Kirsten Ackerman, MS, RDN

The correlation between obesity and chronic disease is well established (Bacon & Aphramor 2011; Bombak 2014; Penney & Kirk 2015). Causality, however, is not so clear (Bombak 2014).
For decades, efforts to fight chronic disease have focused primarily on obesity—encouraging dieting as the best way to lose weight. But even as the U.S. weight loss industry has grown to $58.6 billion annually, we haven’t seen significant improvements in rates of chronic disease (Bacon & Aphramor 2011).