October 20, 2025 — Starbucks denies it. The official word from the dominant force behind pumpkin spice season is that the launch of its fall menu – featuring the much loved and hated latte – sparked the “best ever sales week” for Starbucks. Nonetheless, we can’t help wondering if pumpkin spice is wearing thin. Call us cynical, but there’s […]
September 19, 2025 — The emerging contest to dominate the market for oral tablets in obesity treatment became clear this week as news and PR dispatches flowed from EASD in Vienna. Aiming for a Mass Target With understated confidence, Lilly presented and published pivotal phase three data on orforglipron in NEJM. They did not run from the fact that […]
August 27, 2024 — That was quick. At about 6 am today, we posted to say that obesity drug prices are stuck in the spotlight. “Bold leadership on obesity drug pricing and access to care is the only thing that will bring relief from this uncomfortable spotlight,” we wrote. Before the end of the hour, Lilly took the cue. […]
June 12, 2024 — Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to let this go. Novo Nordisk isn’t eager to cut its thousand-dollar list price for Ozempic. Nor is it eager to face a grilling about this in the Senate. So yesterday, Sanders announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee will vote next Tuesday on a subpoena for […]
October 5, 2022 — Toxic beauty standards are costly – both in terms of health and wealth. This message resonates from a new report funded by the Dove Beauty Bar brand and published jointly with the STRIPED project at the Harvard School of Public Health. This report details the cost of unrealistic beauty standards exploited by a beauty industry […]
October 8, 2021 — With great gifts come great responsibilities. It doesn’t really matter whether you get this message from biblical sources or Spiderman. The imperative is there. If you have a big platform, you better use it to serve a purpose bigger than yourself. It looks like Queen Latifah and Novo Nordisk might be using their platforms to […]
January 28, 2018 — Panera want you to know that they will sell you a better egg sandwich than anyone else. This is a natural extension of their smug advertising that tells us they sell “food as it should be.” So now, they’d like a little help from FDA. They want the agency to crack down on fast food […]
April 21, 2017 — “That stuff can’t be good for you.” Diet soda is a fizzy elixir that people love to hate. And so this week, we have yet another round of studies and pseudo-scientific PR pitching “links” as evidence of cause and effect. The scare theme this week is artificial sweeteners will give you a stroke. The Study […]
March 4, 2017 — It started with a blog post. Brian Wansink wrote an entry for his blog and called it “The Grad Student Who Never Said No.” It quickly turned into a sticky mess. The essay described an unpaid grad student from Turkey with energy and enthusiasm for exploring data in Wansink’s lab. Wansink is famous for clever research […]
October 21, 2016 — A rather confused story about banning obesity in worship came out of Oregon recently. The New Creation Church of Hillsboro attracted attention to its Worship Team Guidelines, which seemed to ban people with obesity from leading worship: No Excessive weight. Weight is something that many people have to deal with. Make sure that you are taking […]
