NEWS

Increasingly, it looks like calorie counting is dead. Remember 100-calorie snack packages? They came and went early in this millenium. They were the snack food industry response to then President George W. Bush pushing against a rising tide of obesity. Back then, obesity experts speculated that those packs “might be one potentially successful approach to […]

Usually, when new medicines have been on the market for a time, warnings tend to accumulate in the prescription labeling. So it is a bit unusual to see the FDA move to remove a warning. But recently, that’s exactly what happened with semaglutide and tirzepatide. FDA is making a course correction on warnings about suicidal […]

Spending yesterday with some of the top experts in obesity, health policy, and health systems reminded us of something essential that often escapes attention. The static measure of BMI cannot possibly be adequate for assessing the chronic disease of obesity. What brought this thought to mind was an expert in health benefit design who said: […]

As we move through the first month of real-world utilization, Wegovy tablets are showing unexpectedly strong uptake for obesity – getting a head start on the anticipated arrival of Lilly’s orforglipron. Early utilization data suggest Wegovy in an oral form might be carving out meaningful space in obesity, defying initial skepticism. The Skepticism When enthusiasm […]

A steady stream of headlines makes it obvious. The incomprehensibility of a chronic disease like obesity is overwhelming. The New York Times tells us it’s a hard truth about obesity medicines: “You’ll probably need them forever.” The wellness industry is peddling dubious strategies for an “off-ramp” from GLP-1 therapies with inflated claims about “sustained remission.” […]

U.S. spending on healthcare hit a new record in 2024 – $5.3 trillion. That is a seven percent jump from the prior year, maintaining a longstanding pattern of health spends rising faster than spending on everything else in this economy. But how can it be that, despite all this spending, the burden of chronic diseases […]

All the research on obesity is not simply about tinkering with GLP-1s or developing the next blockbuster to surpass semaglutide and tirzepatide. This week, for instance, Science published research that opens a window to understanding how obesity activates inflammation. That inflammation leads to many of the complications that make obesity a complex, chronic disease. A […]

Evidence is mounting that the word of the year for 2026 could well be nihilism. Nothing matters. Meaning is void. Science is suppressed. Nonsense is flooding the zone of public discourse. In the contention between signal and noise, noise often seems to be winning. Breaking American Institutions of Science We note with regret that the […]

Should it be a surprise to learn that a testosterone agenda is part of the scientific foundation for the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans? You can find it in “The Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” HHS released that document alongside the guideline document itself. Stat News reports: “For the first time, the […]