To Build Consensus

Readers will recall hearing about this virtual event, “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods.” It was created to persuade the World Health Organization “to include symptoms of addiction related to food, as a disease, in the International Classification of Disease, ICD-11.”

Childhood Obesity News also continued with a second post on the then-upcoming event. The purpose, as outlined in an internal preparatory document, “Introduction from the Facilitation Team,” was to define…

– what we know and can agree on about addiction symptoms as they relate to certain foods
– what we feel we know but can’t agree on, and
– where we need further research

The organizers outlined their concerns and observations about standard care, as currently understood and implemented. It appears that some vital elements are missing or ignored, and also that, in the area of food consumption, moderation therapy is ineffective.

This would seem to imply that some foodstuffs actually are literally addictive substances, a matter that is still rife with controversy. What happens if behavior is changed, but the psychological distress that caused it is still present? What if the person changes their eating habits but does not lose any weight? Also, there is a possibility that, without looking any further, doctors might tend to regard difficulties with the treatment as willful non-compliance.

Dr. Pretlow’s part

Dr. Pretlow’s 26-minute presentation is available online. In it, two fundamental questions are, “What should the disease be called?” and “Is the food the problem?”

The research organization NEUROfast seems not to care for the term “food addiction” because apparently, it implies that “food contains chemical substances that lead to development of Substance Use Disorder.” Well, is that proven to be not the case? It is hard to see this point of view, with all the evidence against, for instance, sugar. At any rate, one school of thought holds that “Eating Addiction” or “Addictive Eating Disorder” would be a more accurately descriptive name.

Others point out that not all foods are associated with addictive-like eating. (For some reason, many people particularly identify broccoli as characteristically non-addictive.) Dr. Pretlow mentions that the only behavioral addiction recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition is gambling disorder. (Some observers have remarked that, of all the addictions, gambling is probably the most unlike eating.)

Dr. Pretlow points out that while almost all binge eaters will go to town on whatever consumables are available, a relatively small number are more discerning. By this criterion, it sounds like the problem is the eating, and not so much the food. So it’s a sliding scale.

The presentation includes segments of interviews with, for instance, a young 400-pound fellow who admitted to having mistakenly believed that he was in control of his eating; that he was making the decisions. He eventually realized, “It was like an addiction almost. I had to.” This same patient poetically described his illness as being “consumed by consuming.”

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Introduction from the Facilitation Team,” by Dr. Pretlow
Image by Pat Hartman

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 4

Ten years ago, Landon Hall interviewed Margo Wootan, who was Director of Nutrition Policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and who opined that…

[K]ids used to eat what their parents ate. But the trend in recent years is for kids’ tastes to rule the family dinner table as well. Too often, that means chicken nuggets, hot dogs, pizza or something else from that fat-and-carb family of foods… Changing this idea of what is a kid’s meal is crucial to solving child obesity. You can’t solve obesity if kids’ food is mostly junk.

The situation has not changed favorably since then. Should parents shoulder the blame? Actually, no. According to many experts, all the shame belongs to the food industry, which single-handedly invented the notion that children are entitled to have their “own foods,” and then sold the idea to kids and, unfortunately, even to some parents.

In January of 2014, Sean Poulter reported that according to the Food Standards Agency,

Nine in ten items at the check-outs of supermarket convenience stores would be considered ‘very unhealthy.’

The writer accused retail stores of being acutely aware of, and using, “pester power” (sometimes known as “nagging beyond endurance”). A display of chocolate never fails to trigger a barrage of whining, especially if the product is strategically placed in a low line of sight appropriate to humans age 3 to 5. He quoted Dr. Jason Horsley who said,

Youngsters […] will see something, want it and have a tantrum if they don’t get. It depends how brave the parent is as to whether they buy it or not.

We can’t show a direct correlation between these displays and rising obesity. But we can say that supermarket check-outs selling junk food, making it cheap and readily available, are not going to reduce the nation’s obesity.

At that point in history, the average American child was absorbing around 16,000 TV commercials per year, a great many of them featuring food — and not good food. But even if all the offerings had been supremely healthful, an increasing number of adults were ideologically opposed to the audacity the industry showed in presuming to deal directly with children.

