Understanding the Research About Weight and Health Workshop (Ragen Chastain)

In the Understanding the Research About Weight and Health, you’ll learn about existing research, tips and tricks for breaking down research, and reading media articles. Research around weight and health can be daunting, dense, confusing, and downright misleading. A mix of diet industry involvement and weight bias (from methodology to media reporting) has created a world where what “everybody knows” about weight and health is often not supported by the actual research.

In this workshop we’ll talk about the existing research around weight and health, learn techniques to evaluate media articles and studies to see past the weight bias and diet industry smoke screen and get to the truth. This workshop will deal with concepts in plain language and is for research nerds and non-research nerds alike, including those with no experience at all in research methods.

Topics will include:

• An overview of the existing research around weight and health
• A discussion of the most common errors in the research, and the ways that they mislead
• Tips and tricks to spot issues in media articles and research
• Options for discussing the research with friends, family, and healthcare practitioners