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 “Chicken Fat,” written by Meredith Willson of The Music Man [...]

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 that federal farm subsidies are helping feed the nation’s obesity epidemic.” Furthermore: Billions in taxpayer [...]

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 diverse. The slogans on the billboards have been called shaming, and Descygna, the author of a [...]

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 [...]