Colon Cancer Screening Controversy. Here's What All The Debate Is About.


My friend and colleague Brian Wansink, from Cornell University, worked with some colleagues to design a preliminary restaurant menu, that maximizes the odds the people will order healthy foods. Trick number one: don’t call them “healthy” foods. Here is an image of that menu, reproduced in the Atlantic. This is a great example of how…
The Managing Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine interviewed me about the piece I wrote, with David Comerford and Eric Johnson, on redesigning the health insurance exchanges. For those of you with long commutes, here is that podcast: Healthcare.gov 3.0
More than two-thirds of employers in the US are paying their obese employees in some form or another to lose weight. Some give health insurance discounts to employees based on target BMIs. Others literally dole out cold hard cash to overweight employees who meet weight loss targets. Employers are adopting these strategies because they work. At…
Just came across an interesting way to try to motivate people to exert themselves: post calories-burned-counts on the stairs. Would that work for you? For me, it would probably make me look down while walking up, only to trip, fall backwards, crack my head, all the while asking myself: “What the heck is a kcal…
Not long before the presidential election, the Wall Street Journal editorial page warned its readers about what it called the attack of the killer Oreos. You have to admit it’s a pretty sensational image — of an Oreo silently stalking its prey, leaping upon an unsuspecting consumer. In fact, this is exactly the kind of…
I am not one of those parents who believes kids should win trophies just for showing up for their t-ball games. But I’m also not stingy in praising my children when they do well. When my kids got hundreds on their grade school spelling tests, I told them how proud I was of their accomplishment….