Many Doctors Believe Food Can Be Addictive
Can food be addictive in the same way as, for instance, heroin? Many doctors believe that it can. While some people are not very addiction-prone, others are, but are too busy being junkies involving some other substance, and food doesn’t do a thing for them. Not every person who eats is a food addict. But […]
Stop Federal Corn Subsidies to Decrease Childhood Obesity
The childhood obesity epidemic can be reversed, but nobody ever said it would be easy. Here is the question posed by journalist Mike Lillis on The Hill: Why, when faced with a childhood obesity epidemic, would the federal government continue to subsidize corn-based sweeteners suspected of contributing to the problem? Why indeed? This question was […]
Junk Food Marketing: You Are the Target
It’s bad enough that we are surrounded by the brightly colored packages of products that barely qualify as edible, no matter how many cartoon characters may decorate them. What a great recipe for childhood obesity, adult obesity, and the endless complications of the multiple disease processes! But no, that’s not enough to contend with. We’re […]
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 […]
Embrace Your Hunger
We have mentioned Oprah Winfrey‘s chagrin when she had been told by her doctor that she would need to “embrace hunger.” Many of us would be better off learning to feel pleasant anticipation of a good meal rather than a craving for junk food. We could experience for ourselves the truth in the old saying, […]
Food Addiction: Just Say Cheese?
There are many obvious connections between childhood obesity and the proliferation of fast food restaurants. A large number of fast food meals have one thing in common: cheese. There has been a lot of talk about the possible addictive qualities of that substance. This is not news. Back in 1988, Dr. Douglas Hunt published No […]
The Health Profession and Food Addiction, Part 2
As we have noted before, not every MD in history has recoiled from the food addiction paradigm. A few shining lights have gone on record, and risked being thought of as cranks, or worse. Sobriety coach Cynthia Perkins is the author of Get Sober Stay Sober: The Truth About Alcoholism. With 21 years of “uninterrupted […]
A Food Addict and His Movie: Lbs.
Film Journal International brings us Frank Lovece’s comprehensive review of a dramedy called Lbs. The subtitle is “Heavyweight human drama of a food addict going cold turkey.” The reviewer is especially impressed by the dialogue between two friends who argue about which addiction, cocaine or food, is harder to kick. Lovece calls this: […] a […]