July 12, 2022 — It seemed like a good idea at the time. Back in 2008, there was a headlong rush to require restaurant menu calorie labeling by decree. New York City tried it first. Other cities and states followed quickly. Tired of fighting it in a dizzying array of local venues, the restaurant industry came on board with […]
July 6, 2022 — Twelve years ago, a very popular First Lady of the United States launched an ambitious campaign to solve the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation. Two papers in Pediatrics yesterday suggest to us that those efforts did not yield the promised solution. In sum, these data tell us that after Let’s Move! began, the […]
July 4, 2022 — We like to think of America as a place of mercy and grace. In America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates calls on God to shed his grace on this country that celebrates its birth today. But reflecting on these words and current expressions of public values about health and wellbeing, we have to wonder. How […]
May 17, 2022 — The British strategy to reverse trends in the health effects of obesity is “falling apart.” So says the distinguished obesity expert Jamie Oliver. He’s a chef, a celebrity, and thus an authority on the complex mix of biological, social, and political science that defines the public health struggle with obesity. But despite his wishes to […]
April 8, 2022 — It is a depressingly familiar story in America. We spend more on health and get less – the rich get richer and the sick get sicker. So now this means we’re getting less life expectancy. A new analysis by Ryan Masters, Laudan Aron, and Steven Woolf says that U.S. mortality increased last year. American life […]
April 5, 2022 — We are close to reaching a million deaths from COVID in the U.S. Worldwide, the number passed six million a month ago and that number is a gross underestimate. So there can be no doubt that the pandemic has had a terrible effect on health everywhere. But in the midst of this tragedy, we can […]
March 19, 2022 — An amazing thing happened this week. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously to make daylight saving time permanent. The amazement comes from two things. First and perhaps most obviously, it’s amazing that the Senate can do anything by unanimous consent in these contentious times. But more startling is that they could do it without a peep […]
February 6, 2022 — Is trauma losing its meaning? It seems that accounts of trauma are filling the news. Death and suffering in more than two years of a global pandemic has certainly been traumatic. So too is the toll of gun violence. With the return to more normal school operations, school shootings are once again popping up in […]
January 16, 2022 — Critical thinking is vital for progress. It really doesn’t matter whether the goal is overcoming obesity, COVID, or economic hardship. Rigorous, objective analysis allows us to recognize the truth of the situation we’re dealing with and then find solutions. But that’s not the end of the story, because the behavior that flows from critical thinking […]
October 3, 2021 — “Child abuse.” When we wrote earlier this week about new data on bariatric surgery in children with severe obesity, that was one visceral response. Ten years ago, Lindsey Murtagh and David Ludwig trotted out the child abuse label with precisely opposite reasoning. They suggested that parents of children with obesity might be guilty of abuse […]
