Posts Tagged ‘research’

“We Should Avoid Treating Published Research as Fact”

November 2, 2023 — Over the past 20 years or so, there has been growing concern that many research results published in scientific journals can’t be reproduced. Depending on the field of research, studies have found efforts to redo published studies lead to different results in between 23% and 89% of cases. To understand how different researchers might arrive […]

The Wisdom of Collaborating with Adversaries

December 11, 2022 — “Let’s just agree to disagree” is an expression of utter nonsense, says Professor David Allison in an introduction to the concept of adversarial collaboration. Of course, he is describing this in the context of scientific controversies. And in obesity and nutrition research, it’s quite easy to construct a list of subjects on which the disagreements […]

Superfood Word Salad and Research Integrity

October 7, 2022 — Publishing research and academic journals is a business that is both important and highly profitable. The business model for this industry could be a whole post of its own, but it’s worth noting that just four companies publish more than half of the world’s academic papers. Elsevier alone published more than half a million peer-reviewed […]

Public Health: Research, Advocacy, and Trust

July 24, 2022 — Institutions of public health are in a tough spot right now. COVID has so battered public trust in the CDC that it has put us into the figure-it-out-yourself phase of this pandemic. Likewise, the public health response to obesity has long been one of both moral panic and ineffective policy prescriptions. Decades of exhortations to […]

ARPA-H: Aiming for Breakthroughs in Obesity Science

March 20, 2022 — “Focusing on cancer, focusing on obesity, focusing on diabetes, a whole range of diseases … we’re going to make significant breakthroughs.” This in a nutshell is the aspiration for ARPA-H, as voiced by President Joe Biden. It is a new agency with a billion dollars of funding for the next three years, passed in a bipartisan […]

Obesity: Gut Signals, Fat Tissue, and Bariatric Surgery

January 21, 2022 — Bariatric surgery has a profound effect on the chronic disease of obesity. Diabetes goes into remission and hunger recedes. Metabolism finds a steadier state, more compatible with good health. But the billion-dollar question is, how? Make no mistake. This is a big puzzle. Now a series of publications over the last several weeks reveals the […]

Innovation and Competition in Obesity Gains Momentum

August 9, 2021 — Could it be that innovation and competition for better obesity care will overtake the health problem of obesity? We see several signs pointing to this. A decade ago, it was tough to get FDA to take obesity innovation seriously. So big pharma research was running from the challenge. Sanofi had invested heavily in developing rimonabant […]

Changing Our Minds About Nutrition and Obesity

August 2, 2021 — We see a lot of stubborn opinions about nutrition and obesity research. People dig intellectual trenches and defend their positions about sugar, salt, and fat. Suppositions turn into convictions. Data becomes a tool for proving a point. Or inconvenient data leads a professor say we have to stomp it out. It’s depressing, really, if we […]

Genetic Sequences to Protect from Obesity

July 6, 2021 — Cambridge Professor Sadaf Farooqi calls it a tour de force of genetics. Researchers from Regeneron and nine international research centers sequenced genetic exomes in 645,626 persons. With this painstaking research, they’ve found genetic sequences that protect some people from obesity. These sequences hard wire a person for leanness. In a world that prizes a lean […]

Normal Weight Obesity: Unhealthy at Any Size

May 19, 2021 — It’s tough to get people to let go of weight and body size as the defining feature of obesity. But indeed, weight does not define obesity. Nor does BMI. What defines obesity is abnormal or excess fat (adipose) tissue that harms health. Most often, this occurs when someone’s weight is high. Not always, though. In […]