Posts Tagged ‘obesity causes’

“Especially for children, diet and lifestyle must remain at the forefront of obesity prevention and treatment.” This conviction, summing up a new editorial in JAMA, beautifully captures the discomfort that the availability of more effective treatments for obesity causes. The belief persists that diets and exercise are the right way to reverse obesity. So the […]

Tamar Haspel is angry. She notes that many of the people expressing righteous concerns about advanced obesity medicines are also folks who have a book to sell you. Or a diet or a supplement or an exercise program. Personal convictions, money, and the conflicts that go with all of that are a jumbled mess when […]

For an accounting for the food that is fueling a relentless rise in obesity, NIH researcher Kevin Hall is a good source. At the Obesity Medicine 2023 conference in New York Saturday morning, this is exactly what we heard. Systematically, Hall described his work to understand how food can be an important input into a […]

Camilla Kingdon is president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and she has the cause of the whole childhood obesity thing figured out. “The primary cause is clear,” she writes in the Guardian. It’s poverty. She describes how her thinking has evolved: “In the last few years, I have been forced to […]

An “impassioned polemic” is headed our way from British media doctor Chris van Tulleken and it aims to have us excise ultra-processed from our dietary habits. No doubt about it, ultra-processed food wins the prize for today’s best food boogeyman, but how wise is this bit of food fear based on correlation without a cause. […]

Could it be that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals such as PFAS has more of an effect on body weight and adiposity than diet? Philippe Grandjean and colleagues this week published a new study in Obesity that points to this possibility. Grandjean tells us: “We’ve previously shown that children with increased PFAS concentrations tend to […]

Scientific progress is sometimes tedious, but inevitable nonetheless. And thanks to progress in nutrition research, at long last, we have a clear understanding of the root cause of obesity. It is hyper-palatable food – too much food that tastes too good. A new analysis in the Lancer Nutrition provides the confirmation that food policy experts […]

Quietly and systematically, Tera Fazzino has been working with colleagues to define a concept of hyperpalatable foods that might explain the apparent effect of ultra-processed foods on body composition and thus, obesity. The latest chapter in this quest appeared recently in Nature Food. In short, a narrative is taking shape that we may have a […]

“This childhood obesity prevention program works best,” says the headline from Futurity. It’s a catchy headline with a catch. The catch is that there’s absolutely no evidence in the research this story highlights regarding the effectiveness of programs for actually preventing obesity. None. Works in this context apparently means that the obesity prevention program runs […]

“It’s naïve to think that we don’t know what’s causing the excess of obesity and that we don’t have the policy solutions that will prevent it.” This thought, from a senior scientist at a noted school of public health, popped up during a discussion last week in a working group of NASEM on obesity. The […]