Posts Tagged ‘bias’

Policies to address obesity across the whole population often make perfect sense to the people who are promoting them. But often, they run into resistance from people looking at obesity from a very different place. Writing in the Guardian, Clare Finney offers a case in point: “For the 1.25 million men and women with eating […]

We are getting an eyeful of injustice, cruelty, hubris, and selfishness. It comes to us in examples large and small. On a catastrophic scale, it’s unfolding in Ukraine. In subtler but relentless increments, we see it in pervasive bias against people living with obesity. Dispiriting as all of this is, an antidote is available to […]

If a patient is Black, health providers are more than twice as likely to put negative words in that patient’s health history. These are descriptors like hysterical, noncompliant, unpleasant, or uncooperative. Those word choices don’t suggest a good relationship with a patient. This conclusion comes from an analysis of records for 18,459 patients, published recently […]

Should 2022 be the year that we turn over decision making to artificial intelligence? Writing in the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik suggests it should. We could banish fears of making bad decisions, he says. But we beg to differ. A growing body of evidence tells us that computer systems can replicate the bad decisions we […]

With the new year on the way, no doubt many headlines will be urging readers to set resolutions to lose the weight they may have put on over the holidays. However, the way the British press talks about weight, obesity, and health has fluctuated markedly in recent years. To learn more about these changes, we […]

In her new book, How the Other Half Eats, Priya Fielding-Singh tells us good nutrition comes in many forms. But the dominant culture often presents a narrow definition of a healthy diet. This happens because we often fix our attention on the merits and faults of specific foods or nutrients. She writes: “Certain items are […]

Dietary bias can be very slow to fade. The American Heart Association updated its dietary guidance for the first time in more than a decade. The new guidance has a lot of good things in it. There’s less emphasis on individual good and bad foods. More emphasis on healthful patterns for eating. The guidance makes […]

At ObesityWeek®, we noticed a subtle shift. In past years, health policy discussions have sometimes been stuck on very detailed food fights. But this year, it seems that such food fights were less in the foreground. Instead, we saw a much greater focus than ever before on health equity, disparities, and the people who are […]

Jessica Nordell describes something like a quest in her new book, The End of Bias. “When I began this book, I thought I was writing a work of science. My plan was to read, study, synthesize the best evidence, and share what I found. The journey would be straightforward; it would be scientific and outward-facing […]

“What happens when health officials tell the full truth?” asked David Leonhardt in the New York Times recently. He was writing about the value of admitting to uncertainty in public health. In a similar vein, Paul Krugman wrote recently about the power of admitting that nobody knows the right answer to a thorny problem. And […]