October 11, 2022 — The toughest question about obesity is also the simplest and most basic. Why do we have so much more of it now? In the spirit of H.L. Mencken, most people presume the answer is also simple. People are just eating too much, moving too little, and they should change their ways. Problem solved. But in […]
September 12, 2022 — In popular culture right now, it seems that ultra-processed foods are the bad boys. “Ultra-processed foods linked to heart disease, cancer, and death, studies show,” says one recent headline. Scary stuff, eh? Targeting ultra-processed foods for scorn wins approving nods. But even if it supports a favored narrative, looking closely at research on ultra-processed foods […]
September 11, 2022 — Candid conversations about obesity prevention can be difficult. Longstanding prevention strategies are not really working too well. “It’s so hard to change BMI at the population level,” said Marlene Schwartz of Yale’s Rudd Center recently at the National Academy of Sciences. She’s right. We know that many factors all around us are driving more obesity […]
August 21, 2022 — Good and bad, healthy and toxic, clean and dirty, right and wrong. These are the kinds of distinctions the public, pundits, and policy makers can embrace. We too like simple guideposts – when they’re valid. But standing in the way of finding such simple guidance is a lot of complexity and nuance on many difficult […]
August 17, 2022 — For a very long time, a basic question about the rising rate of obesity has seemed to frustrate people. Why is it relentlessly rising? Some pundits seem to think people have become stupid, lazy, or undisciplined over the last several decades. “You think cake wasn’t delicious iu 1969?” quipped one self-appointed expert recently. Others are […]
July 29, 2022 — Genuinely, we admire the persistence of David Ludwig. Today in the Washington Post, he has an opinion piece about his opinion piece in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Once again he wants to sell the world on his concept that carbs and insulin are more important for understanding obesity than simply thinking about energy […]
June 27, 2022 — “I would argue that chronic stress may be the single most common cause of obesity in modern society – even more common than food.” With these words at the opening of Obesity Treatment 2022, Lee Kaplan suggested that we should think about the possibility that we’re looking in the wrong places for the root cause […]
June 12, 2022 — Talk is cheap. But history tells us that cheap talk doesn’t solve wicked problems. That’s true whether the problem is the relentlessly rising health harms of obesity or the current hot topic – inflation. The notoriously hollow Whip Inflation Now campaign of Gerald Ford seems like a model for equally ineffective campaigns aspiring to overcome […]
May 24, 2022 — It seems to be an article of faith. Millions of low-income Americans live in food deserts and it puts them at higher risk for obesity. That’s a prevalent narrative to explain the link between poverty and obesity. And thus, the narrative works its way into the interpretation of research on programs for fixing food deserts. […]
April 26, 2022 — “The etiology of obesity is multifactorial. However, the root cause is energy imbalance: more calories consumed than expended.” This was the explanation for obesity that Dariush Mozaffarian offered in 2008. Today, he writes in AJCN that obesity is “an unexplained epidemic.” We count this as a flicker of curiosity about obesity. If it spreads, perhaps […]
