Weight Loss Wonders: Tips and Tricks

For much of our history as a species, the threat of chronic food shortage and malnutrition has loomed over us.   Fortunately, due to global economies and remarkable advances in technology and agriculture, most of the people reading this will never need to worry about starvation.  But ironically, even as people in industrialized nations have largely overcome the problem of famine, we now must battle the consequences of excessive abundance of readily accessible food. All over the world, modern societies are confronting the challenge of obesity and diseases emanating from obesity.  An analysis of trends in adult body mass published in the Lancet puts the progression of this public health crisis into useful historical perspective: It revealed that the number of obese individuals has risen from 105 million in 1975 all the way to 641 million as of 2016. Over the past 40 years, we have gone from a world in which prevalence of underweight was more than double that of obes...

Have you ever wondered what your great-great-grandparents would think of the world today – and how we live – if they were transported here via a time machine? As a science fiction fan, I find myself contemplating this kind of stuff a lot. Whenever I play these scenarios through my mind, it makes me realize what a truly alien environment we now occupy, relative to past generations – and especially from an evolutionary perspective. Our lives have changed drastically in too many different ways to recount here, and most of them are actually a net positive. But for those of us who study health and human biology, our patterns of physical activity is perhaps among the most glaring change.  We have discussed this previously in the context of sedentary behavior. Surveys suggest that the average American spends about 13 hours per day sitting , on average, and it is estimated that they typically get around 4774 steps per day (and let’s be honest, a ton of people aren’t even getting th...