January 5, 2025 — In Nature Medicine on Friday, a striking new study from Brazil suggested that a conditional cash transfer program might have a strong effect on reducing incidence and mortality from tuberculosis in persons with extreme poverty and disadvantaged ethnic backgrounds. In fact, researchers documented more than a halving of risk. It’s quite popular to argue that […]
December 7, 2024 — The concept of turning food into medicine mildly repels us. But telling us chocolate is medicine simply goes over the line. Yet here comes a study in the BMJ, spinning off headlines about dark chocolate as a “bittersweet remedy for diabetes risk.” Milk chocolate? Nope. In fact, the authors of this observational study say milk […]
September 26, 2024 — It was an interesting day that we spent talking with health policy makers in the Senate yesterday. Refreshing in a way, because the conversations about obesity are so different from the conversations we were having just a few years ago. Not a single person raised the false issue of “personal responsibility” for “being obese.” Only […]
August 21, 2024 — Yesterday, Eli Lilly and Company announced an impressive topline number from the results of a three-year study of tirzepatide in adults with obesity or overweight and prediabetes. That number was 94% prevention of progression from prediabetes to diabetes with tirzepatide. No, it was not 100%. But this is awfully close. Historical Context We will have to […]
August 13, 2024 — For the second time in the past few months, a signal from the surveillance of GLP-1 agonists is surfacing to suggest that these drugs may offer a risk reduction strategy for cancer. Earlier, the signal came from a study of persons receiving treatment for diabetes. The present study, presented at the recent annual meeting for […]
July 8, 2023 — It’s coming. Sometime before September we will be hearing about the results of the SELECT outcomes study of semaglutide in people with obesity and we may as well start getting ready to argue about it now. Because value is in the eye of the beholder. And this study is all about the long-term health value […]
June 12, 2023 — In many ways, COVID seems to be in the rear view mirror. Travel, meetings, and busyness have cranked up to a level that makes it seem like the pause we took for the pandemic is a distant memory. But not for folks who develop long COVID – which is about ten percent of people who […]
March 18, 2023 — The search for effective prevention strategies in obesity is daunting. For decades now, researchers have been casting about for effective ways to educate, nudge, or cajole groups of people into moving more and eating less or better. Trying to influence a group of people means that controlled studies of interventions can wind up being cluster-randomized […]
October 12, 2022 — In a typical day, most people really don’t move around that much. The simplest way of quantifying this is by counting steps and the average for an American adult is between three and four thousand per day. The default goal for improving on this became 10,000 steps – probably because an early pedometer called the […]
September 22, 2022 — Problems are messy, so to solve them, humans quite naturally move to make them tidy. We sort them, label them, and get to work on resolving them. But news this week reminds us that health issues often resist our efforts to sort them out and find tidy solutions. The USPSTF this week published a draft […]
