May 21, 2024 — We are witnessing a conversion experience. With the publication of a new policy statement yesterday, the American Heart Association jumped in with both feet to call for closing the gap between obesity science and the typical care that people with obesity receive. Their statement says: “Experts have learned a great deal about the causes of […]
February 25, 2024 — Are we cynical? We can surely find excuses to be. Examples of cynicism pop up at every glance. Certainly we see it in politics and public policy. Closer to home at ConscienHealth, people routinely find reasons for cynicism about all kinds of medical research and advice – especially nutrition and obesity. This is a real […]
April 11, 2023 — Right now, it seems that medical education is failing to prepare students to deal with the most prevalent chronic disease in America – obesity. In an interview with STAT last month, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf noted this failure. “I think it’s a shame that you would need to depend on a pharmaceutical company for an […]
March 19, 2023 — People want to be seen and heard. To feel like they matter. But in research and policy related to obesity, this fact was long neglected for many reasons. The principal reasons have much to do with stigma and the explicit dehumanization of people with this disease. With explicit efforts to overcome these issues, we see […]
March 10, 2023 — Anyone who doesn’t think a major shift in public perceptions about obesity is not underway has simply not been paying attention. Public discourse about this complex chronic disease is more intense (albeit sometimes frustrating) than we have seen in more than two decades of work on obesity. We see a pattern of three threads in […]
July 16, 2022 — On the first full day of YWM Engage, it was plain that this was a different sort of convention for OAC. It was smaller. The group was being very cautious because this rotten pandemic, though it’s less of a threat, isn’t over. So the agenda got right down to the business of bringing everyone up […]
June 24, 2022 — For decades now, Lee Kaplan and Caroline Apovian have led what was known as the Blackburn Course in Obesity Medicine every year at Harvard in June. This year, the name of the course has changed to Obesity Treatment 2022. It has moved to the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, where Richard Rothstein has joined Kaplan […]
April 27, 2022 — Around the world, we have a big obesity knowledge gap in medical schools. A few years ago, Marissa Mastrocola and colleagues documented this in the International Journal of Obesity. But the good news is that people are working on closing that gap. This week, a group of medical educators published a new set of obesity […]
March 20, 2022 — “Focusing on cancer, focusing on obesity, focusing on diabetes, a whole range of diseases … we’re going to make significant breakthroughs.” This in a nutshell is the aspiration for ARPA-H, as voiced by President Joe Biden. It is a new agency with a billion dollars of funding for the next three years, passed in a bipartisan […]
February 5, 2022 — Energy storage? That is the obsolete view about the function of fat tissue that drives much of public health policy on obesity. Energy in, energy out. Eat less, move more. But in reality, fat tissue is an endocrine organ. It is highly active, complex, and essential for health. With exquisite detail, a new review paper […]
