Portside

After some suave marketers used clips from Oz's TV show to sell bogus products, he faced a grilling from a panel of U.S. senators about his weight loss product claims. Oz then invited his Twitter audience, "What is your biggest question for me? Reply with #OzsInbox." Unfortunately for Oz, this strategy backfired. Horrendously. Immediately after Oz asked the question, Twitter gave Dr. Oz a hilarious slap across the face.

Researchers noted a correlation between clinical signs of metabolic disorder — such as increasing weight or decreasing efficiency of glucose metabolism — and consumption of artificial sweeteners. The findings could cause a headache for the food industry.

There is no doubt that an unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle are the two chief drivers of the obesity epidemic, but many researchers are confident that they will eventually hit on specific brown fat–based treatments, although most admit that such interventions most likely are 10 years away at least.

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat? Science may slowly be coming to an understanding of the complex feedback loops which control our metabolism.

While bacteria from lean mice prevent obesity in peers, microbes are only part of the story — the effect also depends on a healthy diet.

You know why black folk in the south don’t vote? According to the New York Times and the experts at the Pew Charitable Trust, they’re just too damn fat!

Soda is a fructose delivery system as tobacco is a nicotine delivery system. (And if it’s not “truly” addictive but only habit forming, so much the better; it’ll be that much easier to get people to cut back.)