September 13, 2022 — Today we are grateful to Sarah Le Brocq for offering her personal story of the reality of living with obesity. Originally appearing in Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine here under a Creative Commons license, we thank Le Brocq for making it possible for us to share it on ConscienHealth. I grew up on a little Island in the […]
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 7, 2022 — In some circles, food addiction is a wildly popular idea. It’s useful for painting ultra-processed food and the food industry as villains in a narrative about obesity and why we have so much of it. Some people think that promoting narratives about food addiction might help to reduce the stigma attached to obesity. In fact, […]
September 6, 2022 — A landmark expansion of access to medical care for people with low incomes is more than a decade old now. Where politics have not gotten in the way, Medicaid expansion clearly has had a broad effect on health in America. But something that’s less obvious is the benefit of a quiet, though uneven, expansion of […]
September 5, 2022 — The big problem with pop diets is the presumption that the latest, hottest diet on the scene might be THE ANSWER that everyone’s been looking for. Ironically, non-diet diets fit neatly into this template. It’s all part of the abyss that greets people when they go looking for answers about diet, health, and weight. Evangelists […]
September 3, 2022 — ICER – the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review – has released its final report on the effectiveness and value of obesity meds and set a public hearing for September 16. Let’s say it right up front. This private nonprofit is trying to do something that is almost impossibly hard. Making objective sense from the […]
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 31, 2022 — It is nothing short of jaw dropping – U.S. life expectancy once again dropped by almost two years. This news comes from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, which released provisional stats for 2021 today. Up until 2014, the U.S. had seen steady rises in life expectancy. Then in 2015, we saw a small […]
August 30, 2022 — We are living in a profoundly disorienting time. Because of this, we are learning that people have the capacity to rationionalize just about anything. People are plunging into rabbit holes where they encounter mazes of rationalizations about conspiracies all around them. It’s a great tool for politicians who find themselves on shaky ground. But now […]
August 28, 2022 — It’s either depressing or enlightening. When the subject of body weight comes up in pop culture, it brings us into an evidence-free zone. Pop diets compete with anti-diets. Obsessive diet regimens compete with people telling us that we should fuggedaboutit and move on to intuitive eating. Eat whatever your body tells you it wants in […]
