Obesity Panacea

Hi, and welcome to Obesity Panacea!

Obesity Panacea is written by two health physiology PhD students: Peter Janiszewski and myself, Travis Saunders.

While working together at Queen's University, Peter and I were constantly discussing, or more accurately, ranting about, the latest weight loss gimmick that we had seen on television, online or in print. While some of these gimmicks (like the Hawaii Chair) were hilarious and clearly ridiculous, we worried that these products were distracting people from the health behaviours that actually work. We had recently started reading the blogs of Dr Arya Sharma and Dr Yoni Freedhoff, two Canadian physicians working in the field of obesity, and decided that a blog would be a fun way for us to speak-out about about all of these gimmicks.

Obesity Panacea began as a way to educate people about the science (or lack thereof) behind popular weight loss products, and has grown to include discussions of the latest news and research regarding obesity, nutrition and physical activity. Previous posts have ranged from discussions of Acai Berry and Human Chorionic Gonadotropin to the links between breast size and diabetes risk and simple ways to incorporate physical activity into daily life. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation and social baggage surrounding obesity, nutrition, and physical activity (most of which is only exacerbated by mainstream news media), and as researchers who study these very topics we feel that it is our responsibility to bring scientific evidence to the public discourse.

We couldn't be more excited about joining the Scienceblogs community, and we're looking forward to getting to know all of you. We're hoping to eventually import our archives from our original site, but in the meantime we will be re-posting some of our favourite posts over the next few weeks so that you can get a feel for the topics we like to discuss. And finally we'd just like to say thanks to our friends like ERV, Scicurious, Dave Munger, and Bora, who have been extremely helpful to us and our blog in the past, and we're hoping to add to the community they have done such a great job in building.

We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a note to say hi!

Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski