September 8, 2024 — What’s the harm? For many “interventions” to reduce obesity prevalence, this rationale seems to be good enough to spur implementation. Menu labeling is a good example. Restaurants in the U.S. and in numerous other places must publish the number of calories in food portions they sell. This went into effect based upon suppositions. Policy makers […]
December 8, 2023 — Sounds great, looks great, not helpful. That’s how we would sum up the evidence for “fitspiration” social media posts and their influence on personal health. Oxford defines this genre as “a person or thing that serves as motivation for someone to sustain or improve health and fitness.” But a recent systematic review puts a harsher […]
September 12, 2023 — People are beginning to discover a major side effect of advanced meds for obesity that is not gastrointestinal – it’s economic disruption. Retailers, food makers, and participants in the huge business of health systems are all just starting to wrap their heads around the disruptive potential of more accessible and effective obesity treatment. Already, the […]
July 12, 2023 — Another milestone came this week for the EDIT Collaboration. We published our protocol for a systematic review of behavioral weight management with a meta analysis of the risk factors for disordered eating behaviors in individual participants. Yes, that’s a mouthful. But the point of the EDIT Collaboration is to muster some serious curiosity about the […]
May 7, 2023 — One of the fundamental assumptions we make about the origins of the rise in obesity is that the food supply has changed in ways that trigger more obesity in more people. You might say it is the foundation upon which most public health experts and policy makers build their thinking about this problem. But what […]
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 […]
February 2, 2022 — PLOS Medicine has quite a good new study of gross pictures on beverage labels to deter purchases of sugary drinks. It is a randomized, controlled study which proves quite convincingly that gross pictures deter purchases of beverages when they appear prominently on labels. Mission accomplished. Our only quibble would be with the meaning these researchers […]
December 4, 2021 — Recent analyses of health policy on obesity present a rather stark picture. Policies aimed at obesity have done more to promote stigma than health. The focus on individuals has not changed for decades, say James Nobles and his colleagues. In fact, they found that 58 percent of research aimed to prove that educating individuals to […]
May 7, 2021 — Late last week, the FDA announced that it intends to ban menthol cigarettes. This is in part because these are the cigarettes that Black smokers prefer. Smoking takes a bigger toll on Blacks than Whites, so maybe this will help reduce a source of health disparities. Indeed it sounds like a good idea. Except that […]
April 29, 2021 — One reason that obesity can be such a difficult topic is because people link it to appearance. Thus we live in a culture where people presume they can diagnose a person’s health based on body image. Looking healthy becomes a surrogate for being healthy. People do very unhealthy things to reach for a healthy appearance. […]
