Category: Food Addiction

Can compulsive overeating be vanquished by the same kind of laws that have banished smoking? Maybe, but not without a lot of protest.

More highlights from a Childhood Obesity News series of posts about smoking, drinking, and problem eating, and the connection between them.

How would the measures intended to curb smoking and deal with alcohol addiction translate to childhood obesity prevention?

All food advertising directed at children should be banned. Food companies are no dopes: an addicted kid is a customer for life.

Smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and overeating can take a toll. If a methodology can reduce one of those problems, is it transferable? If not, why not?

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at measures taken around smoking, and, to a lesser extent, around alcohol, that are transferrable to obesity prevention.

In the realm of positive mental and emotional associations, smoking, drinking and overeating are capable of forming self-reinforcing loops.

What is the rationale for government involvement in either smoking or the eating patterns that lead to obesity?

The McKinsey Global Institute came up with 74 intervention levers in which the obesity epidemic is believed to be vulnerable to pressure.

There is no evidence that stigmatizing overweight and obese people motivates them to lose weight. Instead, information, skills and support are the tools needed.

There are reasons why stigmatization is unable to play as large a role in stemming the obesity epidemic as it does in slowing down the rate of smoking.

It would be inaccurate to claim that stigmatization “works” when it comes to both smoking and obesity.

The extent to which stigmatization is responsible for smokers quitting is impossible to tell. For smokers who don’t quit, it’s not always a physical addiction.

Society now finds it easy to blame and hate smokers, even to the point of directly confronting and denouncing them, which is not the case with obesity, yet.

Smoking and obesity are alike enough so that anyone interested in controlling obesity will look to the anti-smoking movement for advice.

Why has counseling for smoking cessation historically been more successful than obesity counseling?

Smoking prevalence and eating disorders are intertwined in the human psyche, but research conclusions about the relationship are not solid.

One study indicated that among people in a quit-smoking program, binge eaters were less likely than normal eaters to abandon nicotine.

While smoking is socially discouraged, it is not easy to argue that obesity really impacts the non-obese.

Professionals who deal with obesity are interested in how people quit smoking as those therapeutic interventions might be transferrable.

We are looking at the similarities between two public health menaces, nicotine and the overconsumption of food, that threaten to bring on an obesity epidemic.

DSM-5 doesn’t accord food dependency the courtesy of calling it a substance abuse disorder; nor does the industry bible specify Tobacco Use Disorder treatments.

There are similarities between nicotine addiction and compulsive overeating, and cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacological intervention might help both.

Kids with addicted parents can react to gaslighting by “stuffing” their feelings or expressing their chronic anxiety through displacement behaviors.

Anne Lamott, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has accrued what Steve O’Keefe characterizes as “quite a following among the addiction recovery audience.” Her sense of humor can readily be described as dark. Case in point: Someone who’d spent $30, …

Is food addiction a substance addiction, a behavioral addiction, or a combination of both? And why is there resistance to accepting the idea of food addiction?

Most medical professionals see stress eating and comfort eating as the same phenomenon, and both are included under emotional eating.

“Does Comfort Eating Work?” is a question that is asked seriously by bona fide residents of Academia.

Is it possible that the reward inherent in stress/comfort eating has nothing to do with the ingredients and everything to do with a connection made in the mind?

For many professionals in the field, comfort/stress eating lives under the larger umbrella of “emotional eating.”