Journalist Bruce Watson quoted a British source, Ian Barber, who pontificated thusly:

Advertising becomes a proxy for complaints about particular companies, brands or products. Advertising isn’t the issue. The sort of advertisements that children see is the issue. But then you get into a very objective debate about how people feel about certain brands or services.

That incoherent declaration came, by the way, from the communications director of the Advertising Association in the U.K., and it doesn’t even make a lick of sense. Angry outbursts from parents and health professionals are anything but objective. They are, in fact, the epitome of subjectivity. People have strong personal convictions about this sort of thing, which tend to show. But those corporate types are so accustomed to spouting nonsense, they don’t even recognize it when it pours out of their own mouths.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “When did kids start to eat apart from adults?,” OCRegister.com, 12/17/13
Source: “Supermarkets accused of using ‘pester power’,” DailyMail.co, 01/24/14
Source: “The tricky business of advertising to children,” TheGuardian.com, 02/24/14
Images by Jeff Boulter, Marco Verch Professional, Joe Shlabotnik/CC BY 2.0

Selling Crap to Kids, Part 3

We are still wallowing in a topic so controversial, it has been newsworthy for decades. A little over 10 years ago, Susan Linn and Michele Simon wrote:

Marketing to children does not get First Amendment protection because it is inherently misleading. If a young child cannot even understand the purpose of an ad, then marketing anything to that child is both unfair and deceptive.

At around the same time Simon, a public health attorney and advocate for plant-based foods, framed one of the moral issues. In protecting children’s health, is encouraging the food industry to market healthful food to kids important, necessary, or even ethical? She wrote,

[I]f the only issue was marketing fruit and vegetables to kids and if the only people engaging in such tactics were parents, I would be far less concerned. But let’s not confuse well-meaning adults trying to get kids to eat right with profit-driven multi-national corporations targeting children to hook them on a lifetime of consumerism.

In the same year, the journal Health Education published the results of a study of child-oriented food advertising. The uncredited piece about it from PRLog.org said that “Health-related messages in food advertisements targeting children” was the first document to scrutinize not just the health messages conveyed by ads, but the actual content and virtue of the foods they referred to and promoted. Here is the problem, or one of them anyway:

[I]t may actually be the advertising techniques… that are being changed in response to concerns… It found that health messages which appear in foods marketed at children do not necessarily indicate their nutritional value. Conversely, these health-related messages were frequently found to be used to promote unhealthy foods to children, and were mostly likely to appear in commercials for fast foods, sugared cereals and salty snacks.

In other words, instead of doing the right thing, the industry engaged in some fancy bait-and-switch machinations, no more honest than a traditionally rigged carnival ring-toss game. The new method is, in fact, even worse, because it takes advantage of the trusting nature of children and their often deep, if sometimes well-camouflaged, desire to do the right thing.

Children, like adults, perceive products more positively when they are presented with a health message, and exposure to food advertising is linked, not only to their dietary preferences and food selections, but to their understanding and beliefs about nutrition.

Is that devious, or what?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Dark Side of Marketing Healthy Food to Children,” EatDrinkPolitics.com, 06/17/13
Source: “Is a Nutritionism Approach to Marketing to Children the Best We Can Do?,” EatDrinkPolitics.com, 06/26/13
Source: “Can childhood obesity be linked to clever marketing tactics?,” PRLog.org, 10/01/13
Image: Genius.com/Public Domain

Displacing the Displacement

“I need a drink” is probably one of the most frequently heard statements in the language, and the reason why a person feels the “need” for a drink is to eradicate stress.

Of course, many other substances can offer the illusion of serving the same purpose. With heavy downers, the person can zone out or pass out, and avoid experiencing stress — or any other sensation — for many hours at a time. With uppers or stimulants, like amphetamines, the person can create so much busyness and so many superficial distractions, that the original causes of stress are buried under a ton of pointless activity.

Maintaining a habit is, in itself, quite stressful. Where to get the stuff, how to pay for it, hiding the habit from others, quieting their suspicions, concealing the physical deterioration that inevitably follows, pretending to try to quit when a true intention is totally absent — all these activities and situations are very stressful too. For someone to discover that substance use actually exacerbates the very problems they hoped to escape can be a crushing disappointment that unavoidably leads to an even worse place.

