Hits and Misses
Does diabetes cause obesity rather than the other way around?
Why businesses give you a receipt, even when you don’t ask for one.
Tag: "obesity"
Oct 14, 2013 | 11 comments | by John Goodman
Hits and Misses
Obesity paradox: studies showing overweight people live longer may suffer from measurement error.
Does support for ObamaCare reflect lack of empathy for the young?
Good news: looking at what people consume, the war on poverty has been almost completely won.
Oct 07, 2013 | 19 comments | by John Goodman
New Efforts to Get People Signed Up with ObamaCare, and Other Links
On the study finding that overweight people live slightly longer: “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.”
Aug 09, 2013 | 12 comments | by John Goodman
Failing to Change Behavior
According to the July 11, 2013 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, the Look AHEAD trial has been canceled on the “basis of a futility analysis” after 9.6 years of follow-up. It was designed to study whether an intensive lifestyle intervention for weight loss would decrease cardiovascular morbidity and mortality among overweight or obese patients with Type 2 diabetes. Short of interning people in exercise camps, it is hard to imagine a more intensive intervention.
The 5,145 participants were randomly assigned to either a control group or an intensive lifestyle intervention group. The control group received the usual information about behavioral strategies for adopting standard recommendations about how to eat right and exercise.
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Jul 18, 2013 | 11 comments | by Linda Gorman
The Cost of Being Fat
In the past 30 years, the percentage of American adults who are obese has doubled, driving a sharp rise in such chronic conditions as diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.
The ramifications for health spending are significant. Annual health costs for obese individuals are more than $2,700 higher than for non-obese people. That adds up to about $190 billion every year. And many of these costs are borne by Medicare, which will spend a half-trillion dollars over the next decade on preventable hospital readmissions alone.
Ken Thorpe and Tommy Thompson in USA Today.
Jun 19, 2013 | 12 comments | by John Goodman
Wireless Medicine Means Better Quality, and Other Links
iPhone medicine: it’s cheaper, faster and maybe better. (video)
Controversy over obesity studies. HT: Tyler Cowen.
How to keep the NSA from listening to you phone calls. HT: David Henderson.
Jun 10, 2013 | 11 comments | by John Goodman
Why You Are Fat; Or Not Fat
The hypothalamus, which monitors the body’s available energy supply, is at the center of the brain’s snack-food signal processing. It keeps track of how much long-term energy is stored in fat by detecting levels of the fat-derived hormone leptin — and it also monitors the body’s levels of blood glucose, minute-to-minute, along with other metabolic fuels and hormones that influence satiety. When you eat a cookie, the hypothalamus sends out signals that make you less hungry. Conversely, when food is restricted, the hypothalamus sends signals that increase your desire to ingest high-calorie foods. The hypothalamus is also wired to other brain areas that control taste, reward, memory, emotion and higher-level decision making. These brain regions form an integrated circuit that was designed to control the drive to eat.
Source: The New York Times.
May 09, 2013 | 11 comments | by John Goodman
Who Pays For Obesity?
A common starting point is the assertion that those who are obese impose higher health costs on the rest of the population — a statement which is then taken to justify public policy interventions…We will argue that the existing literature on these topics suggests that obese people on average do bear the costs and benefits of their eating and exercise habits. We begin by estimating the lifetime costs of obesity. We then discuss the extent to which private health insurance pools together obese and thin, whether health insurance causes obesity, and whether being fat might actually cause positive externalities for those who are not obese. If public policy to reduce obesity is not justified on the grounds of external costs imposed on others, then the remaining potential justification would need to be on the basis of helping people to address problems of ignorance or self-control that lead to obesity…
Oops. There goes the whole reason for Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban and his call for a soda tax. The study. HT: Jason Shafrin.
Apr 22, 2013 | 10 comments | by John Goodman
