Posts Tagged ‘research’

Over the last 15 years or so, we’ve shaken off some bad dietary advice that swallowed us in the 1980s. Low fat everything was supposed to be the foundation for a healthy diet. Until it wasn’t. But one piece of that dogma has held its place in dietary guidelines. The 2015 guidelines for Americans still […]

Harvard’s School of Public Health issued a press release last week that spawned a flood of headlines. Preventing childhood obesity is easy. They have scientific proof. All you need is a mom who follows five healthy habits. That’s right. Following those five habits will cut the risk by 75%. Habit #1: don’t weigh too much. […]

JAMA Internal Medicine has just published the latest chapter in a hot debate about insulin and sugar as culprits responsible for obesity. David Ludwig and Cara Ebbeling present the prosecution’s case. A spike in highly processed carbs – like refined starches and sugar – is giving us a high glycemic load, they say. And in turn, […]

Yesterday, Michael Schwartz delivered this year’s Blackburn Lecture in Obesity Medicine. The lecture series honors both the memory of George Blackburn and individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the science of obesity. Schwartz painted a remarkably clear picture of some complex neuroscience. Evidence is accumulating to describe the brain’s control center for diabetes and […]

What are we supposed to think now about our precious Mediterranean diet? Somebody took the randomized out of our favorite randomized controlled trial. Yesterday, authors of the landmark 2013 PREDIMED study retracted it from the New England Journal of Medicine. They did this because of problems with the randomization. In its place, they published a new […]

People won’t eat what they don’t like. So if we want them to eat healthy food, it must taste good. Of course, nothing is simple about making the healthiest food taste good to most people people. We are driven by evolution to eat sugar, salt, and fat – as well as protein. Our inherited tastes tell […]

In their recent book, Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich tell us that we’re suffering from truth decay. Public discourse now brings more disagreement about facts and their interpretation. They say the line separating facts from personal beliefs and opinions has become blurry. And thus, we have increasing difficulty with civil discourse and policymaking. Certainly, we […]

The science of fat tissue has progressed in quite an impressive way over the last decade. And just yesterday, researchers added a new milestone to that progress. With a new paper in Nature Medicine, Heejin Jun and colleagues identified a neurological pathway that may be critical for activating beige fat cells to burn energy. And […]

Justin Ryder, Claudia Fox, and Aaron Kelly offer us an excellent overview of the options for treating severe childhood obesity. Unfortunately, for all the talk of urgency about childhood obesity, the options are far too few. Intense Focus on Lifestyle The cornerstone of care for youth with severe obesity remains lifestyle interventions. It’s a low […]

Bariatric centers of excellence now perform most bariatric surgeries. So if all those centers are excellent, how much does it matter where someone has a surgery performed? Quite a bit. A new review by Tapan Mehta and David Allison in JAMA offers an important conclusion. Accreditation might be a good idea, but by itself, it doesn’t […]