The way law professor Joel Bakan sees it, two huge trends are colliding. At a certain point in history, children were recognized as people, and, furthermore, as a class of people deserving of a protected status. It became generally acknowledged that th …

Last time, we looked at how junk food, fast food, and snack food, more accurately known as pseudo-food, all have the common origin point of being specifically designed to create an unhealthy dependency. Some call it food addiction, and its reason for b …

Snacks, junk food, and hedonic foodstuffs in general are all too often nothing more than mere foodlike substances. These ersatz edibles are precisely engineered by the armies of food scientists. The goal is not maximum nutritional value, or even any nu …

Unlike some other social phenomena that are either celebrated or deprecated, childhood obesity has been allotted not a day or a week, but an entire month. We are still in the second annual Childhood Obesity Awareness Month (COAM). How is it being obser …

Since the February 2010 launch of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, what has been happening? Has anything changed in the year since the first Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, in September 2010? Has childhood obesity awareness evolved during this …

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” could probably extend to Part 108, but rest easy, this will be the last one for a while. The Office of National Drug Control Policy tells us that the two main worries of parents are childhood obesity and drug abuse (which …

Chef Domenica Catelli is a food authority who takes a militant stand, who speaks of the fight against childhood obesity, and who wants us to step up to the front lines today and celebrate Childhood Obesity Awareness Month by making one positive change. …

Apparently, knowledge is not a solid rock but a vast expanse of shifting sands. A wise man once said, “There is enough evidence in the universe to prove anything,” and he might have had a point there. Another wise man said, “The ideal consumer is a con …

Influence can be exerted on the brain chemically or electrically. In the realm of chemistry, many of the examples have to do with the food that fuels the body and brain, how a person is influenced to eat more or less of it, and what kind of food they c …

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist of The EEG Institute, and we have mentioned him before in the context of MindStream Academy and Dr. Adela Chirita-Emandi, who applies the Othmer method in her pediatrics practice in Romania. Dr. Othmer, who w …

Deborah A. Stokes and Martha S. Lappin tell us that while peripheral biofeedback monitors responses of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, such as respiration and galvanic skin response, neurofeedback monitors the activity of the centr …

Will it never end? Sometimes it seems as if, in the effort to quench the obesity epidemic, nothing is ever quite nailed down. Chocolate milk, for instance. To think about how many hours of debate have been spent on chocolate milk, is to cringe. In some …

Both of the articles mentioned here today are worth reading in their entirety, but we’ll just give a little tantalizing taste. For the Bangor Daily News, registered dietician Marcia Kyle put together some hints toward a sane and healthful on-the-road e …

It seems to have been pretty well accepted, in childhood obesity circles, that proximity is destiny. Studies from several different parts of the globe have confirmed that when kids live and/or go to school near fast-food outlets, they tend to get fat. …

Not long ago, we looked at some of Kevin Richardson’s ideas about the obesity epidemic and quoted one of his sayings, which is worth repeating: The ideal consumer is a confused consumer. Confusion can be created in many ways. In discussing the deleteri …

“Obama’s Food Police in Staggering Crackdown on Market to Kids,” written by Audrey Hudson, has racked up an astonishing 12,000 Facebook recommendations and more than 700 comments. If the comments were somehow communicated to a scholar 500 years into th …

For just a little while, it seemed as if questions about the relationship between breastfeeding and childhood obesity might have been answered. The journal Pediatrics published an article suggesting that childhood obesity could be minimized if babies w …

For a super-obese child or teenager, a live-in rehab program at a residential treatment center is a much better solution than bariatric surgery, as we have mentioned before. Unfortunately, such a thorough, comprehensive program is necessarily expensive …

The importance of parents can never be overestimated, especially when it comes to preventing childhood obesity. For the Sydney Morning Herald, Isabel Hayes reported on a study completed by Australia’s University of Wollongong and University of Newcastl …

For morbidly obese children and teenagers, the residential treatment center might seem like an extreme solution, but it looks very attractive compared to the other extreme solution, bariatric surgery. An in-patient detox program is less expensive than …

Humans have a built-in susceptibility to addiction and, as we have discussed before, the foodlike substances known as hedonic or hyper-palatable foods are purposely designed and engineered to exploit that addiction-prone tendency. Hedonic foods are, ba …

Can childhood obesity be related to sunlight? It just might be, according to several studies considered by Reuben Chow in Natural News. Several bodily organs and functions intimately related to obesity are influenced by vitamin D. The reporter says, Th …

Spoiler alert: We’re going to start with the end of this article by Martina M. Cartwright, Ph.D., R.D., followed by a relevant real-life fact. The title is, “Separating Super Obese Kids from Their Parents: Solution or Problem?,” and it was published in …

The idea of removing morbidly obese children from their parents and putting them in foster homes is a highly emotional issue. When does overfeeding become child abuse? Is government intervention justified? We looked at some of the questions and answers …

In July, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a subscription-only article by Lindsey Murtagh, J.D., M.P.H., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. It is understandable that a doctor and a lawyer have collaborated on a subject that …

The National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) describes itself this way: Our mission is to ensure that all children, youth, and families have access to high quality programs, activities, and opportunities during non-school hours. We believe that …

We have talked about how parents enable the dependency on hedonic foods by keeping junk food around the house. Unfortunately, that’s not the only way in which careless or misguided parents can hurt their children’s chances for a long life with a health …

In the struggle to end childhood obesity, one thing parents can do is give themselves a break and not feel bad because they’ve passed along some less-than-optimal heredity. As Psych Central News’ associate news editor Traci Pedersen reported, Unhealthy …

In July, U.S. Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge introduced House Resolution 339 that would designate September 2011 as the second annual National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month (COAM), as seen in this short announcement. It was she, along with U.S. Rep. …

Back about a year ago, we looked at the efforts being made to boot Ronald McDonald out of his job as spokesclown for fast food, especially when kids are the audience. After the company had denied that Ronald sells food to kids, Corporate Accountability …