March 4, 2025 — It is about time. The world is waking up to the realization that rising global obesity is not a problem of personal failures. Rather, it is the product of systems with the unintended effect of promoting obesity while denying people care for this chronic disease. At the heart of World Obesity Day 2025 is the […]
February 14, 2025 — New data from CDC (yes, it’s still there) tells us obesity is still growing steadily in children, while in adults, the growth in prevalence appears to be on pause. But in both children and adults, rates for severe obesity are continuing to grow. These data, published in JAMA yesterday by Samuel Emmerich and colleagues, come […]
February 5, 2025 — Yesterday, another report came out to suggest that the prevalence of obesity and overweight may have peaked in the American population – at a combined prevalence of 75%. This particular report comes from Epic Research, based on electronic health records for more than 100 million patients. Every time one of these reports emerges, headlines are […]
December 14, 2024 — Let’s be quite clear. This is encouraging news, but it is nothing more than a glimmer of a possibility that there is a drop in U.S. obesity prevalence showing up in 2023. The data come from electronic health records. From a sample of 16,743,822 U.S. adults, Benjamin Rader, Rebecca Hazan, and John Brownstein analyzed 47,939,382 […]
October 28, 2024 — “Our results provide a national contemporaneous estimate of the decline in metabolic bariatric surgery associated with the era of GLP-1 RAs.” Writing in JAMA Network Open last week, Kevin Lin, Ateev Mehrotra, and Thomas Tsai say rates of metabolic surgery dropped 26% in 2023 as use of GLP-1 medicines for obesity more than doubled. Nonetheless, […]
October 1, 2024 — Almost immediately when the COVID pandemic came to dominate our lives, speculation began that the stress and changes it brought would make us all gain weight. Such speculation has not let up, even now. But it turns out that for adults, this is a false narrative. The best data we have for population-based estimates of […]
September 16, 2023 — The question that fuels much curiosity about obesity seems simple enough. What is it that sparked an increase in the prevalence of obesity beginning in the 1980s? But a new paper in Science Advances suggests this may altogether be the wrong question. That’s because Mads Møller Pedersen, Claus Thorn Ekstrøm, and Thorkild I.A. Sørensen have […]
June 21, 2022 — While many researchers are having scholarly debates about their competing models for obesity, they focus primarily upon how food is doing it to us. Is it the excessive supply of hyper-palatable, ultra-processed food? Or is it all about carbs and insulin? But nowhere in these lovely models is there any focus on factors that go […]
September 19, 2019 — Popular culture is having a moment. All the talk about fat shaming that started two weeks ago is still echoing through the media – supporting a clear view that explicit weight bias is a bad thing. Apparently some people really did think that shaming people might be a tool for making them healthier. So the […]
May 9, 2019 — “There’s a heck of a lot of bias among a lot of researchers,” Professor Barry Popkin tells us. On the subject of what’s driving global obesity prevalence, he’s certainly right. Is it the urbanization? To be sure, many authoritative voices promote that view. But it’s just not that simple. A new paper, published yesterday in […]
