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 […]
Homeostatic and Hedonic Eating
Health columnist Melinda Beck writes for the The Wall Street Journal, and she had also formerly edited that publication’s Marketplace section. Recently, she looked into the technology of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, and how it might impact childhood obesity research. Among the different ways of taking pictures of the brain in action, this […]
Medical Science and Food Addiction
(Part One of a Two-Part Post)(View Part Two) by Robert A. Pretlow, M.D. Why Does The Obesity Community Reject Addiction? In September 2009, I conducted a plenary session presentation at the European Childhood Obesity Group (ECOG) scientific meeting in Dublin, Ireland, in which I proposed that comfort eating and resulting addiction to highly pleasurable foods […]
A Few Words About Chocolate
Have you noticed that it’s possible to buy chocolate-coated just-about-anything? Pretzels, coffee beans, bananas, popcorn, squash, potato chips, even bacon. You name it, and someone has coated it with chocolate. Humans love chocolate so much, they will even eat chocolate-covered ants and scorpions. We’ve mentioned the categories of highly pleasurable food, as defined by Linda […]
Sending Toddlers on the Food Addiction Path
Just when you thought you’d heard the epitome of absurdity, along comes another crazy notion to top the last one. How about formula for toddlers that is laced with chocolate and vanilla flavorings? Of course the stuff is marketed as not only benign, but actually healthful, because of its added ingredients. Apparently, it’s supposed to […]