 by Mia Serabian Eating is largely a social activity. Food is at the center of most celebrations, religious gatherings, and cultural activities. Weekends revolve around brunch, birthdays around cake, and holidays like Passover and Easter around Seder plates and colored eggs. Because we often eat with others, what we eat is susceptible to social influence. What does this mean? Generally, it means that we often look to those around us - our eating companions - to determine how much food, or what type of food, is normal and acceptable to eat. This is called social modeling, and its effect on eating behaviors has been proven repeatedly over the past four decades.
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 by Karen Switkowski, MPH, MS “I really want to get the salmon, but I can’t remember how many times I already had fish this week. Did we have that shrimp pasta on Sunday, or was that Saturday? I guess I’ll be OK if I have this now and we don’t make the tuna until next weekend…” Throughout my pregnancy, my husband had to listen to some version of this monologue every time we went out to dinner. Like many women, I had internalized the warning that I risked poisoning my baby with mercury if I ate seafood too often. Although I was also well aware of the importance of the nutrients found in fish and other seafood for fetal development, I was more concerned about consuming too much mercury that I was about not getting enough beneficial fatty acids in my diet.
 by Holly Gooding, MD, MSc “Will this (any birth control method here) make me gain weight?”
It’s the number one question I get when counseling women about their birth control options, and the number one concern women report in research studies. It’s also a common reason women cite for discontinuing their birth control. But is weight gain related to birth control real?  by Renata Smith, MPH In this growing era of ‘wearable tech’, from Google Glass to the forthcoming Apple watch, our lives are increasingly intertwined with technology. What comes along with this every day technology is vast amounts of digital data. The scale is such that terms like exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) exist, and “Big Data” is now a common phrase. Big Data refers not only to the almost incomprehensible amounts of data being generated and stored but also to the ability to extract new insights from this data.
by Fahad Razak, MD, Aditi Krishna, S.V. Subramanian, PhD It is well known that in high-income countries such as the United States, average body weight, typically measured as body mass index (BMI), has steadily increased over the past few decades. It is implicitly assumed that these average BMI increases are constant and unchanging across all weight classes (i.e. normal weight, overweight, obesity). Very few studies have systematically looked at whether this is true. Does BMI increase equally across weight classes? Has the range in BMIs actually increased as average BMI rises? We used data from the largest dataset available to examine yearly changes in weight gain in the United States – the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a survey of more than 3 million people.
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