March 27, 2020 — Knowledge is power, said Sir Francis Bacon in the 16th century. But today, that aphorism has morphed. Now it seems that misinformation is quite powerful. Governments and politicians have learned that they can censor information simply by overwhelming truth with noise. However, misinformation in a health crisis can be deadly. Truth and public trust are […]
December 29, 2019 — Can fathers have a significant effect on physical activity in the lives of their daughters? This is an important question. Because right now, girls entering secondary school often don’t have fundamental movement skills that predict lifelong physical activity. Though we have plenty of data to say that fathers more often participate in physical activity with […]
December 7, 2019 — An unexpected privilege comes from sharing information on this site every day. It’s the opportunity for collaborating with really smart people from all over the world. All to promote better science for better health. So today’s post is a simple expression of gratitude to Andrew Brown and every one of his collaborators on our […]
October 11, 2019 — Is there such a thing as righteous deception? If you want to make your head hurt, try to ask yourself that in the context of plant-based food alternatives. Fake meat and fake milk are going mainstream. But the folks who make real meat and real milk don’t like it. Not a bit. They think these […]
August 21, 2019 — Tall tales are not just for the literature of Mark Twain. In fact, you can find a few in childhood obesity. A new paper in Obesity Reviews offers an inventory of ten methods for exaggeration of effectiveness in childhood obesity studies. Andrew Brown and colleagues (including ConscienHealth’s Ted Kyle) provide examples of each. Checklists can […]
June 28, 2019 — It’s all so simple. We can fight obesity with a single cup of coffee! It’s a “fat-burning, obesity-fighting beverage.” So say the headlines about a study of brown fat activation with caffeine. This new study in Scientific Reports, hyped by a press release from the University of Nottingham, has unleashed a flood of sensational headlines […]
June 3, 2019 — Disclosing how much added sugar is in a food product is a good idea. Claiming it “will save millions of lives and billions of dollars” is not. Wandering away from the truth never is. But in Circulation last month, Yue Huang et al are bold to say they only have one worry about the precision […]
May 28, 2019 — Fruit juice, soda, cigarettes, and vapes. They’re all killing us, but we keep consuming them. Tobacco and sugar are close neighbors on the slippery slope to poor health and premature death. Right? Well, not really. News and journal articles might give you an impression that sugar and tobacco are very similar bad actors. We hear […]
May 10, 2019 — This is a pretty neat trick. Conflicts of interest are now officially dead. Lobbying for high fructose corn syrup isn’t a conflict of interest for drafting dietary guidelines. It’s a qualification. Evidence of expertise. USDA has put a high fructose corn syrup lobbyist in charge of overseeing new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This would have […]
May 1, 2019 — The World Health Organization is doing some great work on obesity in the European Region. For instance, they just published an outstanding new report at ECO2019 on the prevalence of severe childhood obesity in 21 countries. Unfortunately, though, they buried it in a press release that falsely promotes breastfeeding as a proven effective strategy to […]
