Babies, Cereal, and Childhood Obesity

Fat

It has been a bad year for infant cereal. On the last day of 2010, Eryn Brown of the Los Angeles Times reported that a good time to start worrying about a baby’s obesity potential is about nine months. And then, on February 14, Childhood Obesity News gave infant cereal the old heave-ho. We quoted […]

Breastfeeding Roundup

Ghiradelli Square

Politically and medically significant, it’s a public health issue and also a very personal and extremely emotional one. There is more to be said about breastfeeding, babies, and childhood obesity, so here are a few interesting items from around the Interweb. Actor Charlie Sheen’s alleged misbehavior has been saturating the media. One of the legal […]

Breastfeeding, Health, and Childhood Obesity

amma

New research comes along every day, and breastfeeding is currently a topic of much concern (we have been exploring some of its angles on this blog). The latest interesting findings come from the Colorado School of Public Health, reported on for BusinessWeek by Robert Preidt. It’s one of those “bad news, good news” scenarios. The […]

The Many Voices in a Breastfeeding Debate

The Blessed Virgin Breastfeeding

The Let’s Move! program and First Lady Michelle Obama have plenty of ideas about ending childhood obesity, and one of them is the importance of breastfeeding. Yesterday we brought up some of the problems encountered by the FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States.) The public may experience either strong feelings or ambivalence, both of […]

To Nurse or Not to Nurse

Nursing Mother Station

We learn from Lynn Sweet’s bio that, “In 1990, she was among the first journalists in the nation to analyze political ads for accuracy.”(That is a useful talent, equal to a talent for analyzing hedonic food ads, which tend to have an elevated baloney content.) Sweet is not only the Chicago Sun-Times bureau chief in […]

A Tale of Two Michelles

Two Michelles

It has been a little over a year since the Let’s Move! campaign, initiated by First Lady Michelle Obama, got off the ground. So far, the reviews are mixed. Some critics ignore the fact that childhood obesity is a huge problem, which has gained enormous momentum over a long period of years. Even the best […]

Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 6

Baby bites

We have been thinking about not thinking, specifically about why some parents avoid thinking about childhood obesity in general, and about food addiction in particular. Part of the problem is that even if the latest theories about obesity are correct, it’s too late to do anything differently. For instance, the bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding debate. There […]

Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 5

reactionary

Yes, we have talked before about why a lot of parents just don’t want to hear about food addiction. But there are so many reasons! Some parents don’t believe that food addiction exists. Some may accept the new paradigm in a general sort of way, and be willing to look through the “psychological food dependence-addiction […]

Junk Food Indicted on Many Counts

angry face

You’ve heard about “negative-calorie” foods, which take so much energy to chew and/or digest that they actually burn more calories than they contain. Whether or not that’s valid, it’s an interesting concept, and a terminology that can be borrowed. Maybe some things should be defined as negative-value food. On one end of the spectrum, there […]