August 11, 2024 — Narratives are powerful. One of the early dominant narratives of the rising demand for Ozempic and related drugs was all about Hollywood, appearances, and privilege. But Bloomberg has a counter-narrative for us. The center of gravity for Ozempic demand is not Hollywood. It’s really Bowling Green, Kentucky. The food environment here is more Waffle House […]
June 2, 2024 — The Obesity and Energetics Offerings from the Indiana University School of Public Health and the University of Alabama at Birmingham NORC certainly got our attention this week with an entry titled “Cherished Hypotheses Meet Hard Facts.” That entry links us to two new systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials to assess prevention of obesity in […]
May 26, 2024 — Skimming the headlines, it would be easy to think that the combination of mobile phones and social media are responsible for quite a range of our current ills – including mental health and obesity. If you want to dig deeper, you can find a whole tome on the subject from Jonathan Haidt. He has woven […]
April 21, 2024 — Healthy eating and active living. For decades now, programs to prevent obesity have followed the conventional wisdom that pursuing these two ideals will solve the problem. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation pledged a billion dollars to prevent childhood obesity by following this template: “By 2025, we want to ensure that children in America grow up […]
March 23, 2023 — We face a pivot point for public health strategies to prevent obesity. The advent of advanced medicines for obesity treatment brings critical questions. Can we find better strategies for preventing obesity at the entrance to causal pathways for it? Or will we instead depend solely on medical interventions to reduce the harm it causes? These […]
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, […]
May 24, 2022 — It seems to be an article of faith. Millions of low-income Americans live in food deserts and it puts them at higher risk for obesity. That’s a prevalent narrative to explain the link between poverty and obesity. And thus, the narrative works its way into the interpretation of research on programs for fixing food deserts. […]
