Children overeat to cancel out bad feelings. This age-old problem is unlikely to be solved by a brochure.

An emotional eater will eat anything, and with most people, it all comes down to emotional eating.

Studies found that children in dog-owning homes tend to get more exercise. Pets can also provide comfort and exert a relaxing influence that relieves the stress in many lives.

The yearly children’s weight changes could be indicative of larger issues in need of fixing. Why does it happen? Could the standard school year be the problem?

A fat baby predicts a fat child, and to a much greater extent, a fat child predicts a fat adult. This is everybody’s obesity epidemic.

Kids don’t need more nutrition information. They mainly need training and encouragement in how to control food cravings.

Childhood Obesity News presents the April Fools’ “Ultimate Parents’ Checklist” — on what NOT to do with your kids when it comes to food.

The Teen-Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery, which is known as Teen-LABS for short, aims to document “the efficacy and complications of bariatric surgery in the adolescent surgical patient and its role in the overall management of obesity pri …

Here is the gist of interesting research from Rutgers University, as reported by Robert Gebelhoff: A new study published this week in the journal Cell Reports suggests that overeating happens when people don’t have enough of a hormone called glucagon-l …

A very prevalent and active obesity villain is interpersonal stress, particularly the kind that originates with familial discord. Childhood Obesity News has discussed parent-child relationships extensively, but by no means definitively. In this area of …

“Well, I already broke my New Year’s resolution, so I guess I’ve blown it for 2016. I’ll just have to start over again next New Year.” Here it is January 4, and somewhere, a certified fatlogic ninja has formulated that rationalization, or one very much …

All the winter holidays are basically the same: festivals of consumption that make it easy for a person to justify or excuse overeating. A helpful tip for any one of the holidays is likely to be effective for the others. Childhood Obesity News passes a …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News  looked at only a couple of the ideas espoused by Dr. Billi Gordon. Thanks to his Psychology Today column “Obesely Speaking,” he was named one of the “30 Most Influential Neuroscientists Alive Today” by a website that …

At Kansas State University, journalist Darrah Tinkler interviewed associate professor of psychological sciences Don Saucier about how eating can provide social validation, which means monkey-see/monkey-do behavior that allows a person to fit in and gai …

The introduction can be found in yesterday’s post, so let’s jump right into a pile of things that have been named as obesity villains. Childhood Obesity News neither endorses nor refutes these by listing them, but merely reports on the possibilities. B …

Risk management expert Robin Desrocher developed a continuing education course for physicians, with the object of helping them reduce their exposure to malpractice liability. The downloadable PDF file includes, on page 2, a list of “Secondary Causes of …

It may be a bit late to make any significant changes in a family’s Halloween traditions this year, but it’s never to early to start planning for next year. Scoffers think, why make such a big deal out of it? Here is why, according to Emily Schwartz Gre …

For anyone who hasn’t had enough Halloween lore in our recent compendia of past Halloween posts, there is plenty more where that came from. At this time of year the blogosphere, the zeitgeist, and the cultural milieu all seem to focus intensely on Hall …

For Rolling Stone, Erik Hedegaard wrote a profile of the guy who invented “Sons of Anarchy,” beginning with this sentence: The most important thing to know about Kurt Sutter is that he once weighed 400 pounds. Sutter is the creative genius behind the i …

There is always so much to cover that Childhood Obesity News occasionally misses the chance to comment on a book when it is first released. One such volume is Tuna Breath: A 275-Pound Teenager’s Coming of Age Story, which seems to have generated some c …

Occasionally, to see what can be learned, Childhood Obesity News looks into the lives and thoughts of formerly obese people, not all of them national or international celebrities. Chrisetta Mosley has achieved renown in her neck of the woods, an area t …

Childhood Obesity News has often offered many suggestions for parents. There is always a certain amount of reluctance involved in doing that, because most parents do the best they can. Telling them about their mistakes feels unkind, and no one wants to …

In a recent Huffington Post article, Johann Hari discussed what he calls “the essential mystery of addiction:” What causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? He s …

Because all of Dr. Pretlow’s time is spent working hard on a program to guide millions of children out of the prison of obesity, he is not able to respond to every individual. A recent letter, a true cri de coeur from an English mother at her wits’ end …

{NOTE: Yesterday Childhood Obesity News published, with the kind permission of its author, a moving communication from a mother in Great Britain, along with the beginning of Dr. Pretlow’s response. Here is the rest of that reply.} You can’t make her ac …

In his paper written for the journal Eating Disorders, Dr. Pretlow stated that today’s youth appear to be “victims of boredom, stress, and depression in an addictive, comfort food environment” and added: Accordingly, a perfect storm may be contributing …

Lance Dodes, M.D., whose latest book is The Heart of Addiction, seems to have rethought the field from the ground up and arrived at some conclusions that can only be described as heretical. For instance, when a person seeks a rehab facility, scenery sh …

[montage of junk food]This site covers the social, political, economic, and health impacts of childhood obesity. A common thread that runs through our site is the exploration of food addition. Food addiction remains a controversial topic; many are in d …

In discussing self-image, Childhood Obesity News has mentioned Corey Stoll, who has been remarkably frank about his struggles with weight. A morbidly obese child and 300-pound teenager, Stoll grew up to become well-known actor in “House of Cards,” “Law …

Sometimes, photographic images help to form people’s self-images, particularly around issues of obesity, but not always. Childhood Obesity News has looked at various strange relationships between people and their pictures. For the Good Men Project, Kim …