Women’s Health: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
on Nov 16, 2009 in blog reproductive biology Yesterday, on my way to the American Heart Association Meeting in Orlando, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s recently published anthology of articles he wrote for The New Yorker magazine, now published under the name, “What the Dog Saw”. Of all the fas...

Gut Bugs Revisited
on Nov 13, 2009 in blog intestinal flora metabolism The type of bugs that colonize your intestines (AKA the intestinal flora) may be a major determinant of your risk for obesity. Apart from the studies that I have blogged about before, readers may have seen the paper on twins published in NATURE earl...

Why Banning Junk Food Advertising May Help Companies Sell More
on Nov 12, 2009 in blog marketing neurobiology policy Regular readers of this blog may recall previous surprising and seemingly counterintuitive reports like the one that messages telling you to move more will only promote snacking, marking healthy “choices” on menus virtually guarantees that these...

Obesity: Lifestyle Choice or Lifestyle Chance?
on Nov 11, 2009 in blog discrimination lifestyle policy Readers of these pages should by now recognize that obesity is an extraordinarily heterogeneous and complex condition. While energy balance is simply a matter of energy in and energy out, the determinants of energy in and energy out are anything but...

Breaking Down Walls
on Nov 10, 2009 in blog body image policy November 9, 2009 marked the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Born in Berlin, for years I we lived a few 100 metres from it, my kids played in its shadow, we biked along its perimeter, when visitors came, we took them to the outlook po...

German Competence in Obesity Research
on Nov 9, 2009 in blog miscellaneous This weekend, I attended the joint meeting of the German Societies for Obesity and Diabetes. Apart from delivering a talk at a SCOPE course, I also participated in a session focussing on research networks - my task was to present to introduce the aud...

Indications for Obesity Treatment
on Nov 6, 2009 in blog treatment weight management When an overweight or obese person presents with a sign or symptom of a disease in clinical practice, the clinician needs to always consider the following questions: 1) Is the presenting condition causally related to excess weight? 2) Is the presenti...

Satiety Trumps Reward?
on Nov 5, 2009 in blog ingestive behavior According to conventional wisdom, people tend to go for highly-palatable energy-dense foods because these are more “rewarding” and, for the same reason, often end up overeating on these foods. This “wisdom” is so obvious that it has rarely be...

Weight Acceptance Prevents Weight Gain?
on Nov 4, 2009 in blog ingestive behavior self-esteem weight management This may sound counterintuitive, but it appears that one way to manage your weight and not continue packing on more pounds year after year may be to simply accept your body weight for what it is and, instead of trying to lose weight, to simply focus...

Lifestyle Patterns Among Obese Adults - Chicken or Egg?
on Nov 3, 2009 in blog lifestyle weight management Weight gain is the result of positive energy balance and the only way you can get into positive balance is if energy input exceeds output. As all calories enter the body as food or drink, ingestive behaviour is obviously an important determinant of e...