Those working in public health would be the first to concede that our discipline has a bit of an image problem. If we’re not despairing over the societal burden of obesity (step away from those pies…
This month, the toxic combination of extreme heat and summer holidays will probably mean that you’re going to expose more flesh than you would like to someone whose opinion you care about. January is the…
When it comes to illnesses linked to poor health choices, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the rates at which people die from them have been falling for some time. The bad news is…
Many of us are well versed in the negative health consequences of being obese. For those of us who aren’t, public health marketing campaigns such as Live Well in England and Take Life On Scotland and endeavour…
It is an undeniable truth that prevention is always better than cure. Vaccinations have near eradicated polio and small pox, hygiene caused the dramatic disappearance of typhoid and cholera and just being…
We need to reassess where responsibility lies for obesity and who should be spending the money to tackle it. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which advises the National Health…
Poverty is associated with a great number of health problems. One relatively recent health crisis largely attributed to poverty is obesity. According to the World Health Organisation, obesity rates have…
Refugees settling in Australia constantly face new challenges. They have to re-adjust to new income levels, cultural practices and language. They also face a new food environment, where many traditional…
Over the past three decades, the Australasia region has outpaced other regions of the world with the largest absolute increase in adult obesity. Poor diet and high body mass index have overtaken tobacco…
I run 50km per week on my treadmill and eat a calorie-restricted diet; this is something our ancestors didn’t have to do. But then they didn’t sit at a desk all day and certainly did not have access to…
Science has a simple and incredible trick that will help you lose weight. The idea, it seems, is to make portions appear bigger because this leads people to serve and eat less. While many such fat-fighting…
If we could go back 100 years in a time machine, what would kids be like? They’d be shorter, leaner, probably dirtier and less well-fed — but would they be fitter? It turns out we actually have a beautiful…
Gurmeet Singh, Menzies School of Health Research and Susan Sayers, Menzies School of Health Research
Tony Abbott is spending this week in North-East Arnhem Land, part of his long-held hope “to be not just the Prime Minister but the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”. We asked our experts: what stories…
Non-communicable diseases that you can’t catch from someone else such as stroke, high blood pressure and cancer, account for 36.1m deaths worldwide. Put it another way, this is about 63% of all deaths…
Liver cancer is one of the most deadly diseases in the world with around 700,000 patients being diagnosed and more than 600,000 patients dying of the disease annually, according to the American Cancer…
Want to stack the nutrition odds in your favour? The key is good food so here are five things to never let into your shopping trolley: lollies, biscuits, sugar-sweetened drinks, potato crisps and processed…
Rats are very useful for studying human eating behaviour. Both rats and humans are omnivores, and both use flavour conditioning – learning through taste and experience which foods are good to eat and which…
We’ve all heard those phrases that denote a certain blindness to the passage of time. “She looks as young as the day I met her” husbands say of their wives 50 years into married life, or “haven’t they…
Almost two-thirds of Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese. Excess weight is responsible for 7,200 deaths each year in Australia, as well one in five heart attacks, half of…
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand