There is a new eating disorder coined every decade. Obesity: you eat too much. Anorexia nervosa: you ingest too little. Bulimia nervosa: you do too much of both – but not at the same time. Now, there is orthorexia nervosa (ON): you worry too much about eating healthy food. Maybe we should just stop eating […]
Category: obesity
Every couple of years a group of experts lowers the level of blood pressure required to diagnose and treat hypertension. On the face of it, the advice seems reasonable: obesity and diabetes are on the increase across the globe and both are related to hypertension and its result, cardiovascular disease. So, dropping the upper limits […]
Traditional wisdom about chronic diseases holds that they usually last for three months or longer and may worsen over time. They are supposed to occur more in older adults and can usually be controlled but not cured. Conditions, which we thought worsen with age, paradoxically provide some protection. As with preventable disease, identifying risks early in […]
A smorgasbord of promises to achieve weight reduction are proffered in the 200-plus articles published daily in the media. In the scientific world too, there is an overabundance of research literature. Just the word “fat”, let alone “obesity” or “overweight”, generates 55 research articles a day. The over-promising language used in the lay press doesn’t […]
Everybody knows how to get weight off. Most of us have tried at least once and usually we have failed to keep the weight off. Most of the strategies we use to lose weight are not sustainable. Up to 50% of dieters who reduce their weight to a healthy level, put weight back on within […]
These days it’s pretty hard to believe anything we read about what we should eat and drink. Nutritional facts are tossed about like raw ingredients. Sometimes they are mixed and baked and turned into something sweet and palatable. Other times they are burnt and bitter. The relationship between coffee and cancer is a good example. […]
Once you tip the overweight scales you are unlikely to ever get off again. Chronic weight losers are the big time losers. They end up stuck in the middle of cycles of weight gain and loss. Part of the problem has been the focus on energy input and output through dieting and physical activity. A […]
Depending on where you live, you look at your mobile phone on average between 40 (UK) and 120 (US) times a day. The likelihood of one of those interactions involving a health site is very low, despite the large number of applications available. In 2012 there were over 40 000 mobile device applications for health […]
Having more than one health problem is more common than we think and potentially deadly. Almost one in every four of us has two or more health conditions. With each additional disease morbidity, mortality and polypharmacy increases. Some think multimorbidity can be cured by focusing on the whole patient. Research shows the opposite. Multiple health […]
Successful weight loss programs all agree that participants lose at least 5-10% of their weight in the early phases of the program and up to 90% of participants maintain a healthy weight for between six and 12 months afterwards. So losing weight is not a problem and yet weight loss is big business because so […]
The battle against obesity is as relentless as the fight against sugar. The difference is that the fight against sugar is one of global economics rather than public health. And that’s a problem based in the history of research. Obesity first emerged as the blockade against bad fats in our diet and quickly became confused […]
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