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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
March 24, 2021 — If you had any doubt about prior reports that semaglutide is likely to be a “game changer” for obesity care, perhaps you should look at JAMA today. Just one month after another paper in JAMA, semaglutide is back in the journal. This time, it is a 68-week study that shows the value of maintaining therapy […]
February 10, 2021 — High intensity interval training (HIIT) is hot right now. It mixes short periods of very intense exercise with less intense recovery. Even before the pandemic, interest in HIIT had grown dramatically. Then it spiked when pandemic lockdowns began. But a new RCT published yesterday in JAMA suggests that it might not be a panacea for […]
January 30, 2021 — Nevermind. As far as we can tell, that’s the bottom line on a convoluted story about data thugs, pajamas, and a provocative study of ultra-processed food. It starts with the study by Kevin Hall et al that found ultra-processed food can cause people to eat more and gain weight. All by itself, that finding was […]
