Earlier this week I spoke at a symposium on nutrition and public health at the Tuck School of Business at my alma mater in beautiful Hanover, N.H., Dartmouth College. Among others on the panel with me was Richard Starmann, the former head of Corporate Communications for...

Life is stressful enough without anticipating the next great pandemic. There is the inevitable turmoil in the Middle East, North Korea's nuclear program, cancer-causing genes, the risk of calling your organization something that will make the IRS go through your underwear drawer, and doubts...

My onetime patient and student, Nicole Larizza, earned her MS degree in nutrition studying the effects of nutrition in childhood on breast cancer risk in adulthood. Her important insights have led her to establish an organization dedicated to the early prevention of breast cancer, Nourish Our Girls.

I...

I am just returning from my most recent visit to Mindstream Academy, a boarding school that preferentially addresses the needs of middle and high-school students with severe obesity and related health problems. I leave amazed, and inspired, as I have on each prior occasion. I have shared the impressions...

I was privileged to contribute my comments and perspective to a piece Tara Parker-Pope wrote in this week's New York Times on the bias physicians tend to show toward obese patients. Ms. Parker-Pope's column was prompted by a study in the journal Obesity, finding less rapport by doctors...

As you have likely heard, assuming you weren't grazing on another planet over the past couple of weeks, there may be a new reason to eat less meat. While we were still digesting the study about meat, we were served the news that there may be a...

On Monday of this week, my staff and I at the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center entertained a visiting delegation of colleagues from Korea. The visit was first proposed by a preventive medicine specialist there in an email to me some months back. Somehow, in the time since, the visit...

Doctors, psychologists, ethicists and others, along with our society at large, debate whether "the ends justify the means." But nobody debates whether "the means justify the ends." There is no point even looking for an answer to a question that is patently silly. For now, just hold that thought,...

Knowledge, alas, is not power. Knowledge may be necessary for power. Knowledge may be prerequisite to power. But knowledge is not sufficient for power. The gap between what we know, and what we do with what we know, belies the wishful thinking the expression espouses.

My field -- health...

I have a daughter living in Boston. So, of course, despite the vanishingly remote statistical probability of her being among those injured yesterday, I felt a pang of dread that didn't abate until she texted me back to say: No, I wasn't there. I'm fine.

And, of course,...

Everyone has opinions. You probably know what they say about that. But leaving aside the olfactory qualities of all the opinions to which we are entitled, we at least tend to know when our opinions are just opinions. But not with nutrition*, where not only does everyone have...

One of our hometown newspapers, the Connecticut Post, ran an article on April 8 about our most recent health promotion offering, a music video entitled "The Process."

The article is well done, much appreciated, and overall provides very complimentary coverage of both the music video itself, and the...

An opinion piece in the New York Times of April 4 makes the case that health care policy tends to lag well behind the imperatives of practice. The particular example highlighted is bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery, so goes the argument, is now extremely prevalent and of proven...

Little rumination is required to reach this conclusion: Cows don't make aspartame. But they don't make strawberry flavoring, either.

This is relevant to a debate that involves a petition by the dairy industry to the FDA to change what qualifies as milk, a grassroots petition opposing the dairy industry's...

What's really being processed?

Anyone living and eating in the modern world, and paying even a little attention, knows that we are a very long way from eating food, not too much, mostly plants. Not only does our food come mostly in bags, boxes, bottles, jars...

Perhaps you already know the behind-closed-doors guiding principles of the news media, but if so, I suppose I'm a bit naïve in comparison. I thought they would be all about reliably reporting the news. Instead, I learned this guiding principle during my days working as an on-air contributor...

As I write this, I am just back from my colonoscopy, more or less. All went well, but I am still shrugging off the lingering tendrils of my sedation. So let's chalk up any grammatical snafus to that, shall we?

I had, of late, had some GI symptoms. But those...

With the help of a cameo appearance by a friend you are likely to know, a preventionist reflects on vulnerability -- and the opportunity to take arms against a sea of troubles imperiling our children, and by opposing -- end them!

Please watch, share, and if inclined to help advance this vital mission, visit http://www.turnthetidefoundation.org/.

Thank you--

Dr. David L. Katz; www.davidkatzmd.com
www.turnthetidefoundation.org

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-David-L-Katz/114690721876253
http://twitter.com/DrDavidKatz
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-l-katz-md-mph/7/866/479/

For more by David Katz, M.D., click here.

For more on personal health, click...

Qatar is the richest country in the world. As such, it provides a vivid demonstration that money can't buy you health any more than it can buy you love. The converse, in fact, appears to be true: The wealth of Qatar is being purchased at the cost...

In that riveting courtroom scene we all know from the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson's character famously tells us: We can't handle the truth. That often seems the case with regard to food.

I have encountered the resistance to fundamental truths about food...