October 30, 2025 — Very often, news reports about obesity rates have more puffery than substance to offer. However, a report this week from Gallup deserves your attention. It tells us that a steady decline in self-reported obesity rates appears to be a genuine trend and that an association with use of GLP-1s may explain it. In fact, for […]
October 13, 2025 — We have trust issues. It is true in every dimension of life today, so it should be no surprise that we face increasing skepticism about healthy eating advice. In a review of the IFIC Food and Health Survey research, one fact stands out to us. Among U.S. adults, 79% say it’s hard to know what […]
August 3, 2025 — YouGov released some fascinating new survey research on Friday that shows GLP-1 awareness rising sharply and a profound shift in views of obesity as this happens. Dramatic Growth in Awareness Two years ago, only 23% of U.S. adults knew “a lot” about semaglutide. Now, that number has grown to 41%. Total awareness is now up […]
December 14, 2023 — New research from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation offers a pretty clear picture. The research team sums it up succinctly. “Medicare doesn’t cover obesity drugs, but 76% of older adults think it should.” Yes, public pressure is building for access to obesity medicines. Survey Research of Adults 50 to 80 […]
April 26, 2023 — Insights surface when we take the time to listen to people living with obesity. Yesterday, Ro and the Obesity Action Coalition released results from a study of the thoughts and feelings people are having about obesity, weight loss, and the new GLP-1 medicines. There’s a lot to think about in these results – about motivations […]
July 13, 2022 — When we wrote recently about stress as an important factor in rising obesity, the natural question popped up. Hasn’t stress always been with us? And of course it has been. But it turns out that it’s pretty easy to find indications that stress is indeed increasing in parallel with obesity. In fact, the American Psychological […]
June 8, 2022 — This is definitely a season of renewed meetings. This week, we’ve been trying to follow both the ASMBS and ADA annual meetings at once. New information is flooding out of both of them. Today, from ASMBS, comes a fascinating new study of perceptions about weight bias across diverse racial and ethnic groups. People with White, […]
May 27, 2022 — The Mayo Clinic has surveyed a large number of consumers in their online diet assessment. From more than 200,000 individuals completing this survey of mindset and motivation, they’ve come to a simple and unsurprising conclusion. It’s all about health. In fact, 83 percent of people in this survey are motivated by health in seeking to […]
October 24, 2020 — A tidy narrative attracts the human mind. When they ring true, generalizations are seductive. They wipe away the complex mess of real life. For example, the untidy reality of living through the pandemic lockdown leaves us eager to make sense of it. So a new paper describing a global survey of health behaviors in the […]
September 19, 2020 — It’s hard to doubt that we’re living in challenging times. If you need evidence, take a look at data on happiness. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago has been tracking the happiness of Americans. This year, in the midst of a pandemic, we’ve hit an all-time low. In […]
