In the past week or so, Childhood Obesity News has looked at several medical conditions or comorbidities associated with obesity, including diabetes and the muffin top menace: Less talked about are the psychological damages children and adolescents wit …

One of the more regrettable innovations of recent years is the fashion for bare midriffs exposing not just belly button jewelry, which after all is a matter of individual taste, but mountains of puffy flesh. Perhaps even more distressing is the view fr …

Childhood Obesity News has been exploring some of the physical conditions that go hand-in-hand with overweight bodies, such as diabetes, bone and teeth problems, heart disease, and the list goes on. “Comorbid” is a word that seems to have started out w …

In Britain, the National Clinical Director for Liver Disease is worried. If present trends continue, many thousands of children are headed for a destiny of stroke, diabetes, or liver cirrhosis, arriving there by the road called “fatty liver disease.” A …

How many things can go wrong, medically, in conjunction with childhood obesity? As time goes on, more and more connections are discovered between overweight kids and a stunning array of problems, both existing and potential. Cause and effect relationsh …

Childhood Obesity News has discussed some of the things that can go wrong medically, when kids are overweight. There can be bone problems and dental problems, as we mentioned last time. As it turns out, there are even more obesity possibilities in the …

Before we get started, let’s mention the December 2011 issue of the BC Medical Journal, where a review can be found of Dr. Pretlow’s book, Overweight: What Kids Say. The reviewer is Arlene Cristall, MSc, RD, who holds the post of Program Coordinator at …

Seems like every time you turn around, another distressing medical condition is being linked to childhood obesity. We haven’t caught up with them for a while. The first entry is a piece with the depressing title, “Chronic pain is common child complaint …

The novel Justine is set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the period between the two World Wars. Author Lawrence Durrell describes certain women of that time and place: Fed in darkness on jams and scented fats they have become tuns of pleasure, rolling on pape …

This is not the first time Childhood Obesity News has talked about leanwashing, and for a lovely example of its cultural antecedents, the picture on this page will do just fine. Dating from 1950, the newspaper ad proclaims: Motorola, leader in televisi …

Styles come and go in our culture. Wasp waistlines were the style in the 1950s. (And women wore hats for decoration, not just to keep their ears warm.) There was a time when grade school kids did calisthenics to the (caution: earworm alert!) tune of “C …

The obesity epidemic can be relied on to occasionally add a useful new word to the language. We’ve got fatsploitation, globesity — and now, leanwashing. Like many other made-up words, this one harks back to a previously coined term, greenwashing — wh …

Childhood Obesity News mentioned the discouraging report from Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, on how the school had to change its policy when the compulsory physical fitness program was fiercely criticized. The authors of this paper also commented o …

We have been reflecting on such old sayings as, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and “No good deed goes unpunished,” and looking at the virtual slaughter of obesity messengers. Disney World tried out an interactive anti-obesity feature …

CALPIRG, also known as the California Public Interest Research Group, issued a report titled, “Apples to Twinkies: Comparing Federal Subsidies of Fresh Produce and Junk Food.” As described by P.J. Huffstutter of the LA Times, the report “makes the case …

In the interest of fairness, since Childhood Obesity News has mentioned Coca-Cola on numerous occasions, today it is PepsiCo’s turn. Apparently, the soft drink and junk food giant engages in a whole lot of pro-childhood obesity lobbying activities. In …

Adverse criticism led to the shutdown of a Disney World attraction that had barely even opened. At the same time, Georgia’s Strong4Life advertising campaign drew criticism from far and wide, partly for the ridiculous reason of being too ethnically dive …

We were tracing the story of the state of Georgia’s aggressive Strong4Life ad campaign against childhood obesity. In early February, the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties website published news from one of its members, about correspondence with the National …

Sophocles wrote, “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news,” and, according to folklore, the occasional emperor or general has executed the courier who delivered an unfavorable dispatch. Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the closing of a …

Holy guacamole, did Disney ever step in it! Up to the neck! All they did was open up a new attraction called Habit Heroes, where kids could fight characters who symbolize their own bad habits, and the fertilizer hit the air-circulation device. Everybod …

A few days ago, Childhood Obesity News mentioned the thoughts of some food policy experts rounded up by The New York Times, but did not yet mention Diane M. Gibson, who is an associate professor at Baruch College, as well as Director of the NY Census R …

The Weigh2Rock website collects comments from children and teens, of a kind that would not be possible if they were not anonymous. It strains credulity, that there could be a 16-year-old girl walking around out there weighing 560 pounds, yet this was p …

Epcot Center in Florida, part of the Disney kingdom’s Eastern branch, made news with the debut of a new feature, which turned out to be more of a beta test, and not a very successful one. For the Orlando Sentinal, Marni Jameson reported on the hopeful …

Well, of course Maggie has legs. Not only does she have them, they’re too big, along with the rest of her. Or so thinks the insecure 14-year-old protagonist of a work of poetical fiction by Paul M. Kramer, who has also written children’s books about di …

In the tobacco industry, a certain amount of accountability has been achieved, at least on paper, through some lawsuits. Would increased accountability in a legal, financially responsible sense, do anything to slow down the childhood obesity epidemic, …

Bloomberg stringers Michael Wei and Margaret Conley reported the astonishing news that acceptance into the Chinese branch of McDonald’s Hamburger University is harder to attain than admission to Harvard University. What they meant was, the ratio of app …

Is there anything sadder than Britain’s fattest man? Yes, the former fattest man. When Nick Harding interviewed Barry Austin in 2009, he had lost his title and was sinking fast. The reporter perceived him as: […] bedridden, fighting infections…, st …

McDonald’s is a McMetaphor, for all that is cheap and ticky-tacky, and soullessly franchised, a stand-in for all the mass-produced necessary evils of our age from McJobs to McMansions. It’s a McMeme. The company’s symbolic spokesclown, Ronald McDonald, …

Forbes magazine staffer Kashmir Hill explored the phenomenon of the McDonald’s Twitter fiasco, described by some as “social media trashing” and a “social nightmare.” What happened was: Last week, McDonald’s launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag …

What? Time to check in with the McDonald’s empire again? Yes, because those rascals just won’t stay out of the news. They seem to operate on the Water Balloon Principle of Ethics. You can squeeze a water balloon in one area and some of the water will m …