Food Addiction

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 product. Barnard wrote: At a ‘Cheese Forum’ held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president [...]

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 obesity through social activism (link is PDF). The organization believes it has some answers, which the website [...]

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 feed themselves. In the West, more people are stuffed with highly processed and unhealthy fast-foods favored [...]

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 moving pattern provides visual white noise or dynamic visual noise, or elaborated [...]

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 it, a desire, is accompanied by a mental picture. If the subject is [...]

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’s useful to see what’s going on in the world, and, of course, nothing ever works for everyone. [...]

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. Feelings, internal chemistry, and the mind are all breeding grounds for cravings, so [...]

When healthcare professionals publish articles about childhood obesity, online commentaries sometimes throw back a strange knee-jerk response. Every now and then, an indignant parent will exclaim, “No child should be on a diet!” There seems to be a definition problem. Fact is, everybody is on a diet, all the time. “Diet” is a neutral word [...]

Treena Wynes knows all about the emotional-eating cycle and how to conquer it. Formerly a bulimic teen who fought a years-long battle with compulsive eating, she became a social worker and weight-loss counselor, specializing in emotional dependency on food. Cravings and addiction, the brain, the hormones — Wynes shows how they are tied together and [...]