Parents as Enablers and Saboteurs, Part 1
Parents want to know what to do about childhood obesity. The answers are difficult ones because most of them involve a change in philosophical outlook and/or everyday behavior — a change made by parents, that is. When we parents set out to fix our kids, we often run up against the uncomfortable truth that we […]
More Useful Things That Parents Can Do
In his book Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs shares childhood memories of avoiding all of his mother’s efforts to feed him a healthy diet. Children can be cunning little people, as he proves in the essay called “The Wonder Boy.” Burroughs writes, She’d slip a carton of fresh beans or a head of broccoli into […]
The Many Voices in a Breastfeeding Debate
The Let’s Move! program and First Lady Michelle Obama have plenty of ideas about ending childhood obesity, and one of them is the importance of breastfeeding. Yesterday we brought up some of the problems encountered by the FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States.) The public may experience either strong feelings or ambivalence, both of […]
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 […]
From Head to Toe: Obesity Is Unhealthy
An astonishing number of medical conditions coexist with childhood obesity, or show up later — sometimes not even until adulthood — but can be traced back to an overweight start in life. Of course, children and youth are notorious for not worrying about the future. It’s probably not a good idea to let scary stories […]
Unintended Consequences of the Food Revolution
Usually we have no sympathy to spare for the fast food industry, but it seems like even when it tries to do better, things don’t work out somehow. Thanks, Yunji de Nies and Claudia Acosta of ABC News, for reporting on this. When Yum Brands introduced grilled chicken in 2009, the corporation certainly didn’t foresee […]
Child Obesity, Junk Food Tie Worldwide
The bad news: childhood obesity is on the rise in many places around the globe. The good news: it’s not exclusively an American problem. And if that is what we’re willing to settle for in the good-news department these days, we’re in deep chocolate pudding. Geoff Cumming tells us that New Zealand, one of the […]
A Week of Empty Calories on the Table
If you want to visit the Unhealthiest Town in America, the federal Centers for Disease Control will direct you to Huntington, West Virginia. That’s where fitness-conscious celebrity chef and TV personality Jamie Oliver recently traveled, in order to meet some typical American families and show them the light. There are two reasons why this is […]