obesity

[...] "I think it's forward thinking to start to see, to view food as medicine," he says. "That's not something that's really on our radar in medical education. But with the burden of disease in the United States being so heavily weighted with lifestyle disease, I think it's a very, very logical next step." Read More »

There are lots of theories about why food allergies, asthma, celiac disease and intestinal disorders like Crohn's disease have been on the rise. Dr. Martin Blaser speculates that it may be connected to the overuse of antibiotics, which has resulted in killing off strains of bacteria that typically live in the gut. Read More »

If the torrent of studies suggesting that sugar is bad for our health wasn’t quite enough, new research again suggests that added dietary sugar increases the risk of death from heart disease. Read More »

It was the Greeks who first counseled to let food be thy medicine. And, it seems, some doctors are taking this age-old advice to heart. In New York City physicians are writing prescriptions for fresh fruits and vegetables. That's right, 'scripts for produce. Read More »

Last week’s announcement by the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) council on science and public health cheered me. It said that the AMA should not designate obesity a disease, because doing so was unlikely to improve health outcomes and because the most widely utilized obesity metric — the body mass index or BMI — was simplistic and flawed. [...] Read More »

Last week the CDC released a report titled “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children — United States, 2005–2011”. For the first time the US government has taken a close look at the incidence and prevalence of common childhood disorders such as ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders, serious behavior problems and similar conditions. Read More »