There is no single silver bullet in fighting obesity. Government legislation, corporate responsibility, education and personal responsibility, combined with web and mobile services, can all help people eat healthy and fight obesity.

Preventing obesity-associated chronic diseases and improving our nation's public health requires policy, systems and environmental change. Where we live, eat, sleep, work, learn, and play all impact our health.

Our cultural attitudes about the use of our feet and our forks are ill-advised, but not crazy; they always made sense before. For most of human history, calories were relatively scarce and physical activity was unavoidable. Our prevailing inclinations are well-suited to that scenario.

The debate rages as to why more children are diagnosed with chronic health conditions. Better diagnosing? More ill kids due to environmental factors? Both? While I do not agree we are "better" at diagnosing, I do think we are better at labeling. There's a subtle difference.

As my colleague and I illustrate in our recent paper, the trend toward larger portions coincides with the availability of calories in the U.S. food supply and the rising prevalence of overweight and obesity. So what can we do about this continued trend toward larger portions?

Mark Bittman, a writer for the New York Times, is proposing a new way to label foods so that all consumers need to do is take a quick glance at the package to make an informed decision about their health.

As infectious disease doctors, we routinely care for patients with meningitis, but never have we treated a case of aspergillus meningitis, the type of fungal infection that has caused more than a dozen deaths and sickened nearly 200 people in Tennessee and other states.

Historically, women have experienced discrimination in terms of their health despite making 80 percent of health care decisions for their families, using more medical services than men, and suffering greater disability from chronic disease.

Too often when we talk about this nation's obesity crisis, we talk about it as an overwhelming, seemingly unsolvable problem. With 1 in 3 American children overweight or obese, the issue is an urgent one, but as one American city is showing us, a solution is possible.

"Smaller government" makes a swell sound bite, because it sounds like standing up against waste, inefficiency, and the quagmire of bureaucracy. But in the course of political harangues where sound bites prevail, it's often hard to tell exactly who is apt to get bitten.

Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, all Americans can agree that our health care costs are unsustainable -- and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better. A new report from the Institute of Medicine reveals the truth about the way our health care dollars are spent.

Feet, forks, and fingers could reshape our personal medical destinies, and modern public health, dramatically, for the better. We have known this for decades. So why doesn't it happen?