 by Jason Block, MD, MPH ObesityWeek is a combined meeting of The Obesity Society and the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, two leading organizations that explore clinical care, research, and policies regarding obesity and related diseases. This year, the meeting was held in Boston, Massachusetts, allowing a large contingent of our Obesity Prevention Program to attend. We asked all of them: What did you learn at Obesity Week 2014? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting their responses.
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 by Chelsea Jenter, MPH For kids, sugar not only tastes good, but it makes them feel good too. This might explain my four year old’s obsession with Halloween. The Friday before last, she sprinted from house to house, as if it was her only chance to get candy in this century. And though Halloween was just two weeks ago, she’s already asking how long it is until the “next” Halloween. What is this obsession with candy? This could be a long year.
 by Stephanie Linakis, MPH Replacing sugar sweetened beverages with artificially sweetened, zero and reduced calorie substitutes would seem to be one foolproof strategy for weight loss, right? Well, maybe – the story could be more complicated. Our body’s myriad biological and psychological pathways challenge what would logically appear to be a simple choice. The body can easily recognize and process a natural, calorie free substance such as water. Drinks – and yogurt and other products – that are artificially sweetened (with aspartame, saccharin, or sucralose, for example), however, can confuse our systems and may lead to unintended consequences.
 by Renata Smith, MPH In addition to text messaging interventions for obesity prevention and management, researchers are using mobile applications (‘apps’) as a means of supporting participants in their weight loss or maintenance journey. The world is fascinated with apps for all aspects of life. As of June 2014, a staggering 75 billion apps of any kind have been downloaded from the Apple App Store, with 50 billion more downloaded from the Google Play store. So, it makes sense to take advantage of such a large study population of app users.
 by Wei Perng, PhD Recent technological advances have landed us in a new age of research known as “the omics” era. While the number of omics categories is rapidly increasing, the core four involve the large-scale evaluation of gene expression (genomics), mRNA expression (transcriptomics), protein structure and function (proteomics), and metabolite patterns (metabolomics) - all in hopes to gain knowledge on disease development. Scientists have recently taken a keen interest in metabolomics; specifically, on how low-molecular-weight compounds (e.g. amino acids, carbohydrates, fatty acids, hormones) in tissue can provide information on disease progression and prognosis. Metabolomics could provide a snapshot of the good, the bad, and everything in between.
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