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, […]
November 8, 2021 — At ObesityWeek®, we noticed a subtle shift. In past years, health policy discussions have sometimes been stuck on very detailed food fights. But this year, it seems that such food fights were less in the foreground. Instead, we saw a much greater focus than ever before on health equity, disparities, and the people who are […]
November 4, 2021 — A major thread running through ObesityWeek® is weight stigma, bias, and discrimination. Today at the Obesity Journal Symposium, the first paper presented will be a new study by a collection of distinguished weight bias researchers led by Rebecca Puhl. It is unique because it tells us that the public supports policy to stop weight discrimination […]
November 1, 2021 — Today marks the opening of ObesityWeek (OW2021) and the one thing you won’t want to miss is the Presidential Plenary. That’s because it packs a fabulous inventory of the hottest topics at ObesityWeek into just two hours. The premier is at 10:00 am (East) today, with an encore at 9:30 pm tonight. But the most […]
July 20, 2021 — . Lazy. Unmotivated. No self-discipline. No willpower. These are just a few of the widespread stereotypes ingrained in American society about people who have a higher body weight or larger body size. Known as weight stigma, these attitudes result in many Americans being blamed, teased, bullied, mistreated, and discriminated against. There is nowhere to hide […]
March 12, 2021 — Let them choose is a seductive maxim for guiding health policy. In one sense, it seems perfectly reasonable. You get to choose. We respect personal agency. But it can also be quite punitive. You made your choices, now you have a chronic disease. You’re on your own. Sorry. A new paper in the Future Healthcare […]
February 20, 2021 — Let’s say you’re a brilliant economist. Does it matter how attractive you are? Perhaps it should not. But according to a new study, it most certainly does. Attractive economists get to study and work at more prestigious universities. They get better jobs in the private sector. They even get more more citations for the papers […]
November 21, 2020 — Make no mistake about it. The times are changing. A new order is coming and old ways of doing things will not suffice. We are not merely talking about a change of leadership in Washington. We are talking about bigger changes. These changes come from people fed up with an old order of things that […]
November 17, 2020 — RT-Mart is a hypermarket chain in Taiwan, having a measure of success in mainland China. But last week it set off a furor about fat shaming. For reasons unknowable, the chain replaced the usual S-M-L-XL-XXL clothing sizes with a shaming scheme. Slim, beautiful, rotten, extra rotten, and rotten to the core was the chain’s not […]
November 4, 2020 — Many of us are struggling to hold onto a quaint belief in facts. But we’re also learning to deal with ambiguity. Simply because we don’t have all the facts. So we all, to varying degrees, rely on feelings to guide us. Welcome to the world of obesity, where we cope with an imperfect knowledge of […]
