Posts Tagged ‘scientific rigor’

For decades now, considerable resources have gone toward efforts to prevent the ongoing rise of obesity in the population. But with little success. It keeps on rising. So it seems reasonable to ask, do we have the tools we need for the task of effective obesity prevention? Professor Lisa Powell provided us with some mixed […]

Most of us who think about food systems have a vague sense that our diet has a meaningful impact on the health of the planet. Beef is typically thought to be a bad actor. Eating more plant based foods should help. But an ambitious new study in Nature Sustainability aims to assign specific numbers to […]

The second day of the epic meeting on obesity causes at the Royal Society in London came round to the subject that preoccupies almost everyone – food and physical activity. One thing is certain. This is a pair of subjects that evokes strong passions, but the strength of the data often does not match the […]

“This [obesity] is an important problem and we really still don’t know what causes it,” said John Speakman this morning to open a meeting of the Royal Society in London. Three days of presentations and discussion with some of the most brilliant scientists in the world lie ahead. It”s unfolding on YouTube and a dedicated […]

From the Annals of Sad but True: “It is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit,” said Guillaume Cabanac. He was commenting of the news last year of hundreds of retractions from special issues in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. This and other recent news suggests that scientific fraud is hardly negligible. But […]

“There is more to obesity than meets the eye,” write James René Jolin and Fatima Cody Stanford in the Postgraduate Medical Journal. But too often, visible behaviors and appearances guide our responses to this disease. So we end up wondering why the result of earnest efforts to reduce it in both individuals and the population […]

According to Anahad O’Connor in the Washington Post, your microbiome can do amazing things for you. “These vast communities of microbes are the gateway to your health and well-being – and one of the simplest and most powerful ways to shape and nurture them is through your diet.” Because research sez so. So maybe feeding […]

In popular culture right now, it seems that ultra-processed foods are the bad boys. “Ultra-processed foods linked to heart disease, cancer, and death, studies show,” says one recent headline. Scary stuff, eh? Targeting ultra-processed foods for scorn wins approving nods. But even if it supports a favored narrative, looking closely at research on ultra-processed foods […]

Candid conversations about obesity prevention can be difficult. Longstanding prevention strategies are not really working too well. “It’s so hard to change BMI at the population level,” said Marlene Schwartz of Yale’s Rudd Center recently at the National Academy of Sciences. She’s right. We know that many factors all around us are driving more obesity […]

It really is becoming hard to remember just how we were clutching at straws to cope with the pandemic two years ago when all we had to prevent COVID was social distance and masks. No vaccines or Paxlovid. One of the straws we were clutching then was vitamin D. Both our ex-President and Tony Fauci […]