An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh. Will Rogers said that. What does it have to do with childhood obesity? Nothing. It’s just an example of one type of funny, something that brings on a giggle bec …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at some of the unintentional humor caused by the beverage industry’s empty promises. The comedy continues, with the ridiculous spectacle of a world where millions of kids are both fat and insufficiently fed at th …

Childhood Obesity News has been talking about how the beverage industry promised to mend its ways, and the hilarious hijinks that have ensued. The beverage industry has this concept called self-policing, and it’s the most humorous thing since (insert h …

Joe Rogan is a standup comic who also produces podcasts. In one of them, he talks about working in a nightclub where a very hefty young woman was in the audience, so he skipped over a “fat chick joke” that would otherwise have been part of his routine. …

Want to hear something funny? The American Beverage Association’s statement is pretty darn hilarious. Issued on the anniversary of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, it contains the following gems of humor: Two years ago today, we proudl …

Did we not, very, very recently, just get finished discussing Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and other winter celebrations, and their relationship to childhood obesity? Now here comes another holiday, and this one doesn’t even have any cranberrie …

Way back in 2003, Dr. Neal D. Barnard wrote about the cheese industry’s awareness of its product’s addictive qualities. He said that strategies are carefully crafted by the marketing staff to lead “cheese cravers” into further involvement with their pr …

Childhood Obesity News has been talking about different ways that parents, teachers, and health care professionals have found of listening to kids and putting the information to useful work. A nonprofit group called ACTIVE Life attempts to fight obesit …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the good things that can happen when grownups listen and pay attention to kids. In the Pacific Northwest, government agencies have joined with health workers in the tribal community to address the problem of p …

In the struggle against childhood obesity, listening to kids and paying attention to what they say is tremendously important. Dr. Pretlow has learned this from years of watching the results come in to the Weigh2Rock website, which was created primarily …

Recently, Childhood Obesity News mentioned research indicating that children in Pakistan are more likely to be overweight and more at risk for obesity if they have few or no siblings, and if their parents are wealthy and educated. Around the time that …

Here is further proof that feeding does not equal nourishment. The Austin nonprofit group House the Homeless surveyed the health of people experiencing homelessness and found 66% of the participants to be overweight according to BMI measurements. This …

Spiegel reporter Catherine Cheney interviewed Carolyn Banfalvi, who guides tourists around Hungary on gourmet tours. This expert, in a position to know exactly what the local diet consists of, is quoted as saying: Hungarians are really into desserts… …

When British chef Jamie Oliver came over to America to spend several years as an ambassador for better eating, he brought along high hopes of saving lives in his own, kitchen-based way, and found, not surprisingly, that this is one of the unhealthiest …

Really, it’s a situation that a being from another planet might have trouble wrapping its head around, if it had a head. On Earth, 15% of the humans exist in a state of hunger, while 20% are overweight. Conceptually, it looks a bit like the sculpture s …

Back in 2006, Raj Patel raised consciousness with his book, Stuffed and Starved, pointing out what journalist Simon Butler calls a “bizarre paradox” about the people of planet Earth: In the poverty-stricken global South, the poorest cannot afford to fe …

Childhood Obesity News has looked at various pitfalls of temptation and cravings, such as holidays, church activities, and school vending machines. In regard to schools, people sometimes forget, parents need to think about more than just what goes on d …

Childhood Obesity News has discussed how the birth of a craving can either be internal, from some chemical prompt, or external, from seeing a billboard or whatever. Also, people are like cats. They like to watch something in motion. A certain kind of m …

Elaborated Intrusion (EI) theory was the topic, and we were examining the idea that food cravings can be quelled by diverting the mind in a couple of different ways. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a craving, or as the researchers characterize i …

Inside the mind is a spatial sketchpad that can form a picture, and very often the image it forms is an item of food or drink that the person craves. Like the old Etch-A-Sketch toy, the mental screen can only hold one picture at a time. If you take the …

As Childhood Obesity News has mentioned before, a large part of the human race seems to have lost the instinct that tells a healthy animal what to eat and what to avoid. This instinct needs to be recovered or recreated, similar to what Dr. Pretlow writ …

Jeffrey Norris recently reported for the University of California, San Francisco, on work done by researchers at that institution, on the subject of the stress hormone cortisol, and deep belly fat, the kind that surrounds and encases the internal organ …

The Wall Street Journal’s Melinda Beck brings news of another way to help people recover from obesity. For years, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has introduced astonishing change into the lives of patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Going by the …

It appears that the origins of cravings are both physical and psychological. Laboratory research strongly indicates a chemical basis for at least some food cravings. Additional conclusions have been drawn by scientists in other fields, who observe huma …

Take obesity… please. Standup comic Greg Giraldo made fun of the media for hyping the obesity epidemic as if it were as frightening and destructive as the polio epidemic of the early 1950s. (Five-minute video, adult material.) And he had a point. Compa …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the various efforts toward craving reduction that have been suggested by different people. A mention, of course, doesn’t imply that Dr. Pretlow necessarily recommends the measure for any particular patient. It …

The wry motto of Eartha’s blog is, “Trying Fitness — because you’ve tried everything else.” She recommends switching grocery stores, cooking at home, choosing snacks wisely, and stocking healthful snacks in a cooler in one’s car. That’s a great idea f …

Dr. Pretlow equates food cravings to withdrawal symptoms, and, as he repeatedly points out, the vast majority of Weigh2Rock kids really want to know how to resist cravings. Young people are at a disadvantage because they don’t always have control over …

Suzanne Robin, a registered nurse who writes extensively on medical topics, looked into the research done on, of all things, carrots, and found a childhood obesity connection. Parents are always asking, “How do I get my kids to eat vegetables?,” and it …

The main thing to know about food cravings is, this is not some kind of sideshow act. The topic is front and center, the star of the whole childhood obesity epidemic. It appears that food cravings have emotional, biological, and mental origins. Feeling …