Going nowhere

Not surprisingly, eventually it all catches up, and a heavy price is demanded. When the supposedly stress-alleviating addiction takes hold, there are consequences — like academic failure, job loss, divorce, bankruptcy, physical deterioration, endangerment of others, arrest, criminal charges, public shame, alienation of friends and family members, and so forth — all of which serve to just pile on the pressure and the suffering. And that is the inescapable “catch-22” of it all. Addiction inevitably causes even more problems and more stress.

Obesity gets involved because eating is one of the most obvious and available displacement behaviors. Eating, sleeping, and grooming are all natural drives, and useful and beneficial activities, until they are not. Picking bugs out of the hair is fine; pulling out the hair itself is taking things too far. A normal amount of sleep is necessary for health; sleeping 12 hours a day to escape a challenging life situation is obviously counterproductive.

Consuming enough calories to keep the body operating at peak functionality is obviously desirable; but when it’s a displacement behavior, and no longer a reasonable response to a natural, healthy drive, then eating is a problem.

Personal situations

For young people, school is one of the most frequent and obvious sources of stress. For older people, the big problem is often the job, or the lack of a job, and either one can make a person feel desperate and push them to look for something, anything, that will alleviate the misery.

And then, there are personal relationships. Often in a marriage, one partner realizes that the status quo is untenable. But like an animal faced with the choice between “fight or flight,” the person realizes that neither leaving nor staying can promote their well-being. If they leave, they will be broke and lose their kids. If they stay, they will be wretched.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by x1klima/CC BY-ND 2.0

Feed the Enthusiasm, Part 1

One of the greatest feelings in the world is to become absorbed in some activity for a few minutes, and then realize you’ve been so wrapped up in it, and an hour or more has passed. That forgetfulness of the world and the self is, at minimum, a painless interval, and at most, a rewarding spell in which you’ve actually achieved or learned something. Finding a passion can save a life.

“Smile, when your heart is breaking…”

For some people in show business, the constant access to free drinks and easily available hard drugs is their downfall. But for others, practicing their art can be the thing that makes all the difference to their mental health. Like fly fishing, mechanical dexterity, or learning to play the drums, performance art is a way to satisfy a certain drive.

That drive might be described as the need to escape from an untenable circumstance. Even an amoeba knows to avoid pain. To entertain a room is certainly an improvement over fighting, running away, or other available displacements. Telling jokes to strangers can even help a person maintain their sobriety for decades.

Standup comedians Joe List and Greg Fitzsimmons agree that making a commitment to get up on stage, and then following through, can pull them out of a depressive funk. Stage time is somehow the “fix,” even if neither the comic nor the audience happens to be at the top of their game. Using an evocative and appropriate metaphor, Fitzsimmons says, “Even if you bombed, at least you got the needle into your arm.”

Positive displacement

Musician/comedian Gary Mule Deer was simultaneously addicted to cocaine and gambling for about 20 years. He told interviewer Marc Maron, “When I came out of rehab, I needed a new addiction, and needed to walk off the weight I’d put on… Golf saved my life.” While pursuing that fresh interest and challenging skill, Mule Deer met one of his heroes, the singer Smokey Robinson, who invited him to raise money for charity by participating in celebrity golf tournaments. Consequently, Mule Deer met many other people he held in great esteem, from several fields of endeavor. These friendships helped him to further his career as an entertainer, and granted him a new lease on life.

Full of surprises

Fortunately, a person who is trying to shake a habit may work on the underlying problems through whatever means are available — individual therapy; 12-step programs; spiritual practice; conscientious action plans; vision boards — people are different and they can be helped by different things. But one thing that helps anybody is finding higher-quality, productive, creative, attractive, meaningful displacements that give them a chance to use their skills and competencies, and that bring out the best in them.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Fitzdog Radio #994,” YouTube.com, 02/15/22
Source: “Episode 1458 Gary Mule Deer,” WTFPod.com, 08/03/23
Image by Chic Bee/CC BY 2.0