Comfort Eating and Valerie Bertinelli

Valerie Bertinelli

Did some little thing ever catch your eye and entice you into a more thorough investigation of a subject? It was just a tiny paragraph in Entertainment Weekly, written by Keith Staskiewicz, about the second volume of memoirs published by actress Valerie Bertinelli. Staskiewicz says, In the new book, she details her battle with emotional […]

Comfort Eating, Food Addiction, and the DSM-V Manual

Light Bedtime Reading

Not long ago we mentioned Jennifer LaRue Huget, the Washington Post reporter who began to take seriously the notion of food addiction after meeting Michael Prager. This is encouraging, because childhood obesity won’t be stopped until food addiction is understood to be as real as addiction to hard drugs, alcohol, and even the range of […]

Comfort Eating and Regular People

comfort food

The psychological food dependence-addiction lens is a new and still somewhat unpopular paradigm, because it has to do with addiction to food as the cause of much obesity. Looking through that lens, we see that while legislative measures are useful, what really needs to be addressed is the tendency of people to become addicted, at […]

Comfort Eating and Kelly Osbourne

British Cosmopolitan

Here is Kelly Osbourne, looking much different than she used to, on the cover of the February issue of British edition of Cosmopolitan, with an article inside, titled “I was an emotional eater.” Reporter Kara Gause says, [… S]he’s at once Madonna circa ‘Material Girl’ and her own mum, Sharon Osbourne, who has a penchant for […]

Comfort Eating and Carrie Fisher

carrie fisher

Yesterday we discussed the difficulty, for parents and health professionals concerned about childhood obesity, in having a positive effect, or making any impact at all, on the production, advertising, or availability of junk food. Call it less-than-optimal food, call it pseudo-food, or call it ingestible matter that does the body more harm than good. Especially, […]

Do Bad Genes Cause Big Jeans?

Do these jeans make my ass look big

In the area of childhood obesity, does genetic research lead to a light at the end of the tunnel, or a dead end? Is the whole genetic thing just a cop-out for people who are in denial about their food addiction? A couple of years ago, Maggie Fox of Reuters reported on the activities of […]

The Childhood Obesity Perfect Storm, Part 7

Sunday's Storm

We have talked about the Childhood Obesity Perfect Storm before, and its various components such as the existence of cleverly engineered highly pleasurable foods, the ubiquitous availability of those foods to kids, and the way the products are marketed. We have discussed how stress and obesity go together like a horse and carriage, or, in […]

Childhood Obesity Funding and Independence

magazine in lens

Dr. Pretlow’s December 20 post, “Childhood Obesity Science Conflicts of Interest,” set off an interesting chain of reactions. It expressed concern about the objectivity and impartiality of the new magazine, Childhood Obesity, which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. (The link is to where an issue of the magazine can be sampled for free.) How objective […]

Stress-Eating and Recession Obesity

large lady

You know a writer is onto something when a piece she wrote almost two years ago is even more true than on the day it was first published. Georgia Lund, a contributor to the Yahoo! Network, made a few observations about the relationship between the murky fiscal environment we have been immersed in and the […]

Stress, Emotions, and Obesity

Berkeley Bowl

As we all know, the winter holidays are prime time for emotional turmoil. Being a fat kid is no fun at any season, and now the relatives who haven’t seen you all year come around and say, “My goodness, Johnny is certainly… growing.” Meredith Melnick of Time magazine has been examining a new report from […]