January 29, 2022 — For decades now, public health figures have been talking about an urgent need to prevent and reverse the rise of obesity. A number of U.S. presidents – notably George W. Bush and Barack Obama – have embraced this goal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a whole division devoted to this goal. […]
December 12, 2021 — Rudeness is on the rise, says Jennifer Finney Boylan. It’s hard to miss, and few of us can claim to be innocent. Certainly, it’s easy to see in others, when they are taken off a plane because they refuse to wear a face mask. We also see it very clearly in the rudeness of healthcare […]
December 7, 2021 — We’re on our way to enduring two years of this pandemic, and it’s still killing more than five thousand people daily – more than a thousand in the U.S. alone. But, as each of us has learned, that’s not all. Coping with the pandemic has brought stresses that are showing up in our physical and […]
September 1, 2021 — We thought we were done with this. But the stress of the pandemic is unrelenting. That stress is hitting families especially hard and it’s showing up in child health. Notably, more data is telling us that obesity is rising especially fast in younger kids. A new research letter in JAMA tells us that the prevalence […]
August 19, 2021 — It’s hard to deny that yoga has put an imprint on popular culture – especially popular concepts about fitness and wellbeing. It had an outsized role in defining a now dominant fashion trend – athleisure. Prior to the pandemic, yoga was a roughly ten billion dollar industry. But of course, the pandemic put a dent […]
October 18, 2020 — New research from Rand and the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington offers a vivid picture of two major health risks colliding. Alcohol use is growing more frequent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, it’s growing heavier. This is not what we need, because alcohol use is already the number one global health risk […]
September 6, 2020 — Are we anxious? Judging by a huge leap in people filling prescriptions for anti-anxiety meds, the answer is clearly yes. Before COVID-19 was on our minds, those prescriptions were growing by a by a few percentage points, year over year. Once COVID-19 grabbed our attention, they jumped by 34 percent right away. Likewise, Rxs for […]
April 2, 2020 — Believe it or not, we are still in the early days of coping with the pandemic of COVID-19. Yes, if you live in New York City or Italy or China, you might think you’re well into it. But the truth is that the effect of this biological disaster will come in waves. It’s going to […]
March 23, 2020 — Healthy routines and habits are essential for a happy and healthy life. We say this as creatures of habit, so you can be sure that the following words reflect our bias. But it’s unmistakable. This nasty little virus that’s sweeping the world is scrambling our usual routines and habits. It’s putting us into a virtual […]
March 19, 2020 — We have a grand natural experiment underway – a huge lifestyle intervention. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people are living a more confined lifestyle. We have no more third place, no commute to work, only the home place. So physical activity and nutrition patterns will change. Likewise, social dynamics will change, too. But we have […]
