Would Junk Food Tax Curb Childhood Obesity?
Extreme measures are needed to deal with the childhood obesity epidemic, there’s no doubt about it, but is taxation a step that would help? For purposes of this discussion, let’s define junk food as whatever the kids find most difficult to resist — their abused substance of choice — if phrased in the addiction model. […]
HIP HOP Makes Junk Food Unhip
In Overweight: What Kids Say, Dr. Pretlow writes, What is really needed is a cultural shift in regard to highly pleasurable food, so that overeating is ‘not cool’ and so that junk food is ‘yuck.’ If the culture is moldable, these are the very people to do it: D-Nick The Microphone Misfit and B-Boy Super […]
Facets of Emotional Eating
When considering the obesity epidemic, more and more people are making the mind/body connection. David M. Dunkley, assistant professor in the Psychiatry department at McGill University, is also a clinician and researcher at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. While following 170 patients with binge eating disorder, Dunkley and his colleagues have discovered that: … [T]he severity of […]
Heart Hunger Not Satisfied by Junk Food
Linda Spangle, R.N., is an expert on heart hunger, the emptiness that leads to emotional eating, which is pretty much the same as comfort eating. Her website, Weight Loss Café, offers several helpful articles about emotional eating. Today we’re looking at one called “When Your Heart is Hungry.” It offers several concrete suggestions for the […]
Stress and Fat: A Complicated Relationship
Today we are watching a video from a class given by Dr. Elissa Epel at the University of California San Francisco, where she is a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry. She and her colleagues have been studying the ways in which stress can lead to early onset of age-related disease processes. This episode […]
Weight-Loss Camps and Sustainable Improvement
Not long ago, Pediatrics magazine published the results of a study undertaken by four authors: Jean Huelsing, RN; Nadim Kanafani, MD; Jingnan Mao, MS; and Neil H. White, MD. They took a very close look at 76 children and adolescents who went to a weight-loss camp. Some were enrolled in one-month-long programs, and others had […]
Task Force Recommends Tracking Body Mass Index
Here, from Huffington Post, is an illumination of one aspect of the proposed Healthy Choices Act. The article was written by Penny Lee, Executive Director of the Campaign to End Obesity. Her job is to cross-pollinate the thoughts of many powerful interests, and to come up with ideas that can be forged into federal policy. […]
Junk Food Addiction: What Kids Say
Well, this is news that many people don’t want to hear, but, like it or not, we do need to pay attention to scientists like Paul Kenny and Paul Johnson. Victoria Stern has recently reported on fruit flies, personality problems, nanoparticles, and bacterial fingerprinting. In summing up the work of Kenny and Johnson, and their […]
Childhood Obesity and Government Regulation
The editors of Scientific American have compiled an interesting article about childhood obesity, which appears in the May issue. The stark reality is that one out of every three kids in America is overweight, and many people believe the government must do something about it. Those of us whose memories of our school days include […]
Childhood Obesity Linked to Fast Food Toys
Jesse McKinley, the San Francisco Bureau Chief for The New York Times, keeps the East-coasters apprised of what’s coming at them from the other side of the realm. In this case, it’s an ordinance — with its final vote coming up in May — that would only affect a dozen or so restaurants in a […]