January 5, 2026 — This is an uncomfortable truth. Whether health professionals think about it or not in work that touches on obesity, they are making a choice: Are they perpetuating or challenging obesity stigma?
October 10, 2025 — Sometime between July 29 and August 27, Leanne Redman became Editor-in-Chief of Obesity, the official journal of the Obesity Society. We know this because the August issue (published July 29) lists Michael Jensen as editor. But the September issue (published August 27) lists Redman as editor. A One-Sided Grievance The only reason this came to […]
September 3, 2025 — The magical Mirror of Erised can drive people mad by showing them their deepest desires. Judging by the flood of papers in recent days, it seems that one such desire is to find consensus for a clinical definition of obesity. In the past week alone, three such publications have crossed our screens. In the past […]
August 30, 2025 — This has been a bad week for the CDC. Wednesday night, a spokesman for President Trump, Kush Desai announced that the White House had terminated CDC Director Susan Monarez because she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” She had been sworn into that position only last month by HHS […]
May 20, 2025 — A new viewpoint in JAMA Pediatrics articulates a concern we hear repeatedly about the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity. Pediatric obesity experts have reservations about applying the concept of preclinical obesity in pediatrics. Melania Manco is a professor of pediatrics, clinical research scientist, and consultant endocrinologist at the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome. She writes: […]
March 18, 2025 — We’ve been living with the consensus report of the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity now for two months. Enough time has passed for feelings about the strengths and limitations of this work to take shape. A new commentary in the BMJ yesterday brings a sharp focus to the struggle of defining and dealing with current […]
February 19, 2025 — A new cancel culture is sweeping through science and research, censoring mentions of bad words under the new administration. The bad words relate to things like equity, bias, and diversity. Openness? Probably not a good thing to talk about if you don’t want your research funding flagged. This is a problem. Three researchers in pulmonary […]
January 28, 2025 — It is fascinating to watch the public discourse about newly proposed criteria from the Lancet Commission for a clinical diagnosis of obesity unfold. The headline is easy. “It’s time to move beyond BMI alone.” The response to that idea has been clear and unmistakable: “What took so long?” But then comes the hard part that […]
January 23, 2025 — It was easy to see this coming. Our top prediction for the new year was that the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity would be big news and the spark for a big debate. The news splash was unmistakable. From 92 countries all over the world, more than 3,000 persons lined up for the launch event. […]
July 24, 2024 — It’s nice, really. People are paying attention to obesity, its definition, and the bias they bring to the subject. If you need evidence of this, look no further than a series of three new editorials in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They’re wrestling with BMI and the definition of obesity. The authors present a range […]
