Posts Tagged ‘bias’

Today we’re at the WHO for the WHA learning all about NCDs and UHC. Alphabet soup for lunch. Obesity? It was hiding behind the chia seeds at the breakfast buffet. Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and universal health coverage (UHC) are big priorities at the 72nd World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva today. But within the global […]

We’re making progress. Right? Explicit fat shaming is no longer cool. But then again, we see implicit weight bias on the rise. It’s subtle. It often comes in healthcare – “for your own good.” Yesterday, it smacked us in the face when we read this from a distinguished bariatric surgery program explaining about a new […]

This is a pretty neat trick. Conflicts of interest are now officially dead. Lobbying for high fructose corn syrup isn’t a conflict of interest for drafting dietary guidelines. It’s a qualification. Evidence of expertise. USDA has put a high fructose corn syrup lobbyist in charge of overseeing new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This would have […]

“There’s a heck of a lot of bias among a lot of researchers,” Professor Barry Popkin tells us. On the subject of what’s driving global obesity prevalence, he’s certainly right. Is it the urbanization? To be sure, many authoritative voices promote that view.  But it’s just not that simple. A new paper, published yesterday in […]

Workplace wellness sounds like such a benign concept – maybe even beneficent. So why does it sometimes spark such anger from employees? And why aren’t workplace wellness programs working to yield better health? A recent paper from Frontiers in Psychology offers important insights. Senior author Stuart Flint sums it up: Problems arise when these programs […]

The World Health Organization is doing some great work on obesity in the European Region. For instance, they just published an outstanding new report at ECO2019 on the prevalence of severe childhood obesity in 21 countries. Unfortunately, though, they buried it in a press release that falsely promotes breastfeeding as a proven effective strategy to […]

You might think that childhood obesity is a subject that draws a lot of sympathy from the public. You would be wrong. Today at the 26th European Congress on Obesity, we presented new data on a huge gap in the public understanding of severe obesity in young children. Even in young children, our data shows […]

For reasons we cannot fathom, Jay Leno decided to deliver a rant about “this disturbing trend of gluttony” that he supposes is the root cause of obesity. Thanks, Jay. But you’re not helping. Food marketers might be pushing a lot of disgusting “innovations,” but gluttony is not the root cause of obesity. And rants about […]

At the sixth Canadian Obesity Summit on Wednesday, three of Canada’s top experts on weight bias presented diverse views on taking action against weight bias. The focus ranged from reducing bias in new healthcare providers to internalized bias and health at every size. Though these experts brought diverse perspectives, they shared a common focus. Reducing […]

Have Dietary Guidelines for Americans gone seriously awry? In a newly published doctoral thesis, Adele Hite suggests they have. As an RDN and a scholar of how public health and policy makers frame issues of nutrition, she brings a unique perspective. The definition of a healthy diet has shifted subtly, but profoundly. No longer is […]