Blogs

I had the pleasure of interview Kristen Avera from Open Hand Atlanta to learn more about her program addressing food insecurity with women living with gestational diabetes. The interview recording can be found here: https://youtu.be/9_V04RqDUak or you can read the transcript below! Tell us about yourself. I'm Kristen Avera. I am a registered dietitian. I've been a dietitian for about 10 years. Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist for about four years and then in my current organization with Open Hand for about four years as well. So, currently serving as our Nutrition Services manager, we have an awesome group of dietitians throughout our ...

Since my previous Public Health COI blog posts about food addiction (on January 13, 2020 and February 3, 2020) I’ve been incorporating information from the scientific literature (obtained via ongoing PubMed Alerts on this topic) into multiple professional presentations. Below are some brief summaries of newer points along with my personal musings from ongoing scientific and popular readings. The ongoing debate about alternative names for “food addiction” continued with someone suggesting “food use disorder”, while someone else complained that this term failed to capture the differentiation of highly processed foods being most implicated in the phenotype. ...

Is Weight Bias and Weight Stigma a Public Health Problem? Megrette Fletcher M.Ed., RDN, CDCES In 2005, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer asked, " Can we simultaneously work toward the prevention of obesity and eating disorders in children and adolescents? " She noted weight-related issues are not in isolation. Ten years ago, Eric Stice , Ph.D., C. Nathan Marti , Ph.D., and Shelley Durant , B.S. concluded, "There is a growing body of scholarship that acknowledges that these weight-related domains are in fact related: obesity and eating disorders co-occur in individuals and have risk factors in common." ( Stice, et al., 2011 ) What are these commonalities? This ...