Research paper
Friedman JM. Modern science versus the stigma of obesity. Nature Medicine. 2004;10(6):563-569. doi:10.1038/nm0604-563. PMID: 15170194.
Why we cite it
Friedman’s perspective piece arguing that obesity stigma is scientifically indefensible. Articulates the lipostat model — leptin as a negative feedback signal from fat mass to brain — and places it alongside heritability data (0.7-0.8) to frame obesity as a biological condition comparable to height in its genetic determination. The lipostat is one account of fat-mass regulation and this library holds it as contested: `cls01` (Speakman et al. 2011, held in full) argues that neither the set point nor the settling point model is adequate alone and proposes dual intervention points instead, and `kls04` states the corpus position that neither pure model is adequate.
About the author
Jeffrey M. Friedman, MD, PhD is the Marilyn M. Simpson Professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at The Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He discovered leptin in 1994. Awards include the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2010), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2020), and the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2019).