Posts Tagged ‘bariatric surgery’

Can obesity care and prevention lead to less death, cancer, and other complications of obesity? This question has been a hard one to answer. For one thing, we’re not too good at prevention. Obesity rates keep going up, not down. However, on the plus side, we have pretty good data on preventing death, cancer, and […]

This is unfolding today in the New England Journal of Medicine. A fascinating little study of 22 patients is offering up a comparison of apples and scalpels today. The researchers compared metabolic effects of weight loss from very low calorie diets and from bariatric surgery. They found similar effects for similar amounts of weight loss. […]

Just how important is bariatric surgery for someone living with obesity in the midst of a pandemic? We’re getting all kinds of advice about how to best take care of ourselves in this stressful time. Barely a day passes without another study confirming the reasons for concern. Obesity raises the risk for hospitalization and death […]

That long-awaited day has arrived and the UK now has a brand new, shiny obesity deal. This “world-leading plan” aims to help people lose weight, beat the coronavirus, and protect the NHS. It bans buy one, get one free deals on food. But apparently, bait and switch is A-OK, if it’s a public policy deal. […]

Any day now, we will see a new obesity plan for the UK. Some of the loudest voices in the process leading up to this great unveiling have been focused on prevention. But this is a problem that already affects 64 percent of the population in England. In my opinion, this focus reflects simplistic weight […]

A healthy conversation is shaping up because of COVID-19. It’s all about the gap between talk and action on obesity. In the UK, it has a hashtag: #ActOnObsityNow. Though it’s happening more quietly in the U.S., the same conversation is in play. Will actions match our words about the urgency of obesity? The question of […]

A randomized controlled trial (RCT) in surgery is quite a challenge. For good reason, people are reluctant to sign up for a study in which they might randomly get surgery. Or not. Surgery is a big decision and leaving it to chance doesn’t sit well with most people. Yet an RCT is the very best […]

It’s fascinating how readily people agree with the truth that correlation does not prove causation. Talk is cheap. But throw a study of correlation at them and poof! Caution evaporates. People leap from correlation to causality. So it is with a new study of pre-op weight loss and mortality after bariatric surgery. In JAMA Network […]

This is a remarkable day for two big reasons. For one thing, it marks the first ever unified Worldwide Obesity Day. That by itself is impressive enough. But even more impressive is a global commitment to end weight stigma, published late yesterday in Nature Medicine. This commitment, developed by 36 distinguished experts from all over […]

Let’s face it. We live in a culture that is obsessed with weight and body image. Cool Sculpting ads bombard us with the promise to target, freeze, and eliminate inconvenient fat cells. To “take you further.” But this and other cosmetic nonsense has nothing to do with a real view of obesity care. The point […]