Childhood Obesity News has been looking at how ideas about food and physical characteristics vary among people from different backgrounds. As Jerry Jeff Walker says, “Life is mostly attitude and timing.” If someone’s psyche has been marked by privation …

The cultural consciousness is slowly adapting to the idea that some relationship might exist between childhood obesity and sleep, but exactly “what’s up with that” is not yet clear to anyone. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has several ideas, …

There’s so much advice about childhood obesity! Everyone has ideas about how to prevent and/or cure the problem, and Childhood Obesity News has been sifting through lists of recommendations from many sources. For LA Times, Jeannine Stein summarized mat …

Two years ago, a childhood obesity study made big news by confirming that all waistlines are not created equal. For Clinical Psychiatry News, Kate Johnson summarized: Extreme obesity is on the rise in children and adolescents, and certain ethnic/racial …

A guy named Steve Almond published a book about sweets, and going by the clues in a review from a blogger called Kim, it sounds ambivalent, if not downright schizophrenic. The title is Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. …

The importance of family meals was a recent topic here, because many health care professionals believe that having dinner together is a crucial piece of the childhood obesity prevention puzzle. Life is very complicated, and sometimes it’s difficult to …

In today’s media, it seems like one of the easiest things to find is advice on how to raise normal-weight children. The Internet is rife with bullet-point lists of suggestions. Childhood Obesity News has surveyed many such lists. How many of the helpfu …

Childhood Obesity News has been talking about societal forces that make people do what they do, and get in the way of efforts to improve conditions. This is true of many things, including childhood obesity: Some cultures or societies view body types an …

The Pediatric Academic Societies met in Boston not long ago and, as so often happens when health professionals gather, the subject of the childhood obesity epidemic was on the table. Dr. Rachel Gross of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine told the …

A while back, Singapore was getting some good PR for keeping its kids thin. As Childhood Obesity News discussed, a comparison was made between the childhood obesity rate in Southeast Asia, which was 23%, and the rate in Singapore, less than half that n …

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-IV, there are six substance-abuse criteria, and if a patient has three out of six, he or she has an addiction. Childhood Obesity News has previously enumerated the “top six reasons why food add …

The challenge? In the struggle against childhood obesity, there are a hundred challenges. It’s like the mythological Hydra, the beast with many ferociously fanged heads, and every time a hero would cut one off, it would grow back. Some days are like th …

Childhood Obesity News has been exploring the idea that “fat” is a four-letter word, not literally, but in the sense of being forbidden, vulgar, and offensive. Sometimes it seems as if “thin” is equally reprehensible, because people object to the idea …

Dr. Pretlow teaches that obesity is not a matter of poor willpower or lack of exercise, rather it is an addictive brain disease involving certain highly palatable problem foods. It is substance dependency, and attributing it to a direct biochemical eff …

Not long ago, Dr. Pretlow was extensively quoted in an article written by Marsha McCulloch, R.D., which appeared in Live Right Magazine. The author also quoted Bruce Blumberg, Ph.D., of the University of California at Irvine, who strongly advocates goo …

Lately, childhood obesity research has been turning up a lot of results that include the word “pregnancy.” New studies appear with frightening regularity, demonstrating various kinds of harm that can be done to a fetus by parental ignorance or disregar …

Claire Bates is one of the many health writers who has noticed the tendency of childhood obesity studies to indict parents. If children are to make lifestyle changes, their chances are much better if it’s a family affair. Bates says: Researchers found …

Childhood Obesity News has been exploring the art and science of food porn (or foodporn), including the ways in which food is visually enhanced, sometimes for the purpose of advertising, and sometimes just because. An entire enormous genre of photograp …

This interesting chart, called “Regulatory Status,” is found in a document issued by the Responsible Advertising and Children (RAC) Programme, and it illustrates where things stood, as of late last year, in the international regulation of how food and …

A very unusual website, Human Stupidity, deals with food porn as applied to children. The terminology is a bit strange, defining “food porn” as junk food itself (which is equated with poison) and “child food porn” as pictures of stuff that deceptively …

A Twitter entity called “Food Porn” (with more than 30,000 followers) acts as a clearinghouse to spread around links to porny food pictures that other people have sent her or him. It does, indeed, take all kinds to make a world. What exactly is food po …

Childhood Obesity News was talking about the discovery of several genes, including two particularly significant ones, that appear to influence childhood obesity in kids of European ancestry. The full report, by the Early Growth Genetics (EGG) Consortiu …

It’s easy to see why parents are fed up with being blamed for the childhood obesity epidemic. The unconscious thought of a caring yet overburdened parent might run something like this: “It’s all too much! We’re responsible for having their teeth straig …

You’d think it was a moon landing! Everybody is all excited about a genetic basis for childhood obesity, and the headlines proliferate. It all started with an international group of collaborators known as the Early Growth Genetics Consortium, or EGG. T …

We are discussing a much-neglected topic, the intestines and their flora, the trillions of little beings who live inside us and help all our systems go. Here is a writer who has gone into the subject in depth, so to speak. For AlterNet, Anneli Rufus wr …

Although they are not discussed as often as other organs such as the heart, the intestines are very important. Jill Escher mentions them, when dismissing the theory that sugar is just empty calories: No, no calorie is empty — each bit of digestible st …

Is there no end to the things parents can be blamed for? Strollers! The Canadian Paediatric Society released a report about toddlers, ages one and two, claiming that 80% of them spend half their outdoor time in strollers. This represented only a fracti …

For a website called Mommyish, Nadia Bruno has launched a new column devoted to childhood obesity in relation to fast food and junk food. She talks about how she was raised, and how she turned out, and addresses the underlying ambivalence that causes h …

Suzanne Cullen brought to Dr. Pretlow’s attention an interesting website, Aupair.org, for professionals who take care of other people’s children, and for parents who want to take care of their own children like pros. Childhood obesity is only one of it …

“Why is my kid fat?” is the question asked by many parents. In some cases the answers are obvious, but in others, not so much. There are many theories, and no matter what else may or may not be going on in genetics, manufacturing, or the environment, t …