Posts Tagged ‘scientific uncertainty’

If you were confused this week by headlines proclaiming that “nearly half of Americans will have obesity by 2035,” don’t feel bad. It means you are paying attention. Because this proclamation flies in the face of headlines from last year telling us obesity rates are declining in the U.S. So what gives? The New Research […]

“Basically, all the scientific leadership has been wiped out at the CDC. They’re all political people now who are running the CDC and determining what the public health message is going to be,” says Julie Rovner. She has been reporting on the CDC for four decades now and has never seen anything like this. Leadership […]

Food policy advocates are sharing a music video that captures a certain way of thinking. The choruses are nothing but trash talk about obesity and food. “It’s your own damn fault,” says one verse. In the next, “a team of evil scientists through rigorous testing created the most abominable snacks.” So it draws us into […]

“Give a boy a hammer and everything he meets has to be pounded.” Though this hammer-nail-pounding metaphor started half a century ago, it still works well today. For example, folks armed with the carbohydrate insulin model (CIM) of obesity see opportunities everywhere to pound away, bringing truth and light. Whatever the question, carbs and insulin […]

Patterns. Much of what helps people form their ideas about the source of rising obesity around the world is the patterns they observe. Right now, patterns of ultra-processed food consumption over time – together with some impressive experimental evidence – leads many people to speculate that rising consumption of these foods might explain at least […]

The tension between science and policy at CDC is inevitable. But that tension has never been in plain view more than during the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, citing a “botched” response to the pandemic, CDC director Rochelle Walensky says that she will launch a sweeping reorganization of the agency. Her announcement was thin on specifics. […]

No two ways about it, we’re all getting a crash course in the uncertainty of science. It turns out that all those bumper stickers saying follow the science don’t mean exactly what we thought. Because COVID-19 is teaching us that the certainty we seek from science is not always there for us. Little more than […]

New publications about the role of ultra-processed foods in health and food systems remind us about a missing dialogue. Food policy advocates are very clear that food systems should evolve to favor minimally processed food. Nutrition scientists know that ultra-processed foods have an association with poor health outcomes. But they also know that the science […]

It’s a wildly popular catchphrase in this age of COVID-19. Follow the science. The video on the right is packed with cautionary tales by Rohin Francis. In short, he explains that when policy makers say they’re following the science, it’s often a fiction. Mangling the science might be a more apt description. Mangling the Science […]

How are we doing these days on quizzes of true and false? In public affairs, it’s become quite a challenge. In nutrition and obesity science, the challenge is nothing new. Some things are clearly true. Obesity is a highly heritable condition, for one example. Other things are clearly false. For example, to lose one pound […]