November 22, 2025 — A rupture of public trust occured this week. Information on the CDC website changed overnight, without input from scientists, to espouse the anti-vaccine agenda of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Specifically, the website now says “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the […]
November 16, 2025 — “Studies show food is medicine” says WBUR, with Allison Aubrey quoting studies that suggest a benefit from prescribing healthy food to people at risk for metabolic and diet-related diseases. Under the Food Is Medicine banner, hyperbole is easy to find. The people who have taken up this cause are selling hard. So the headlines that […]
November 10, 2025 — At a press event last week, announcing a deal to make obesity medicines more affordable, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz told us “Americans will lose 135 billion pounds by the midterms” because of this. Comedian Stephen Colbert pointed out a problem with the numbers. They imply that every single American will be losing 393 pounds. It […]
October 2, 2025 — The press office at the UNC School of Medicine wins the prize for clickbait this week with this gem: “Junk food can scramble memory in just four days.” That headline inspired some impressive creativity. From the seed of junk food to scramble memory sprouted headlines about rewired brains, disrupted memory circuits, cognitive decline, and brain […]
September 24, 2025 — The Washington Examiner tells us we can prevent millions of cases of obesity and thousands of strokes simply by dropping twice-a-year time changes. “Study says.” Discover magazine says so, too. The Washington Post is a little more restrained. “We’d all be a little less prone to obesity and strokes if we ditched the switch.” Ditch […]
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 […]
