December 27, 2025 — This was a year of great change in nutrition, physical activity, and wellness. RFK Jr. and his MAHA agenda came in with the new administration, “guns-a-blazing,” as our president might say. The result has been some very interesting cross-currents and attention-grabbing headlines. Here are five of the biggest stories we’ve been watching this year. 1. […]
August 28, 2025 — New research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology tells us that walking the talk of a healthy lifestyle for preventing heart disease is not so easy. Perhaps the most striking number from this research relates to dietary recommendations. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) recommends a whole-food plant-based diet for cardiovascular disease […]
August 14, 2025 — An excellent new study in Nature points us to a nudge that really does work. Walkable cities really do lead people to walk more. In fact, when people move to a more walkable city from a less walkable one, researchers found that they walk an average of about 1,100 more steps every day. The reverse […]
May 30, 2025 — To be sure, exercise has many benefits – including the widely accepted benefit of fitness and a longer life. But a new study of causal inference linking fitness to reduced mortality suggests those benefits have been exaggerated. The problem is an old one: Confounding. The senior author of the new study, Marcel Ballin, explains: “We […]
December 9, 2024 — Eat healthy and get your exercise. It is a straightforward framework for dealing with obesity. But that simple prescription of diet and exercise for preventing obesity overlooks a critical factor – the prolonged sitting time very often required by work and school. A recent study of data from young adult twins showed that sitting time […]
December 3, 2024 — “This seems like a landmark paper in my books and a call from the other side of the energy balance equation. We seem built to be a highly physically active species, not sedentary office workers and couch dwellers.” With these words, Professor Emeritus Jennie Brand-Miller seized our attention today. She was writing about a new […]
November 13, 2024 — Standing desks arrived with high hopes of countering the health risks of a sedentary office lifestyle, promising to reduce heart disease and improve circulation. However, recent research in the International Journal of Epidemiology casts doubt on whether simply swapping sitting for standing delivers these benefits. Cardiovascular Risk Benefit? In a study of over 83,000 adults, […]
October 21, 2024 — “We conclude that exercise and video gaming have differential effects on the brain, which may help individuals tailor their lifestyle choices to promote mental and cognitive health, respectively, across the lifespan.” This conclusion comes from a preprint published on PsyArXiv. Science, health, and lifestyle reporters got even more bold with their conclusions. For instance, the […]
March 29, 2024 — A fascinating new study is prompting some very clickable headlines this week. It is all about the interaction of genetic risk for obesity and physical activity. It shows that in people with higher genetic risk scores for obesity, the association between physical activity (using daily step counts as a surrogate) and BMI is different than […]
February 29, 2024 — What could explain the observation that self-reports of exercise predict less of a benefit for men than women? In the Journal of the American College of Cardiology researchers nimbly leap to a conclusion that women get greater gains in mortality risk reduction from “equivalent doses” of physical activity. But would men exaggerate their self-reports? When […]
