Posts Tagged ‘public policy’

Changing the Subject on Obesity Prevention

September 11, 2022 — Candid conversations about obesity prevention can be difficult. Longstanding prevention strategies are not really working too well. “It’s so hard to change BMI at the population level,” said Marlene Schwartz of Yale’s Rudd Center recently at the National Academy of Sciences. She’s right. We know that many factors all around us are driving more obesity […]

Perilous Politics Pretending to “Tackle” Childhood Obesity

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 […]

Defining Goals for Regulating Food Marketing

April 30, 2022 — In food policy, there’s plenty that people are ready to fight about. Dairy and meat come to mind. Anyone who’s reading this will doubtless have their own list of hot topics. But one subject that gets most people nodding their heads is marketing junk food to children. So for more than a decade, the World […]

Population-Wide Personal Preference Policies in Obesity

April 3, 2022 — Policies to address obesity across the whole population often make perfect sense to the people who are promoting them. But often, they run into resistance from people looking at obesity from a very different place. Writing in the Guardian, Clare Finney offers a case in point: “For the 1.25 million men and women with eating […]

Searching for Effective Policies in Obesity

March 8, 2022 — From the perspective of public health, we have a tremendous burden of obesity – and it’s growing all over the world. Decades of work to bend the curve of rising prevalence has had no discernable effect. Large and persistent disparities in diet quality mirror disparities in obesity prevalence. We might be good at nudging the […]

Two Reasons for Failure to Prevent the Rise of Obesity

January 29, 2022 — For decades now, public health figures have been talking about an urgent need to prevent and reverse the rise of obesity. A number of U.S. presidents – notably George W. Bush and Barack Obama – have embraced this goal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a whole division devoted to this goal. […]

TMI About Health with Too Little Trust

January 23, 2022 — Increasingly, we find ourselves burdened by TMI about health, much of which we cannot trust. Such an overload of dubious information makes it hard to make good decisions. Evidence of this is everywhere we turn. People are dying needlessly from COVID after choosing to refuse vaccination. And to be sure, the subject of obesity, weight, […]

Too Few Fruits and Veggies, but Plenty of Talk

January 7, 2022 — We are stuck in an infinite loop, it seems. Yet again, we have a new report in MMWR to tell us that Americans are eating too few fruits and veggies. In fact, only one in ten meet the recommendation in the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans. That’s one and a half to two cups of […]

Following the Science into 2022

December 29, 2021 — Following the science is a catchphrase in wide circulation throughout this past year with good reason. Scientists have been warning us about a number of threats to humanity and, at times, we seem to have dismissed those threats. Of course, COVID-19 and climate change are two very prominent examples that come to mind. But many […]

Obesity Policy to Promote Stigma

December 4, 2021 — Recent analyses of health policy on obesity present a rather stark picture. Policies aimed at obesity have done more to promote stigma than health. The focus on individuals has not changed for decades, say James Nobles and his colleagues. In fact, they found that 58 percent of research aimed to prove that educating individuals to […]