People can become famous for being overweight. Or for losing weight. Or, like film actors, can suffer the scrutiny of a censorious public whose eyeballs are glued to every ounce they gain. YouTube comedian and actor Shane Dawson lost over 150 pounds, a …

In an essay describing how people use food to cope with emotional problems, Elizabeth Hartney outlined some resemblances: There are several similarities between food addiction and drug addiction, including effects on mood, external cues to eat or use d …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the confused and tangled matter of fit fatness. Is there such a thing? Can an overweight or obese person ever be said to be truly healthy, no matter how nice the blood test results are? Is all this fat fitness …

Can a person be both fat and fit? The question has attracted the interest of some obese doctors with a vested interest in the outcome, and of many civilians who would like to go on believing that no lifestyle changes are necessary in their corner of th …

Lousy math grades, bra size, snoring, mushrooms, the U.S. armed forces, and a theory that bigger clothes might be causing bigger kids… What all these things have in common is a connection with the childhood obesity epidemic, in some way that may seem …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News asked what it means that children’s clothes are getting more “wide” and “robust.” It seems bad enough that manufacturers are profiting from the obesity epidemic by selling plus-size pants, shirts, and dresses. Even mor …

Journalist Frances Childs was an obese teenager, with stomach and thighs marked by purple stretch marks, wearing long full skirts to school because no store carried jeans in her size. Childs says: So, when I see fat children, I know how they feel: unco …

Abundant evidence has shown that the emotions affect the weight, and the weight in turn affects the emotions, in a million different life scenarios. The possible variations on vicious cycles and vicious circles are dizzying. Now we must brace ourselves …

With his 1937 song “Malted Milk,” bluesman Robert Johnson confirmed the reality of emotional eating, especially in the Depression era in the United States. Some of the lyrics are: I keep drinking malted milk, trying to drive my blues away. Malted milk, …

Last time, we discussed the usefulness of cognitive behavioral therapy for people who want to escape obesity. The fact that it works is wonderful, but it’s still unfortunate that this therapy or any other kind is needed at all. Many health professional …

The recent Consumer Reports National Research Center surveyed about 1,300 psychologists about the relationship between weight loss and emotions. Apparently, only 306 of them offer weight loss treatment per se, so their answers may count for more. Out o …

Children need vitamin D for their bones. The lack of it can make them get rickets, a condition not seen much in the United States, although it is said to be increasing. Vitamin D is also necessary for protection against other problems like decaying tee …

Because so many of the indicators and risk factors of childhood obesity overlap with matters of ethnicity and poverty (which is disproportionately linked to ethnicity), it is not surprising that civil rights organizations have taken an interest in chil …

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) takes an interest in childhood obesity, as it does in any societal problem that affects its members and constituents, and indeed that affects any minority groups. Its webpage says: …

Mark Bittman, a professional journalist who cooks (or perhaps a cook who writes) is only one of the many nutrition-oriented thought leaders who were themselves influenced by Robert H. Lustig, M.D. They are highly critical of all forms of sugar, and esp …

One of the problems with the whole sugar debate is the amazing amount of time, energy, and money that has been spent and will continue to be spent to answer such questions as, “Which is worse, traditional cane and beet sugar, or high fructose corn syru …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News was looking at the sugar’s checkered past, in historical terms, and the current damage to taxpayers when a commodity so much in demand and so cheap to produce can still collect farm subsidies, or what some call “corpor …

Gary Taubes is an independent investigator in health policy associated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In a New York Times article, he resurrected the memory of John Yudkin, a British professor of nutrition and dietetics who spent the 1960s ex …

Looking at the brain’s reward circuits is a hot research area, and sugar is one of the favorite substances to experiment with. Consequently, the past 12 months have been rich in sugar addiction news. At the Oregon Research Institute, researchers starte …

How many people have made a serious effort to quit sugar for a month? How many have succeeded? It has been said that trying to quit sugar for a month will make a skeptic into a food-addiction believer. That is, if the person gets through the preliminar …

New areas of research are opening up every day. Some interesting recent discoveries have been that mice with impaired cannabinoid receptors don’t like to exercise, and that some humans who use cannabis do like to exercise very much. And, surprisingly, …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News was talking about the CB1 and other cannabinoid receptors found in the brains of people and mice. The terminology is confusing, because these receptors get a lot of their input from bodily processes that don’t involve …

Every year ends the same way. Journalists look back over the preceding 12 months and make arbitrary lists — the 10 top food stories, the 5 most promising discoveries, and so on. They weigh and assess, and pick the biggest health story of the year, or …

Here is a first-person account by a not-obese woman, of an encounter at a party: The high tables were pushed together into long strips, with barstool seating along both sides. I talked a bit with the woman next to me, and then she asked if I would mind …

Childhood Obesity News has reviewed high fructose corn syrup before, and found the track record of HFCS to be unimpressive. Or too impressive, but not in a good way. A year ago we quoted early worrier Sara Novak, whose words are an example of how yeste …

Childhood Obesity News has been considering the distressing story of Vilma Soltesz, who died in Hungary recently because three airlines refused to let her travel on their planes, and then she got too sick to travel back to the United States. This story …

We see some things so often, we just take them for granted, and get used to them. It never occurs to us to step back and say, “Wait… What?” One of those freakish sociological quirks is the overwhelming and ubiquitous obsession with the bodies of famo …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News began tracing the history of the singer Beyoncé as it relates to the issue of childhood obesity. Beyoncé, whose weight seems to fluctuate as much as that of her fellow celebrity Oprah Winfrey, was recruited by First La …

Consider the strange case of Beyoncé, who seems to be working both sides of the street in the childhood obesity neighborhood. Early in 2011, the world learned that the singing star, following in the footsteps of other celebrities like Jamie Oliver and …

Really? For the holidays, are we going to talk about a bummer like addiction? Yes, indeed, because at this time of year, addictions that might have lain dormant for a while have a tendency to bloom. It’s a rough season for many people and for a lot of …