Posts Tagged ‘bias’

We’re launching a whole new decade on Wednesday. So it makes sense to step back for a moment and think about what the coming year will bring in obesity, nutrition, and health. We’ll be ready for surprises. Those are unpredictable. But we’re pretty sure that these big stories – already in play – will grab […]

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year seems perfect for our time. On one hand, it’s very nice to see this humble word rise up from obscurity. English needs a gender neutral singular pronoun. So people are getting comfortable with they for this purpose. It’s also handy for people who want to specify a non-binary pronoun for […]

So far this year, about 130,000 of you have read our posts. It boggles our mind. But of course, nobody reads all of the daily posts we offer up. So as this year closes out, we think it makes sense to take stock of the stories that most commanded your attention this year. Thus we […]

Why is it so hard to get simple, unbiased information about nutrition and health? A story this week in the Washington Post should give you a clue. It’s all about eggs and the bias that people bring to the subject. When it comes to what we should eat, it seems that everyone has an ax […]

It sounds wonderful. This program is ideal for integrating health promotion more intensively into the everyday life of children. Best of all, it only takes is a very low dose of encouragement to Join the Healthy Boat. It’s easy and effective, say the folks who designed and tested this incredible program. But we can’t help […]

Entrenched habits die hard. So it is with treating bariatric surgery as a last resort. In case you had any doubt, a new study in PLOS Medicine provides more reason to rethink this is a false premise for bariatric surgery. Jans Anders and colleagues found that when more time passes between the onset of diabetes […]

We’re just about done with this decade that started in 2010. And if you look back over these ten years, it’s plain to see that we’ve marked some big milestones in obesity and health. Here are ten that stand out. No doubt, others will seem big to you. So please, use the comment function below […]

How do people with obesity – or any other health condition – become stigmatized? It turns out that words are very important for weight stigma. In Communication Theory, Professor Rachel Smith offers us powerful insight with a classic paper. Four elements are critical. Thus, we should be careful about letting those elements creep into the […]

I’ve had obesity since early childhood. This is my story of living with it. In my immigrant Italian family, chubby children were considered “healthy,” a sign of “making it.” I was lovingly, but, unwittingly, overfed. Up until my early 20s, nothing worked to control my dietary intake or for lasting fat loss. I knew back […]

Sad but true, most obesity care is self care. For the most part, that means personal efforts to lose and maintain a lower weight. Recently, a study in JAMA Open Networks, by Liyuan Han et al, generated a flood of headlines on this subject. Bottom line, the story was that “more people are trying and […]