A couple of years ago, Michael Pollan published a prediction in a piece for The Nation titled “How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System.” He believed that the food movement would be joined by the healthcare industry in taking on such battles as s …

Corporate sponsors of AND Childhood Obesity News is interested in a paper titled “And Now a Word from Our Sponsors,” whose subtitle is a pointed question: “Are America’s Nutrition Professionals in the Pocket of Big Food?” Written by public health speci …

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, center, with AND members Sara Eye, a certified performance technologist from Austin, Texas, wrote a comprehensive description of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), which is… …now the largest organization for …

Of course it is beneficial to have experts explain things to CEOs and politicians. In the hard sciences, it can be a very difficult task to translate concepts into language that nonprofessionals (in that field) are able to understand and make use of. I …

Childhood Obesity News has raised the question of how a typical academic figure can manage to carry out duties related to health policy while in the employ of manufacturers of products whose qualities are not aligned with the public good. Many experts …

When prominent academic figures are on corporate payrolls, and when corporations finance groups whose mission is to end childhood obesity, alarm bells ring in the minds of vigilant observers — in some cases, alarm bells that have tolled very many time …

Coca-Cola and other comparable companies regularly inject their names into the news by sponsoring research projects, conferences, healthy-lifestyle initiatives, and similar rah-rah-get-healthy programs. All these efforts are designed to give the impres …

Childhood Obesity News is looking at some of the reasons why people don’t get behind the idea of taxing soda pop. In California a couple of years back, a 1-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened drinks was proposed, and the Los Angeles Times said: The e …

Why have people supported or voted for the adoption of tobacco taxes? For one thing, they hear numbers that sound encouraging, like how every time the cigarette price increases by 10%, the youth demographic decreases its smoking by about 7%. Another re …

Heavy tax was imposed on tobacco products with the rationale that money has to come from somewhere to pay for the damage caused by their use. Similar attempts have been made to recoup the costs associated with sugar-sweetened beverages, with not much s …

Many people who generally do not spare a thought for political philosophy are galvanized by any hint of official interference in what they do for a good time. As we saw with the politician Sarah Palin, the straightest route to the unthinking public’s h …

(This is a sequel to yesterday’s post, which tracks the story of how the feisty, quintessentially Middle American state of Kansas has handled its journey toward eliminating childhood obesity.) Late in 2010, the state of Kansas ruled that within a year …

Tired teen girls in gym class On this page we see yet another frame of the music video “We Are Hungry,” in which famished and debilitated girls have a hard time making it through gym class. The comedic short film, made by high school students in Kansas …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News looked at a parody music video made by a Kansas high school class. It features scenes like the one shown here, where students droop over their desks, faint with hunger, and even the teacher seems to succumb to malnutri …

The federal Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 actually started to be implemented in July of 2012 with changes to the national school lunch program, which affects about 32 million students. Over a three-year period, schools were directed to serve …

Childhood Obesity News takes a break from examining the case against vending machines in schools, to look at a report that brings up a basic question: Why does summer vacation even exist? Writer Paul Jury says the three-month hiatus “came about through …

In July, new U.S. Department of Agriculture rules will kick in, affecting 100,000 American schools. The Smart Snacks in Schools standards actually concern cafeteria meals, too. For instance, the calorie limit for an entree item is 350 calories, while t …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the question of how much responsibility schools should bear for preventing childhood obesity. In one way, it seems almost intuitively obvious that, especially in the early years, school is the right place to t …

Preventing Childhood Obesity: Evidence Policy and Practice is a book with global perspective, drawing relevant information from contributors from many countries whose credentials take up pages and pages. One of the points it makes is the necessity to s …

Childhood Obesity News has examined some statements made by Big Soda spin doctor Jeff Nedelman that are open to interpretation. For instance: Causational studies are very expensive; to be credible must involve many participants over a long time and acc …

Count Brickula Some beverage industry spokespeople insist that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and artificially sweetened drinks are benign in their effects on the human body. Some of these mouthpieces even say there is no evidence to the contrary. Th …

  Believe it or not, there is still more to say about attacks against the sugar-sweetened beverage industry and all its kin, like artificially sweetened fizzy drinks and sports drinks; and more to know about the rebuttals they have offered in thei …

At the American Heart Association’s 2013 annual meeting, a Harvard postdoctoral research fellow named Gitanjali Singh presented some ideas that generated headlines and controversy. The topic was the public health hazard posed by soda pop in all its for …

Republished in a forum, this article originally came from the British newspaper The Times, and its title is “Sugar watchdog works for Coca-Cola.” In the past, the U.K. government had assigned scientists to determine how much of a person’s total energy …

As an example of a global corporation that activists love to hate, the Coca-Cola Company is at the top of the list. Every now and then, it’s useful to look back over what Coke has been up to, in its long and troubled relationship with the childhood obe …

The Centers for Disease Control took a look at “fruit drinks, sodas, energy drinks, sports drinks, and sweetened bottled waters,” and officially declared that sugared beverages are linked with weight gain, up to and including morbid obesity. The Center …

Writing for AlterNet, Martha Rosenberg highlighted five areas of modern life that are “under suspicion” as being responsible for why the average American man weighs 194 pounds and the average American woman weighs 165 pounds. Traditionally, the answer …

While Childhood Obesity News is on the subject of fat-shaming, Israel really stepped in it early this year. Actually, very few Israelis had anything to do with the appearance of various large billboards in Tel Aviv, some of which are shown on this page …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News looked at the latest significant report about childhood obesity, which found that, measured over a decade, American children between the ages of 2 and 5 years showed a 43% decline in obesity. That’s good news, but the …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the pros and cons of bribing and/or rewarding kids for their weight loss efforts and/or successes. One thing to always keep in mind regarding bribery is that this is how a lot of families get in trouble in the …