February 25, 2024 — Are we cynical? We can surely find excuses to be. Examples of cynicism pop up at every glance. Certainly we see it in politics and public policy. Closer to home at ConscienHealth, people routinely find reasons for cynicism about all kinds of medical research and advice – especially nutrition and obesity. This is a real […]
September 11, 2023 — John Keats seems to be guiding a great many people trying to make sense of the stubborn rise in obesity. His advice that beauty is truth has surprising power. So we look for elegant solutions to all challenges. David Ludwig has an elegant explanation for the cause of excess obesity in the carbohydrate insulin model. […]
May 29, 2023 — Expert opinion holds that ultra-processed food is not a good thing. So it’s quite natural to expect that helping people resist the convenience and taste of this ubiquitous type of food will help with dietary health outcomes. So natural that it’s quite easy to dismiss inconvenient, unexpected findings. A little ultra-processing of study results in […]
April 9, 2023 — Hello darkness, my old friend. Welcome to the sound of silence. Social networks, conceived to connect and inform us, have evolved in a way to polarize and misinform us. Loud voices dominate public narratives on a wide range of subjects and leave us little room for the development of well-informed and nuanced views. Certainly we […]
December 17, 2022 — Do angels dancing on the head of a pin get good exercise? We’ll have to get back to you on that one. But we can say that thinking about the value of exercise for overcoming obesity is worthwhile. In the International Journal of Obesity over the last few weeks an excellent conversation about this has […]
December 3, 2022 — You can’t outrun a bad diet. It’s a clever turn of phrase that resonates. But like many things that resonate about diet, exercise, and obesity, it might be a little too clever. In a very gentle way, David Allison, Dennis Bier, and Julie Locher point this out in a brief commentary appearing this week in […]
June 15, 2022 — The ASN Nutrition Live 2022 virtual meeting started with a feisty debate yesterday. The architect of the NOVA system for identifying ultra-processed foods – Carlos Monteiro – made the case for his magnum opus. Then, in this debate he faced off with nutrition professor Arne Astrup, who made the case that relying on the NOVA […]
May 13, 2022 — What is going on here? Why is this happening? What is the cause? The struggle to discern causality bedevils anyone who is serious about understanding obesity and how to overcome it. But the line between cause and effect can be very blurry, and fuzzy thinking ensues. And thus, the progress toward reversing the relentless increase […]
November 23, 2021 — “The way that fat people and thin people experience this conversation is worlds apart,” says Michael Hobbes on a recent episode of his Maintenance Phase podcast with Aubrey Gordon. He’s describing a heated debate about catastrophizing obesity that has been smoldering for almost two decades. This is a conflict between two views of obesity. One […]
January 2, 2021 — New publications about the role of ultra-processed foods in health and food systems remind us about a missing dialogue. Food policy advocates are very clear that food systems should evolve to favor minimally processed food. Nutrition scientists know that ultra-processed foods have an association with poor health outcomes. But they also know that the science […]
