July 23, 2023 — Slowly, but surely, the world is waking up to realize that obesity is not a problem of bad behavior by the people who live with it. Of course, this is not to say that healthy behaviors are unhelpful for our well-being. Good health habits can benefit anyone. But thinking that behavior change can reverse obesity, […]
July 19, 2023 — New research today in the New England Journal of Medicine offers an important lesson – for anyone with an open mind. Finding an association of a dietary pattern with a better health outcome is not the same as showing that a dietary pattern has that effect. Eight years ago, Martha Clare Morris and colleagues told […]
July 13, 2023 — A new study in the Journal of Nutrition reports that people can eat 91 per cent of their calories from ultra-processed foods and still be eating a pretty healthy diet. Hold Onto Your Socks This is not opposites day. Rather, it might be that the we are living in a time of peak demonization of […]
June 17, 2023 — “Nutrition policies are intended to improve diet quality and decrease rising obesity prevalence . . . Although obesity prevention policies can improve diet quality, they are not expected to decrease the prevalence of obesity.” These words, from a recent review, lead us to wonder what we really know about preventing obesity. Fortunately, on the closing […]
June 15, 2023 — BMI seems to be everyone’s favorite target for abuse these days. Depending on whom you listen to, it’s racist, sexist, useless, or useful. Nobody really stands up for it, except as an simple, objective measure of weight for height. Now, the AMA decided to caution doctors about the misuse of BMI as a surrogate for […]
May 29, 2023 — Expert opinion holds that ultra-processed food is not a good thing. So it’s quite natural to expect that helping people resist the convenience and taste of this ubiquitous type of food will help with dietary health outcomes. So natural that it’s quite easy to dismiss inconvenient, unexpected findings. A little ultra-processing of study results in […]
April 22, 2023 — An “impassioned polemic” is headed our way from British media doctor Chris van Tulleken and it aims to have us excise ultra-processed from our dietary habits. No doubt about it, ultra-processed food wins the prize for today’s best food boogeyman, but how wise is this bit of food fear based on correlation without a cause. […]
March 15, 2023 — One of the most disappointing responses to the new guideline for obesity care in children and adolescents came from the Academy of Eating Disorders. Shortly after AAP published its evidence-based guideline for obesity care, the Academy for Eating Disorders issued a press release to criticize it. But their criticism used speculation rather than data to […]
March 4, 2023 — Today – World Obesity Day – is all about changing perspectives. The World Obesity Federation deserves credit for a well-chosen theme, because in the face of much new evidence about obesity, old perspectives are crashing into newer ones driven by evidence and science. Research has brought us new options for treating obesity more safely and […]
February 22, 2023 — Has the FDA bitten off more than it can chew? Two presidents ago, back in 2016, the FDA told us the agency had begun work to “redefine the term ‘healthy’” for food labels. Good luck with that is a fair summary of our reaction at the time. Seven years later, the quest to define objectively […]
