Posts Tagged ‘bias’

“Prevention is better than cure. We don’t even want people to gain excess weight. We want to have a food system in which people can eat healthily and not become fat.” This assertion came at the end of three days of an outstanding program for presenting and discussing theories, conjectures, and evidence about the causes […]

It’s a fact. Healthcare professionals are human and so are their patients. So inevitably they will – regardless of their professionalism – encounter friction with some patients. These are patients who wind up being labeled “difficult” and all too often because of that label, receive care that is less than optimal. Physician Joan Naidorf says […]

Health insurers, including Medicare, are regarding obesity meds like Botox Cosmetic, when they should be thinking of them more like a knee replacement. This observation, from a report by Jamy Lee in MarketWatch, sums up the challenge for people seeking obesity care in a health system that pays for the complications of untreated obesity, but […]

“There is more to obesity than meets the eye,” write James René Jolin and Fatima Cody Stanford in the Postgraduate Medical Journal. But too often, visible behaviors and appearances guide our responses to this disease. So we end up wondering why the result of earnest efforts to reduce it in both individuals and the population […]

We are living in a profoundly disorienting time. Because of this, we are learning that people have the capacity to rationionalize just about anything. People are plunging into rabbit holes where they encounter mazes of rationalizations about conspiracies all around them. It’s a great tool for politicians who find themselves on shaky ground. But now […]

Genuinely, we admire the persistence of David Ludwig. Today in the Washington Post, he has an opinion piece about his opinion piece in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Once again he wants to sell the world on his concept that carbs and insulin are more important for understanding obesity than simply thinking about energy […]

“We’ve been working at this for so many years and nothing has changed!” These words came from a frustrated advocate for reforming obesity policy and care at a recent strategic planning meeting. He had a point. Progress is maddeningly slow on obesity. But major changes are happening – even if they aren’t obvious at a […]

Institutions of public health are in a tough spot right now. COVID has so battered public trust in the CDC that it has put us into the figure-it-out-yourself phase of this pandemic. Likewise, the public health response to obesity has long been one of both moral panic and ineffective policy prescriptions. Decades of exhortations to […]

Every week from the Obesity and Energetics Offerings, we get sharp reminders. Headlines about nutrition and obesity science very often don’t stand up to a careful look at what the study behind the headlines actually found. This charade, though, has a serious downside. As two studies in the last week show, it perpetuates a fiction […]

“I would argue that chronic stress may be the single most common cause of obesity in modern society – even more common than food.” With these words at the opening of Obesity Treatment 2022, Lee Kaplan suggested that we should think about the possibility that we’re looking in the wrong places for the root cause […]