July 31, 2024 — A fascinating new study in Annals of Internal Medicine asks an important question. When people receive semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, are they less likely to smoke? This is not such a random question. In fact, clinicians are reporting striking reductions in addictive behaviors by people receiving it for obesity. So William Wang and colleagues […]
November 13, 2022 — Analogies are a powerful tool to build a story and persuade people to adopt a preferred course of action. When it comes to policies to reduce obesity, one of the most frequent analogies employed is tobacco policy. Earlier this year, Sarah Hill and colleagues made the case for health policy to align the regulation of […]
August 22, 2021 — Make no mistake about it, public health is a righteous cause. Overwhelmingly, people choose careers in public health because they believe in the mission and they want to make a difference in the world. But righteous causes can bring a loss of objectivity. It happens because strong, human feelings come into play. When we hear […]
May 2, 2021 — Dialing up emotions about health can be very unhelpful. Especially if the goal is to make good decisions and good policy. But today, we have many examples of strong emotions getting in the way of clear thinking about public health. Face masks and vaccination come to mind. Nicotine, tobacco, and obesity are also subjects that […]
July 23, 2019 — The trend is unmistakable now. Life expectancy in the U.S. is stalling. A new analysis in Population and Development Review brings a fresh perspective to this troubling trend. The foundations lie in rural white America and the fuels for these trends are obesity, opioids, and smoking. Poor Prospects for Rural, Non-Hispanic Whites Irma Elo and […]
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 […]
January 16, 2018 — American lives have grown shorter for the second year in a row. When CDC issued these statistics in December, all the talk was about drug overdoses. That’s certainly a factor. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences points to growing obesity rates for peeling away nearly a year […]
December 22, 2017 — On the subject of obesity, one way or another, it takes only seconds. Almost always, the subject of personal responsibility will claim its central role. To some people, it’s even a key tool for allocating scarce medical resources. But with a new paper in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Sven Ove Hansson helps us […]
December 9, 2017 — Movies offer an escape from harsh realities, right? That’s the conventional wisdom to explain why we watch. But a new analysis published in the December issue of Pediatrics suggests that’s not entirely true. A child being bullied about body weight can be pretty sure that the most popular children’s movies will include fat shaming messages. […]
January 19, 2017 — Perhaps you’ve noticed that public trust has evaporated this year. Recently, Edelman reported that trust in government, business, nonprofits, and the media dropped across the board and around the world in 2016. In nearly two decades of tracking public trust, Edelman has never before seen such a broad and dramatic drop. A vigorous discussion about the […]
