Working as an occupational medicine physician in 2003, I became interested in metabolic syndrome. I had a number of requests coming from corporate clients to address the rise of obesity and diabetes in the workforce. Human resource directors, wellness teams and CEOs were keenly aware that the health costs of their employees were driven more by lifestyle factors than anything else and I thought I might be able to help. Using the Diabetes Prevention Program as a model, I pitched and implemented a "metabolic clinic" for one of my client companies which performed yearly blood tests and wellness screens.

Portia De Rossi became famous playing Nelle on Ally McBeal in the 1990s and more recently as Lindsey Bluth on Arrested Development. She's a talented, funny actress, but more importantly: Portia De Rossi can write!
Her 2010 anorexia memoir, Unbearable Lightness, is the best of the first-person examinations of how this disease plays upon the minds of its victims and the subtle nuances of its manifestations. What's refreshing about Ms. De Rossi's account is not its candor (it is candid, but several ANA books have been that), but the fact that it's written by someone who understands and pays attention to narrative.

Taking Andy Warhol's quip, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," (which seems, like so many quotations, to have been stolen or mis-attributed) as a point of departure, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi hypothesized that perhaps the internet was the place where this prediction might be close to accurate.

In his 2010 book "Bursts," Barabasi looks at many phenomena related to dispersion, starting with Einstein's thought experiments and predictions for a power law to describe the "random" movement of dust particles in water.

The realization that everything would be okay regarding the obesity epidemic occurred to me in a doughnut shop. It was the last week of my employment as a weight loss doctor and for years, my clinic had been a junk food free zone. This was not because I set rules based on a notion that junk food is bad for a person. I didn't and I don't really have much worry about sugary snacks. It just happened as a sort of accidental byproduct of what we were doing. If you talk about diet rules all day and see how hard the patients are working to eat better, it just feels wrong to have a big box of doughnuts in the break-room...or powdered sugar on your slacks.