Category: Food Addiction

Healing starts with the gut, and the microbiome can indirectly influence addiction or its absence through addiction.

In Australia, Coca-Cola Amatil sued the government for promoting the 10-cent beverage container recycling idea.

McDonald’s and Coca-Cola Company continue to want more junk-food addict customers, and at an even younger age.

It was a busy year for Coca Cola Company, the world’s largest purveyor of liquified sugar, tooth decay, and childhood obesity.

As a nation rife with obesity, Mexico ranks even above the U.S. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, senior author of a recent Tufts University study, has this to say: In Mexico, where more than 10 percent of the population has diabetes, approximately 30 percent o …

On a list of the the most abused foods in America sugar-sweetened beverages always score among the top entries. James Greenblatt, the chief medical officer of Walden Behavioral Care (treatment centers that concentrate on eating disorders), joins the ch …

Childhood Obesity News salutes two pieces of web journalism that were first published six years ago. Wade Meredith’s classic “What Happens to Your Body if You Drink a Coke Right Now?” describes the effects of the first hour. Then, Briana Rognlin’s “Wha …

Analysis of data provided to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) by thousands of American children and teenagers revealed that on any given day, 22% of them eat pizza. Difficult as it may be to believe, this is actually an imp …

Billi Gordon Ph.D., popularizer of neuroscience, is acutely aware of the problems holidays, as well the rest of the year, can bring to compulsive overeaters and addicts of every kind. Even in a crowd, loneliness can attack. Sometimes, it comes from mis …

Childhood Obesity News mentioned one pioneering study on distraction as it affects appetite. The University of Liverpool study that we discuss today is a different kind, a meta-study that curated and collated the results of more than 20 previous studie …

All the winter holidays are basically the same: festivals of consumption that make it easy for a person to justify or excuse overeating. A helpful tip for any one of the holidays is likely to be effective for the others. Childhood Obesity News passes a …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News  looked at only a couple of the ideas espoused by Dr. Billi Gordon. Thanks to his Psychology Today column “Obesely Speaking,” he was named one of the “30 Most Influential Neuroscientists Alive Today” by a website that …

The possibility that obesity is predetermined in the womb is disheartening. Even worse, it appears that fate is set for us by trillions of microorganisms. Because we serve as their luxury apartment buildings, they may cooperate in keeping us alive, but …

For Rolling Stone, Erik Hedegaard wrote a profile of the guy who invented “Sons of Anarchy,” beginning with this sentence: The most important thing to know about Kurt Sutter is that he once weighed 400 pounds. Sutter is the creative genius behind the i …

Addiction to overeating is real, and one of the most interesting things about it is how recognizable the symptoms are to anyone who has ever been addicted to (what are seen as) the harder substances, like alcohol and narcotics. Actor and comedian Russe …

“Ultrasound Image of My Large Intestine” What is the role of the microbiome in addiction? Nobody knows for sure, but mounting evidence indicates that the gut plays a large part in the body’s reaction to addictive substances. The question is worth askin …

Sadly, childhood obesity is inextricably connected with bias, stigma, discrimination, blaming, and shaming. “Obesophobia” is an actual word. It is an intense and abnormal fear of weight gain that might be caused by family influence or a distorted self- …

A while back, Childhood Obesity News featured a four-part series about the many costs, both obvious and obscure, of sugar addiction. The toxicity of sugar is not a new concept. In the 1960s, Prof. John Yudkin sounded the alarm and was universally regar …

Mark Manson is an author greatly interested in happiness, self-knowledge, habits, relationships, and several other areas of human awareness. He invited a guest blogger with a fascinating story, Kelvin Burnett, who lost 266 pounds by “getting his mind s …

Soon after show business personality Jamie Kilstein accepted that he was an alcoholic, he understood that his relationship to food was also one of addiction and said: Once you admit you have a problem, you have a new agenda: to get healthy. To be bette …

Occasionally, to see what can be learned, Childhood Obesity News looks into the lives and thoughts of formerly obese people, not all of them national or international celebrities. Chrisetta Mosley has achieved renown in her neck of the woods, an area t …

The ability to think rationally and the ability to rationalize are quite different. Rational thinking starts with observing the world, before drawing conclusions about it. Conversely, rationalization starts with conclusions that a person has already co …

We already had racism, faith-based bigotry, and several other varieties of divisive doctrines. Wasn’t that enough to deal with? Apparently not, because now fat-shaming has become a “thing.” One of the weird aspects of this type of prejudice is that obe …

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” That saying has been around since before the year 1500. Such proverbs live so long in the human consciousness because they are adaptable to many situations. For instance, a paraphrase could be, “In …

In a recent Huffington Post article, Johann Hari discussed what he calls “the essential mystery of addiction:” What causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? He s …

In his paper written for the journal Eating Disorders, Dr. Pretlow stated that today’s youth appear to be “victims of boredom, stress, and depression in an addictive, comfort food environment” and added: Accordingly, a perfect storm may be contributing …

Lance Dodes, M.D., whose latest book is The Heart of Addiction, seems to have rethought the field from the ground up and arrived at some conclusions that can only be described as heretical. For instance, when a person seeks a rehab facility, scenery sh …

In the struggle to reverse the childhood obesity trend, one of the most pervasive tropes about junk food is to “tax it like tobacco.” In 2008, at the National Childhood Obesity Congress, Dr. Pretlow met Steven K. Galson, who was at the time the acting …

Regard de Kurt Ehrmann In olden times, crusaders ransacked a continent looking for the Holy Grail, and alchemists competed to rediscover the Philosophers’ Stone that could turn base metals into gold. In more recent centuries, humankind has labored to f …

Available both online and in the print edition of the journal Childhood Obesity is Dr. Pretlow’s paper, “Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study.” As Dr. Pretlow says: This publication signals anoth …