October 30 is Sugar Addiction Awareness Day, so this is pretty much going to be Sugar Week. You are invited to absorb what it’s all about, at EndSugarAddiction.com, and then follow along for a sick-making ride through food addiction hell. And this migh …

There is overweight, and then there is perception of overweight. This is one of the areas investigated by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) program which, under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, …

We know Robert Pretlow, M.D., as a pediatrician and childhood obesity expert, director of Weigh2Rock.com, writer of many articles (most recently, an important one published by the journal Eating Disorders), and author of Overweight: What Kids Say. As w …

Dr. Pretlow has developed an iPhone application with interesting potentialities in the area of childhood obesity. Below, he describes the impetus behind the innovation and retraces the thinking that inspired it: Charleston Children’s Hospital came to u …

Of course, kids and teens are crazy about social networking. The need for social approval and interaction is deeply ingrained. Its dark side may show up as the type of unwholesome peer pressure that can lead to undesirable behavioral outcomes. But the …

Not done yet? Nope, there is always plenty more to say about sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and the machinations going on around them. The soda pop industry is up to all kinds of mischief, and a lot of concerned health professionals are devoting thei …

Surely, nobody thought we were done with the subject of SSBs? Not hardly. Those initials stand for “Self-Sabotage in a Bottle.” Just kidding. They stand for sugar-sweetened beverages, and that’s shorthand for all of them, whether fizzy or non-carbonate …

As we mentioned, WebMD recently published a comprehensive article by Salynn Boyles on this very subject, which is of great interest because, of course, evidence piles up every day of the undeniable and unwholesome relationship between childhood obesity …

Why does the poor, old soda pop come in for so much verbal abuse? Is evidence of a link between sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and childhood obesity really so overwhelming? And what exudes from the witch’s cauldron shown here? Could it be… Boiled-dow …

We talked about Coca-Cola’s Vitamin Water sports drink. What’s not to like about it? Everything. The whole sports drink scene in general is no model of professional restraint. Some of those concoctions may as well be brewed in cauldrons by witches. But …

We have been discussing the Coca-Cola Company, famous for product placement, a sneaky way of advertising without seeming to, or without technically breaking any agreement the company might make to not advertise. Showing a corporation’s products in movi …

Should anti-obesity organizations accept funding from giant food corporations? We have been looking at the complex issues, emotions, and moral implications that surround this particular debate. It’s all about conflict of interest. We mentioned Dr. Mich …

The Coca-Cola Company has a strange and wonderful relationship with many anti-obesity organizations, both on the professional level and in communities. The whole thing is bizarre, and part of the reason is, there are good people on both sides. One scho …

Did we mention that Coca-Cola manufactures 3,500 different beverages? Earlier this year, the company was scolded for how it marketed the drink called “Vitamin Water.” The labels are so plain and subdued in design, the product appears to be bottles of I …

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture says the average American eats 150 pounds of sugar per year (see illustration). People who care about the childhood obesity epidemic never run out of things to say about sugar. William Dufty’s classic Sugar Blues was publi …

Dr. Pretlow was extensively quoted by Marsha McCullouch, R.D., who interviewed him as one of the main sources for an article titled “Is Your Child Overweight?” in the print publication LiveRight. The topics are stress and food cravings in children, and …

Is there such a thing as too much fairness? Maybe the Obesity Society has a case of it, on display at its annual meeting which is coming right up, October 1-5, in Orlando, Florida. The Obesity Society self-identifies as THE leading scientific society d …

Last time, we looked at the much-criticized link between Coca-Cola and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). Dr. Michael Siegel talks about this, and more, in the explicitly titled “The Two Biggest Reasons Why the ADA, AAP, and AAFP Should …

How ironic. They took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola more than a hundred years ago, and it still turned out to be one of the most harmful substances ever invented. One of the ways in which it has been harmful is in causing dissent and conflict among heal …

The vast Coca-Cola empire comprises 450 different brands and a stunning number of products, including 3,500 separate and distinct beverages. Imagine that! If you tried a different Coca-Cola brand every day, at the end of a year there would still be alm …

Not long ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement titled “Children, Adolescents, Obesity, and the Media,” which addressed those subjects with the organization’s usual thoroughness. The Introduction begins, Obesity represe …

The way law professor Joel Bakan sees it, two huge trends are colliding. At a certain point in history, children were recognized as people, and, furthermore, as a class of people deserving of a protected status. It became generally acknowledged that th …

Last time, we looked at how junk food, fast food, and snack food, more accurately known as pseudo-food, all have the common origin point of being specifically designed to create an unhealthy dependency. Some call it food addiction, and its reason for b …

Snacks, junk food, and hedonic foodstuffs in general are all too often nothing more than mere foodlike substances. These ersatz edibles are precisely engineered by the armies of food scientists. The goal is not maximum nutritional value, or even any nu …

Unlike some other social phenomena that are either celebrated or deprecated, childhood obesity has been allotted not a day or a week, but an entire month. We are still in the second annual Childhood Obesity Awareness Month (COAM). How is it being obser …

Since the February 2010 launch of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, what has been happening? Has anything changed in the year since the first Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, in September 2010? Has childhood obesity awareness evolved during this …

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” could probably extend to Part 108, but rest easy, this will be the last one for a while. The Office of National Drug Control Policy tells us that the two main worries of parents are childhood obesity and drug abuse (which …

Chef Domenica Catelli is a food authority who takes a militant stand, who speaks of the fight against childhood obesity, and who wants us to step up to the front lines today and celebrate Childhood Obesity Awareness Month by making one positive change. …

Apparently, knowledge is not a solid rock but a vast expanse of shifting sands. A wise man once said, “There is enough evidence in the universe to prove anything,” and he might have had a point there. Another wise man said, “The ideal consumer is a con …

Influence can be exerted on the brain chemically or electrically. In the realm of chemistry, many of the examples have to do with the food that fuels the body and brain, how a person is influenced to eat more or less of it, and what kind of food they c …