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The author awaits a bowl of ramen noodles in a Tokyo restaurant. Yuki Noguchi/NPR To read more of Yuki Noguchi's article, please click here. I was born and raised in the American Midwest, but love visiting my parents' homeland in Japan. Central to every trip there is always the food: Oh my goodness, the food. Eating is a raging national obsession here, with good reason. Staggering varieties of food are available everywhere; it's all delicious and — most impressively, to me — always fresh.

There were a few bad moments, over the course of a few bad months, that led me to download the weight- loss app. These will probably sound trivial to anyone who is not me, and of course they are trivial — but we are talking about bodies here, and about my body in particular, and one of the defining features of having a body is that it is a fire hose of tiny humiliations blasting you constantly in the face, never allowing you to look away, even when you most want to. One bad moment happened...

Syndemic Theory (ST) provides a framework to examine mutually enhancing diseases/health issues under conditions of social inequality and inequity. ST has been used in multiple disciplines to address interacting infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health conditions. The theory has been critiqued for its inability to measure disease interactions and their individual and combined health outcomes. This article reviews literature that strongly suggests a syndemic between...

"When I realized all of our drinking glasses were really just Prego spaghetti sauce jars." 1. "We never had any other kids cartoon channels other than PBS KIDS. My friends now talk about how much they loved watching SpongeBob SquarePants and Steven Universe, and I've never seen those shows." 2. "During third grade when I got sent home because my shirts kept showing my belly. My mom couldn't afford to buy new clothes when I grew. The teacher was always super rude about it too and acted like I...

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...

"About three months after I was born, my father was incarcerated. As a toddler, I was poor but housed. Mom and I stayed with a paraplegic meth dealer named Tony who used to employ my father. After that, up until the age of 14, life depended on Mom’s relationship with a man who sold insurance. When they were on, there was money. When they were off, there wasn’t. Through high school, it was all poverty — abject, uninterrupted and more severe than what had preceded it. I was on the margin’s...

How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...

LONDON — A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity‌ recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated. Now scientists were arguing about ‌‌the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $ 173 billion each year . At the meeting’s closing session, ‌ John Speakman , a biologist, offered ‌‌this...

To listen to Julia Rucklidge TedTalk, please click here. "In 1847, a physician by the name of Semmelweis advised that all physicians wash their hands before touching a pregnant woman in order to prevent childbed fever. His research showed that you could reduce the mortality rates from septicemia from 18%, down to 2% simply through washing your hands with chlorinated lime. His medical colleagues refused to accept that they themselves were responsible for spreading infection. Semmelweis was...

It’s 6 p.m. on the patio at Il Moro, a twinkly-lit Italian gastro pub in West Los Angeles, and Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole are intuitively eating their dinner. They start with warm, crusty bread, liberally dipped in olive oil, and then move on to salad, branzino and the penne tossed with little pillows of burrata that Ms. Resch ordered for the table. In accordance with one of intuitive eating’s 10 principles — “challenge the food police” — neither woman moralizes about the carbs. “The...

I've started and scrapped and restarted this essay several times. Imagine the camera zooming in on a wastebasket filled with crumpled typewritten pages, my thoughts written in red pen across the top. Too mean , this introduction about how teaching people a new recipe won't help them eat more vegetables. Too accusatory , this one asking if the skills you are teaching were requested by the people you teach. Be more human . Because the desire to teach is at the core of being human. We want to...

Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...