January 30, 2022 — You may have noticed. Evidence of skepticism, disagreement, and polarization is all around us. These phenomena are notably – sometimes disturbingly – present in dialogue about public health. We suppose that a pandemic puts stresses on people that explain some of this behavior. Healthy skepticism indeed is a good thing. Its roots lie in objectivity […]
January 9, 2022 — “Know that BMI is BS.” On NPR’s Life Kit podcast, that’s the advice for coping with the boogeyman of diet culture. Whatever diet culture is, in this season of anxiety about weight and health, it certainly seems to be on the minds of many influencers. So if one defines diet culture as a preoccupation with […]
November 23, 2021 — “The way that fat people and thin people experience this conversation is worlds apart,” says Michael Hobbes on a recent episode of his Maintenance Phase podcast with Aubrey Gordon. He’s describing a heated debate about catastrophizing obesity that has been smoldering for almost two decades. This is a conflict between two views of obesity. One […]
November 9, 2021 — A few weeks ago, nutrition researchers at Tufts released Food Compass. It is a complex algorithm for scoring the healthfulness of foods on a scale of 1 to 100. I’ve not yet heard a positive assessment from RDN colleagues. The tool has generated anger and rage on Twitter, which is to be expected. Personally I […]
September 5, 2021 — The global food industry is huge – so big that people have a hard time putting firm numbers on it. But roughly, it’s worth about ten trillion dollars. It’s also very diverse. The top ten multinational food and beverage companies add up to only half a trillion dollars of those sales. Nonetheless in public health […]
August 22, 2021 — Make no mistake about it, public health is a righteous cause. Overwhelmingly, people choose careers in public health because they believe in the mission and they want to make a difference in the world. But righteous causes can bring a loss of objectivity. It happens because strong, human feelings come into play. When we hear […]
August 8, 2021 — Anger is circulating freely these days. It’s nothing new. But harnessing anger and its close cousin – fear – is a skill social media algorithms seem to have mastered. Thus, politicians see an opportunity and anger grows. Punitive public policy scores points with constituents stoked by anger and fear. It seldom solves problems, though. In […]
June 3, 2021 — Five years ago, Chile adopted innovative regulations of food marketing to combat the rising problem of obesity there. A year later, Rand’s Debra Cohen wrote that Chile’s programs are a model for anti-obesity policies: “Nearly 30 years into the ongoing global epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases, Chile has taken the lead in identifying and […]
May 29, 2021 — Is it still true that seeing is believing? Or in this age of truth decay, is it more likely that people see what they’ve already chosen to believe? We see a lot of this in politics and religion. But it also seems to creep into nutrition research. A case in point would be highly polarized […]
April 4, 2021 — Prevailing bias envelopes us invisibly. Objectivity is something we have a passion for pursuing. But the challenge of that pursuit is great. In fact, objectivity is rare, if not mythical. Humans are subjective creatures, so objectivity is unnatural for us. If we care about a subject, we bring a bias to it. When we hear […]
