After more than 9 years at PLOS.org, Obesity Panacea is moving.  We would like to take this time to thank PLOS for hosting us during these years, and for being supportive of science blogging and science communication in general.  Obesity Panacea will be moving back to our original home at ObesityPanacea.com.  All of our PLOS posts have already been moved there, where you can read our full archive. If you subscribe to Obesity Panacea via email, your subscription will be updated automatically.  If you would like to receive our posts via email, you can do so by clicking here. From Travis Obesity ..read more

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have a lot of conversations with teachers and parents about screen use.  My wife is an elementary school teacher, so we have a lot of these conversations around the dinner table as well. One practice that comes up a lot is that screens are used frequently to help with classroom management.  This can be done in a few different ways – by showing videos at lunch time, or by rewarding kids with screen use for behaving in a certain way. There are several reasons why we think screens are consistently associated with negative health outcomes for children and youth ..read more

For years, I’ve bristled whenever I hear someone say they are using pedometers to see if someone is “sedentary”.  This is because (in my world), we use the term “sedentary” to refer to sitting/reclining/lying down.  Traditionally, pedometers measured steps/day, and nothing else.  So they could tell you if a person was active/inactive, but didn’t tell us anything about how much time a person spent sitting down. However, over the past 10 years pedometers have gotten increasingly sophisticated.  They’ve begun to measure not only steps/day, but many pedometers also now measure steps/minute.  This ..read more