Allergies, Addiction, Childhood Obesity, and Halloween: All Scary
“In the interest of fighting the childhood obesity epidemic, I’ve decided to eat all the Halloween candy I bought.” Just kidding. The line is from Someecards, a company that devises — you guessed it — greeting cards in electronic format. The picture above is not the ecard, by the way. The boy in the picture […]
A Psychological Problem, Not a Nutritional Problem
“Will Marriage Make You Fat?” is the question asked by Cynthia Ramnarace in an article that follows the histories of three different couples. She got interested in the emotional basis of obesity because of something she read: A 2008 study in the journal Obesity showed that couples that lived together more than two years — […]
The Medical Science and Food Addiction Barrier
Today, the focus is on a piece written by forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, Ph.D. What, you may ask, does forensic psychology have to do with the childhood obesity epidemic? Well, it turns out that the upper levels of all the professions have certain characteristics in common, and this applies to the medical establishment and everybody […]
Why Parents Don't Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 4
Ever since Freud, parents just can’t seem to catch a break. Every time we turn around, somebody finds another reason to blame us for yet another deficiency in our children. Like in the picture here, why is this rather chunky boy wearing a necklace of doughnuts? However, we can’t prevent or find out about a lot […]
Stress, Boredom, Activity, and Childhood Obesity
Researchers at Iowa State University, after studying the lives and health of over 1,000 teenagers, have concluded that adolescent obesity is very much connected to the increasing levels of stress. For starters, 47% of the adolescents they studied were overweight or obese. But after six years of collecting data and interviewing the children and their […]
Childhood Obesity and Activity
You’re not gonna believe this, but we are still marveling over the vast number of intelligent, coherent, and useful responses that came in regarding last Friday’s post, “When There Is Nothing to Do but Eat.” For instance, somebody known as JumpGym Vancouver suggested a series of articles from a program called “Canadian Sports for Life” […]
Facets of Hunger in Childhood Obesity
Don’t you love it when somebody brings up an angle that isn’t discussed much, but maybe ought to be? That’s what Deborah Schoeberlein did, in a piece for the Huffington Post, called “Overweight Kids? Feed Them Compassion and Mindfulness.” She’s talking about the childhood obesity epidemic: Society has labeled this situation a public health disaster, […]
Eating as Recreation, Food as Fun
When something hits a nerve, there’s no mistaking it. Friday’s post “When There is Nothing to Do But Eat,” concerning one of the contributing factors to the childhood obesity epidemic, definitely brought forth a flood of comments, ranging from pure nostalgia to well-reasoned arguments. Many thanks to everybody for contributing to this topic! By the […]
National Pet Obesity Awareness Day: October 13
First, how do we know how many pets are obese? It’s simple. The Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (APOP) is in its fourth year of conducting an annual survey of veterinarians and pet owners. The Association estimates that nearly 90 million animal companions in the U.S. are either obese or overweight. Half of America’s pet […]
Junk Food Indicted on Many Counts
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 […]