June 18, 2022 — Two new studies in AJCN provide observations on the relationship between health outcomes and fast food, take-out, café, or home-cooked meals. These studies find an association of worse outcomes with fast food and take out. But the real question is, why? What are the causal relationships behind these observations? In an editorial, Barry Popkin suggests […]
June 10, 2022 — The theme is a meme. Food is medicine. Exercise is medicine. Now yet again, a big study tells us that people who drink coffee live longer. So should we be on the lookout for a coffee is medicine campaign, funded by big java? Gosh, we hope not. Another Large Observational Study Stirring this subject up […]
March 17, 2022 — Should we be having potatoes for breakfast? An interesting new study this week adds to the evidence that when we eat different foods might matter for health outcomes as much as our choice of foods. Specifically, this research was an analysis of mortality in persons with diabetes based on NHANES data from 2003 to 2014. […]
February 21, 2022 — In this moment, food policy advocates are in love with plant-based diets. Many reasons do favor plant-based diets. In fact, the advice to eat more vegetables has been dispensed at family tables for generations. The American Heart Association promotes eating more veggies for cutting heart disease risk with great enthusiasm. But today, a new study […]
October 11, 2021 — As rationalizations go, imagining huge health benefits from eating more plant-based diets is not terrible. Trisha Pasricha writes in the Washington Post that pneumonia, diverticulitis, diabetes, and cancers are linked to regularly eating meat. She even points to a study of COVID and plant-based diets to illustrate how beneficial such diets might be: “In a […]
October 7, 2021 — Well-controlled data for surgical procedures is hard to come by. This is especially true for bariatric surgery, where strong feelings come into play and thus, people aren’t willing to accept random assignments to a surgical procedure. So a new study in JAMA Surgery that gives us clarity about the safety of gastric sleeve operations is […]
September 29, 2021 — As severe obesity has grown to take a toll on a growing number of children and teens, clinical care is evolving. In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics said it plainly. Youth with severe obesity need better access to bariatric surgery. The authors of that position statement conceded that most of the young patients for […]
September 13, 2021 — We’ve known all along that 10,000 steps per day is a goal for physical activity that came to us out of thin air. People latched on to it because it was a nice, round number. It was memorable. But the fact is that it’s arbitrary. In fact, evidence now tells us that one size does […]
August 14, 2021 — A new study in JAMA this week tells us that American youth get two thirds of their calories from ultra-processed foods. Is the response to this moral panic? Or does this observation document a serious threat to public health? It is easy to find responses on both ends of this spectrum and everything in between. […]
August 5, 2021 — Taking dietary advice from headlines is an iffy proposition. Today many headlines are telling us to eat more foods from plants and we’ll have less heart disease. The basis for this claim is two new studies in JAHA. The American Heart Association is pretty clear about the message it wants to send. Its press release […]
