January 26, 2025 — The most pervasive way of thinking about obesity is to simply regard it as “a diet-related disease.” But a new paper in Nature Food suggests we may be misleading ourselves. That’s because of a fundamental problem in the data that links patterns of diet to obesity and health. An impressive collection of scientists examined the […]
December 26, 2024 — This has been quite a year. We’ve seen endless death and destruction in Ukraine and the Middle East. People expressed discontent with the status quo in elections all over the world. But most notably for our readers – more than 100,000 of you this year – the progress on obesity and health has been nothing […]
November 23, 2024 — The claim is both straightforward and absurd. “An additional hour’s walk could add 376.3 min of life expectancy.” This is a near perfect reduction of “Exercise Is Medicine” to absurdity. Yes exercise is an excellent tonic and the benefits of physical activity for health are well documented. As a metaphor, exercise is medicine is not […]
February 11, 2024 — Religious tolerance seems hard to find lately. Ample illustrations of intolerance flow from the Middle East, India, and American politics – from all over the world, really. But in an age of less affiliation with organized religions, we also see people seek out other belief systems to latch their passions onto. Health and fitness are […]
January 11, 2024 — Clicks rule the internet and much of social media, so rudeness is rather easy to find, but hard to take. Reporting that brings insight and understanding is more rare and more rewarding. On obesity yesterday, we found a sharp contrast between promoting insight and promoting contempt. From the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public […]
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 […]
October 21, 2023 — “Swift and decisive” was the decision by the Editor-in-Chief of Nutrition and Health. This is how Luis-Enrique Becerra-Garcia described the response to errors in a publication on educating women with obesity about ultra-processed foods. The authors had claimed to find significant effects on weight, quality of life, pain, and metabolic syndrome. Becerra-Garcia and colleagues found […]
July 21, 2023 — The President of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced his resignation this week, following a review of his research that concluded some of it “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process.” If you entertain any doubt about the importance of attention to scientific rigor and integrity, this should resolve it. Retractions and Corrections After […]
February 11, 2023 — “Calorie restriction slows pace of aging in healthy adults.” This headline for a press release from Columbia University sounds pretty impressive. Until you stop and read the paper – which comes to no such conclusion. It appears that the headline writers were referring not to the pace of aging, but to P.A.C.E. – the Pace […]
January 11, 2023 — Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and supper like a pauper. These immortal words date back almost 70 years to a pop nutrition icon of the early and mid 20th century – Adelle Davis. Unfortunately, the health benefits of this advice are more presumption than fact. But the legends persist. This week, […]
