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. […]
September 2, 2023 — Ask any parent. They can tell you that “Why?” can be the most wonderful question a child can bring them. It can also be the most annoying. And so it is with the question of why the population has so much obesity. But it just won’t go away, and in fact the question seems to […]
August 31, 2023 — It is hard to believe. But a new commentary in Health Affairs Forefront tells us once again that drug labeling fails to assure safe and effective use for many important drugs by people with obesity. These are drugs for conditions other than obesity. But people with obesity may represent half or more of the people […]
August 24, 2023 — Simplistic thinking about obesity has an overwhelming appeal. Sadly, though, it has a dismal history of letting us down. “Yes, calories in/calories out really is the key to weight loss,” writes Tamar Haspel in the Washington Post. To insure we don’t miss the point, she closes by saying: “It’s the calories, people. It’s the calories.” […]
July 27, 2023 — Five years ago, Faith Ann Heeren brought her life experiences to YWM2018 in Denver. Now, as a PhD candidate at the University of Florida College of Medicine, she is the lead author on one in a collection of papers from last summer’s outstanding program on causes of obesity at the Royal Society in London. Life […]
July 18, 2023 — Barbie Girl (the song) told us life in plastic is fantastic, but the knowledge that we’re swimming in microplastics gives us reason for second thoughts. These tiny particles of plastic are accumulating in the oceans (even the Arctic), in the air, in the soil, in our food, and even in our bodies. This is an emerging […]
July 12, 2023 — Another milestone came this week for the EDIT Collaboration. We published our protocol for a systematic review of behavioral weight management with a meta analysis of the risk factors for disordered eating behaviors in individual participants. Yes, that’s a mouthful. But the point of the EDIT Collaboration is to muster some serious curiosity about the […]
July 9, 2023 — This is a heady time for people pursuing scientific insights into obesity. Better knowledge of the physiology that regulates healthy weight and adiposity has brought breakthroughs in medicine for obesity. Some people living with great harms from obesity are finding profound benefits because of these advances. Further advances are on the way. Yet all this […]
June 16, 2023 — At the Boston Course in Obesity Medicine, Sadaf Farooqi received the George L. Blackburn Foundation Award and delivered a masterclass of digging deeply into genetics to fully understand obesity. Simultaneously, she co-authored striking new observations about one dimension of this in the New England Journal of Medicine. All in a day’s work for someone intent […]
June 13, 2023 — We are in the midst of a great deal of cognitive dissonance about obesity. Part of the boilerplate description is that it is simply a dietary disease. But recent scientific and therapeutic advances tell a different story – that obesity is just as much a disease of altered brain function as it is a dietary […]
