NEWS

Can we think global and act local on chronic diseases and obesity? At the United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, quite a few people gave it a try – with mixed results. At the end of the day yesterday, no one was terribly surprised when U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw a […]

This one definitely sounded too good to be true from the start. A little bit of apple cider vinegar daily for young persons with obesity supposedly produced lower body weight, BMI, body fat ratio, blood sugar, triglycerides, and cholesterol. No side effects. However, this stunning piece of research on apple cider vinegar in obesity was […]

The Washington Examiner tells us we can prevent millions of cases of obesity and thousands of strokes simply by dropping twice-a-year time changes. “Study says.” Discover magazine says so, too. The Washington Post is a little more restrained. “We’d all be a little less prone to obesity and strokes if we ditched the switch.” Ditch […]

Yesterday Pfizer announced a $7.3 billion deal to buy Metsera, a company with an impressive obesity drugs portfolio. Roche, having spent $2.7 billion to acquire Carmot in 2023 and $1.6 billion in March on a deal with Zealand, yesterday confirmed its intent to spend everything it takes to become a market leader in obesity. “We […]

Don’t look up statistics on hunger, says USDA. It only causes “fear mongering.” To make sure we don’t have to worry about that, the agency is canceling the survey research on food insecurity it’s been doing for 30 years. That’s right. USDA announced over the weekend that measurement of food insecurity is unnecessary: “The U.S. […]

Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall have some Food Intelligence to offer us this week and their book of this title will be shipping on Tuesday. No, this is not a paid endorsement. It is, though, an earnest recommendation to learn from two of the most thoughtful people we know on the subject of food, health, […]

The emerging contest to dominate the market for oral tablets in obesity treatment became clear this week as news and PR dispatches flowed from EASD in Vienna. Aiming for a Mass Target With understated confidence, Lilly presented and published pivotal phase three data on orforglipron in NEJM. They did not run from the fact that […]

This week has been a flood of news from the EASD meeting in Vienna. Yesterday, the big news was an impressive win for kids 10-17 with type 2 diabetes in a study of tirzepatide. Researchers presented the SURPASS-PEDS trial and simultaneously published it in Lancet. At the end of the 30-week trial, tirzepatide in two […]

We get a first glimpse of the potential effect of a GLP-1 agonist, semaglutide, in data presented as a late-breaking abstract at the EASD meeting in Vienna this week. This is just a glimpse because it is survey data – self-reported and uncontrolled. With that caveat, though, Timothy Arnaut and colleagues found large reductions in […]

Today at EASD, investigators for the ATTAIN-1 pivotal phase three trial are presenting detailed results for orforglipron in obesity. These results, published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, offer no big surprises. The effectiveness in this 72-week trial was acceptable. But a big question hangs in the air. Will orforglipron be the GLP-1 […]