Posts Tagged ‘bias’

FNCE is winding up today after four days of this virtual conference. For information on weight, health, and obesity, the agenda offered some bright spots – most especially content on the lived experience of obesity. But one subject was almost completely absent. Rigorous discussion about weight neutral care, including Health at Every Size, could not […]

Progress is all around us but it’s not always obvious. Explicit weight bias is getting better, but implicit bias is as bad as ever – perhaps worse. So when people catch themselves and walk back from implicit expressions of bias, we find cause for celebration. Making errors is easy, but to correct errors – especially […]

“Child abuse.” When we wrote earlier this week about new data on bariatric surgery in children with severe obesity, that was one visceral response. Ten years ago, Lindsey Murtagh and David Ludwig trotted out the child abuse label with precisely opposite reasoning. They suggested that parents of children with obesity might be guilty of abuse […]

The global food industry is huge – so big that people have a hard time putting firm numbers on it. But roughly, it’s worth about ten trillion dollars. It’s also very diverse. The top ten multinational food and beverage companies add up to only half a trillion dollars of those sales. Nonetheless in public health […]

Can an ineffective program to prevent obesity be cost effective? Our first impulse is to say no. But a new paper in Obesity Science and Practice says yes. Mariette Derwig and colleagues tested a child-centered approach in Sweden. They found no effect in their well-designed study. However, this inconvenient result did not get in the […]

Make no mistake about it, public health is a righteous cause. Overwhelmingly, people choose careers in public health because they believe in the mission and they want to make a difference in the world. But righteous causes can bring a loss of objectivity. It happens because strong, human feelings come into play. When we hear […]

The gap between facts and feelings about bariatric surgery never ceases to amaze. In 2016, we were presenting at a CDC conference in Atlanta, when a prominent family physician interrupted. He wanted to tell us that surgery usually leads to patients regaining all their weight. Or too often, he said, death. We responded by asking […]

It’s been eight years since the American Medical Association resolved that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. But still, the argument endures. For different reasons, some people continue to resist what they see as medicalizing obesity. So with the closing session of the YWM2021 convention, it was quite interesting to hear a discussion from two […]

Back in 2005, new obesity research from CDC produced an unexpected finding. JAMA, a first-rate journal, carefully peer-reviewed and published it. But Harvard’s Walter Willett didn’t like what the data showed. So he mounted an offensive to discredit the researcher and her work. We would call this academic bullying. He called it necessary because his […]

When the words are a challenge, then dealing with a health issue is a challenge. Ask anyone working in mental health or addiction medicine. There was a time when people could not even talk about breast cancer. Betty Ford brought these subjects into public discourse. But obesity remains something that people are not really ready […]