November 12, 2022 — It’s interesting to trace the slow evolution of thinking about the food environment and efforts to understand why it seems to be triggering ever more obesity. Food policy advocates have shifted from worrying about too much fat, to a focus on sugar, and now toward thinking that the problem must be ultra-processed foods with too […]
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 […]
November 4, 2022 — For decades now, considerable resources have gone toward efforts to prevent the ongoing rise of obesity in the population. But with little success. It keeps on rising. So it seems reasonable to ask, do we have the tools we need for the task of effective obesity prevention? Professor Lisa Powell provided us with some mixed […]
October 23, 2022 — “Prevention is better than cure. We don’t even want people to gain excess weight. We want to have a food system in which people can eat healthily and not become fat.” This assertion came at the end of three days of an outstanding program for presenting and discussing theories, conjectures, and evidence about the causes […]
October 20, 2022 — Frustration or amazement. Take your pick. John Speakman brought a close to three days of some of the best presentations ever on the causes of obesity and summed things up nicely: “The causes of obesity turn out to be exceedingly complex. Although I’ve learned a lot, we’ve not reached any sort of conclusion about what […]
September 24, 2022 — “There is more to obesity than meets the eye,” write James René Jolin and Fatima Cody Stanford in the Postgraduate Medical Journal. But too often, visible behaviors and appearances guide our responses to this disease. So we end up wondering why the result of earnest efforts to reduce it in both individuals and the population […]
September 11, 2022 — Candid conversations about obesity prevention can be difficult. Longstanding prevention strategies are not really working too well. “It’s so hard to change BMI at the population level,” said Marlene Schwartz of Yale’s Rudd Center recently at the National Academy of Sciences. She’s right. We know that many factors all around us are driving more obesity […]
September 2, 2022 — It’s barely September. Labor Day isn’t here yet. But pumpkin spice is all around us already. It’s not just Starbucks, it’s more than sugary coffee drinks, it’s in everything and the marketing intent is clear. Consume it! Even though health policy folks are still pushing soda taxes to fight obesity, we’re here to tell you […]
August 20, 2022 — Fast food and junk food are slippery and pejorative terms that many people equate with a risk of obesity. Most people – even people who routinely consume it – presume that fast food is not good for health. With the release of Super Size Me in 2004, we seemed to hit a peak in the […]
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 […]
