Posts Tagged ‘obesity’

Can obesity prevention be as simple as telling people to chew more slowly? That’s what the principal investigator of a new study published in Nutrients, Professor Katsumi Iizuka, says: “These are easy, money-saving measures that can be started right away to help prevent obesity. “Incorporating the proposed eating behavior into school lunches and other programs […]

ICER, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, yesterday brought a sharp focus to the challenge of dealing with the money flowing for obesity medicines. Sarah Emond, ICER’s CEO, explained the challenge and the opportunity of this unique moment: “This new class of obesity medicines offers weight reduction and associated benefits that, if they’re sustained […]

Change is hard and people resist it. FDA is coming to terms with the idea of radical transparency and certainly drug labels are a good place to start. When we talk about drug labels for prescription drugs, it means the lengthy “prescribing information” that FDA reviews and approves. Its purpose is to tell doctors, pharmacists, […]

It is really easy to beat up on the lowly BMI. The Lancet Commission on clinical obesity gently kicked it to the curb by saying BMI “can both overestimate and underestimate adiposity” and thus declared its obsolescence as a singular measure for excess adiposity. “Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body […]

The news in obesity research these days is so full of headlines about a multitude of new medicines in development that it is easy to lose count. All too often, these are early stage or even pre-clinical notions of a potential treatment. So yesterday, it was good news indeed to hear that a once-daily oral […]

Back in October, JAMA Network Open published a research letter suggesting that metabolic surgery numbers were “plunging” because of GLP-1 medicines. They claimed to observe a 26% drop in surgeries between 2022 and 2023 for privately insured patients. A few months later, the authors issued a correction and said the actual drop was more like […]

This is puzzling. When we saw a new systematic review of therapies for childhood obesity, we were intrigued. It popped up in JAMA Network Open on Friday, clearly focused on central (abdominal) obesity in youth. The authors used waist circumference (WC), waist-to-height ratio, waist-to-hip ratio, and WC z-score as measures of this. But there is […]

The first update to Canadian guidelines for pediatric obesity in two decades is out today. The authors grounded them in the best available science. They crafted them with the values of children and families at the center of their process. In short, these are very solid guidelines. But there’s just one little problem. The scarce […]

A fascinating new study in Nature Metabolism suggests how climate temperatures might affect obesity risk in a surprising way – at conception. Takeshi Yoneshiro and colleagues conducted a careful study of the potential effects of climate on obesity risk. They found that obesity is less likely when conception occurs during cold seasons. In a commentary […]

We find ourselves wondering, as Marion Nestle does, about the unlikely alignment of RFK’s MAHA concept with some of the ideas about food policy she has been advocating for decades. We do not always agree, but we have long admired Nestle’s convictions in taking on problems with food systems and the business model of the […]