Posts Tagged ‘puffery’

Soups, Shakes, Weight Loss, and Diabetes Remission

August 10, 2024 — This is an impressive sales push. A diet of soups and shakes offers a brilliant path to weight loss, changing the lives of people with obesity and diabetes. So says the director of the NHS Type 2 Diabetes Path to Remission program, Clare Hambling: “It’s brilliant that these findings show a large number of those […]

More Avocados Equal Less Diabetes? Not Really

May 1, 2024 — If you pay attention to nutrition headlines in consumer media, avocados sound pretty amazing. “Eating more avocados could help women stave off type 2 diabetes,” says one report. “Avocado a day may keep diabetes at bay,” says another. The only problem is that neither of the studies that prompted those stories actually support the claims […]

Exercise Self-Reports Predict Less Benefit for Men Than Women?

February 29, 2024 — What could explain the observation that self-reports of exercise predict less of a benefit for men than women? In the Journal of the American College of Cardiology researchers nimbly leap to a conclusion that women get greater gains in mortality risk reduction from “equivalent doses” of physical activity. But would men exaggerate their self-reports? When […]

The Overselling of Diet and Exercise for Diabetes Remission

January 27, 2024 — Zeal is thrilling. “The solution is at hand” for type 2 diabetes, says Professor Roy Taylor. “If a person has T2DM, they have become too heavy for their own body.” Losing weight with his very low calorie diet will put that diabetes into remission, he says. “A simple bottom line.” Except that a new study […]

Vegan Diet Cuts Risk of Heart Disease After Two Months?

December 1, 2023 — Enthusiastic promoters of vegan diets are quite happy with headlines coming out of Stanford today. The Times of London captured the aspirational promise with their headline quite well: “Vegan diet cuts risk of heart disease after two months.” The Stanford University PR department was a little more subtle. They merely said “a vegan diet improves […]

Cutting Salt “Works as Well” as Blood Pressure Medicines?

November 14, 2023 — Please. We don’t need fake controversies and false comparative claims. But in reporting on an excellent new study of the effects of cutting salt on blood pressure, we’re getting a little bit of both. The study that is generating this frenzy simply doesn’t line up with the headlines that reporters are spinning out of it. […]

What if Diet Books Had to Be Truthful?

May 21, 2020 — Some things, it seems, never change. Even, and perhaps especially, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, magical thinking about nutrition and diets persist. So publishers feed us a steady diet of diet books. More than most, Dr. Michael Greger has captured the purest essence of this genre in his bestselling book: How Not to […]

Fighting Obesity with Coffee and Headlines

June 28, 2019 — It’s all so simple. We can fight obesity with a single cup of coffee! It’s a “fat-burning, obesity-fighting beverage.” So say the headlines about a study of brown fat activation with caffeine. This new study in Scientific Reports, hyped by a press release from the University of Nottingham, has unleashed a flood of sensational headlines […]