidemic.” On the other, hand the World Obesity Federation […]
March 1, 2023 — “The only way to reverse our obesity epidemic is by preventing obesity in the first place.” This perfect expression of a perfectly unreal approach to obesity appears in The Hill today. Optimism about obesity treatment is “not warranted,” write Anthony Biglan and Diana Fishbein. Instead, businesses must stop selling us food “with an irresistible taste.” […]
February 21, 2023 — “This childhood obesity prevention program works best,” says the headline from Futurity. It’s a catchy headline with a catch. The catch is that there’s absolutely no evidence in the research this story highlights regarding the effectiveness of programs for actually preventing obesity. None. Works in this context apparently means that the obesity prevention program runs […]
February 16, 2023 — Among folks concerned with obesity, nutrition, and health for kids, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) is a bright spot in the list of accomplishments on school nutrition. But until now, there was little evidence that this or anything else that fell under the umbrella of Let’s Move! had done much to move the needle […]
February 12, 2023 — Strategies for obesity prevention are in the midst of a great shift in emphasis – from healthy choices to healthy systems. For decades now, public health efforts, in one way or another, have had their roots in promoting better choices. It started with efforts to educate the public to eat in more healthful ways and […]
February 6, 2023 — Authors of a new study in Preventive Medicine Reports tell us that their program “shows promise for obesity prevention among children in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.” But there’s a catch. The study failed to show a significant effect on the study’s primary outcome measure for obesity prevention – BMI z-score. Undaunted, Milagros Rosal and colleagues call […]
