Posts Tagged ‘bias’

For decades now, Lee Kaplan and Caroline Apovian have led what was known as the Blackburn Course in Obesity Medicine every year at Harvard in June. This year, the name of the course has changed to Obesity Treatment 2022. It has moved to the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, where Richard Rothstein has joined Kaplan […]

Just about any medical diagnosis can be a bit dehumanizing. Even more so when a medical professional takes it a step further and explicitly labels a person with their diagnosis. For most diseases, health professionals have long understood that labeling people in this way – as an “epileptic,” for example – is bad form. But […]

Public health should stop talking about obesity, says a policy brief from University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. “Replace assignments connecting ‘obesity’ and health,” suggests the brief. Cancel the word obesity and weight stigma will fade. That seems to be the thinking there. At the other extreme, we have folks who love to […]

It seems to be an article of faith. Millions of low-income Americans live in food deserts and it puts them at higher risk for obesity. That’s a prevalent narrative to explain the link between poverty and obesity. And thus, the narrative works its way into the interpretation of research on programs for fixing food deserts. […]

Ten years ago, PLOS Medicine published an examination of the role of “Big Food” in global health with a collection of articles. It was an indictment, to be sure, and this theme continues to resonate today. PLOS Medicine editors summed it up: “Big multinational food companies control what people everywhere eat, resulting in a stark […]

Cancer is not just exuberant cell growth. Nor is depression simply a matter of feeling sad. Likewise obesity is not a simple matter of living in a larger body. But cancer, depression, and obesity are medical words that can be daunting and also misused. And each of them can bring stigma to complicate any efforts […]

Around the world, we have a big obesity knowledge gap in medical schools. A few years ago, Marissa Mastrocola and colleagues documented this in the International Journal of Obesity. But the good news is that people are working on closing that gap. This week, a group of medical educators published a new set of obesity […]

Yesterday, the USDA opened up the process for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. They invited us all to comment on the questions they will pose to a scientific advisory committee. Then they’ll appoint that committee and put it to work on producing a report. The report goes into the sausage grinder of policy making. […]

Your health is in your hands. With these words, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky captures the essence of flawed thinking about public health. These words also capture the pervasive bias that gets in the way of coping well with both the COVID-19 pandemic and with obesity. This is the presumption that personal responsibility will take care […]

Two years ago, 69 percent of Americans believed what the CDC had to say. Now, that number is 44 percent. After seven decades, CDC sat atop a pyramid of influence in public health. But today, top-down public health decrees meet with skepticism as often as with trust. We are living in an era when distrust […]