Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Ingestive Behavior Gone Awry

Pat Hartman April 7, 2022 No Comments

Dr. Pretlow says, “Leaders in addiction science concur that addiction and obesity both reflect the consequences of ingestive behavior gone awry.” In this context, gone awry almost invariably means “too much.”

In most cases, this boils down to meaning too much of the wrong stuff. Back when people had purer diets and more active lifestyles, it actually took some effort to become obese. Getting fat was an accomplishment, reflected by the fact that aristocrats were proud of their own portly figures, and a “trophy wife” was a plump wife, living proof that her successful husband could afford to feed her well.

Now, things are different. All day, every day, we are assailed by the wrong stuff. For a normal, unsuspecting person, it is quite easy to unthinkingly consume horrible junk on a daily basis without even trying very hard. Still, in the case of both addictive substances and mundane ones, the operative principle is that “too much” is where the trouble starts.

Dr. Pretlow speaks extensively of the core similarities between addiction and obesity, which will be covered in due time. But first, let us give some consideration to the major difference between the excessive ingestion of an addictive substance and the excessive ingestion of food.

Can’t say no

Nobody has to smoke crack. Everybody has to eat. You can, in the famous words of Nancy Reagan, “just say no” to alcohol, but you can’t not eat.

Okay, maybe for a while. Maybe there are fancy European clinics where a customer can pay a fortune to be put in a coma and fed intravenously for three months, while the weight just melts away. But eventually, even they have to eat again. We can’t stop eating, we can only stop eating too much. Ms. Reagan notwithstanding, there is no “no.” There is only “no more, right now, at this moment.” That line is a tough one to draw, over and over again, every day for the rest of your life.

No means no

A truth heard from many alcoholics is that the smallest sip of alcohol can send them out of control. In an interview, comedian Jayson Thibault admitted that after a restaurant dinner with friends he would lurk over the table and polish off any partially-filled glasses of wine they might have left. “I’ll throw up and keep drinking. There’s no shut-off valve.”

There are people who will eat in the same way. The difference might be that they carry a heavy psychological burden. Maybe they grew up in grinding poverty and with the constant fear of never having enough to eat. Maybe they work a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, and will clean up any scraps their children leave on plates, because the personal price to afford that food is so high.

This is where it gets complicated for those whose problem is food. A person who “can’t say no” to alcohol is labeled an addict. With unrelenting and vigilant determination, they actually can say no to alcohol, and prevent letting the addiction take over. For a substance addict to recover, strict abstinence is the only answer that works. In their world, moderation isn’t even a “thing.”

A person who can’t say no to eating may be an addict, but at least they stay alive, because to say no to eating means death. Saying yes to eating might also lead to death, but probably not for a while. Dr. Pretlow says,

A central barrier to the success of treatment for obesity that is distinct from drug addiction is the fact that food consumption is essential for survival; thus, abstinence is not a feasible or appropriate treatment goal.

We will be talking about that more.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “#189: Catastrophic Alcoholic (@TheTeeb),” Shaffir1.libsyn.com, 10/20/14
Image by PlusLexia.com/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Yes, Kids Get COVID-19

Pat Hartman April 6, 2022 No Comments

It is interesting that three branches of a denialist belief system are in vogue at any given time, with varying intensity, in different parts of the world, and even within one society. “Kids don’t get COVID-19.” “They don’t get it very bad.” “They don’t spread it around.” Simultaneously, things constantly happen to prove otherwise. Let’s bring up to date our journey through the history of thought regarding the relationship between children and the coronavirus. Or, at least some of the highlights.

Last December, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were in dire straits. The CDC was estimating Omicron’s market share at 59 percent. But in Connecticut, the frightening variant accounted for 80% of new cases, and in New York, for 90%.

Hospital admission rates are contested because, among adults and children alike, record-keeping protocols are always subject to a degree of arbitrary decision-making. People (including children) who test positive for COVID are admitted to hospitals for other reasons, and if their virus is asymptomatic, they may not be included in the COVID-patient statistics. Then again, Andrew Jacobs wrote in The New York Times,

Alarming hospitalization figures can be misleading because they sometimes include all children who have tested positive for the coronavirus upon admission. Some hospitals around the country have reported positivity rates as high as 20 percent among children.

And a lot of grownups do not see this as a problem, or even admit it. Many professionals are cautious, like Boston Children’s Hospital pediatrician Dr. Rick Malley, who says, “It’s premature to predict what’s going to happen with Omicron, because this virus has repeatedly surprised us.” Prominent New York pediatrician Dr. James Schneider reacted to the rapid increase in children struggling in the intensive care unit, and said, “[V]accination is the single most important thing you can do to protect your kid from getting sick with this virus.”

By the first month of 2022…

The situation has gone from “kids don’t get it” to “kids absolutely get it in all kinds of ways.” In Minnesota, Hannah Lichtsinn, M.D., told the press that her state’s children were “severely ill with COVID at rates like we’ve never seen.”

It had become obvious that Omicron was easier than the previous brands for children to catch., and there was suspicion of a shorter reinfection interval. Also, the new BA.2 strain showed a proclivity and a talent for reinfecting children in particular. Even when child vaccination is permitted, nobody can really keep accurate statistics on how many haven’t been reached. Still, in January it was suggested that only 15% of eligible children had received anti-COVID shots.

In the spring, journalist Adrianna Rodriguez explained to the public some of the home truths about heart-lung machines. Also known as ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, this is the next step after intubation, and making that decision is very serious. Someone researched the records of 55 patients who, during a set time period, were recommended for ECMO treatment that turned out to be unavailable. Almost 90% of them “died in the hospital despite being young with few other health issues.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Omicron Is Not More Severe for Children, Despite Rising Hospitalizations,” NYTimes.com, 12/28/21
Source: “Nearly 90% of COVID patients who didn’t get critical care therapy they needed died despite being young and healthy, study says,” USAToday.com, 03/01/22
Image by Official U.S. Navy Page/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus — Denial and Delusions

Pat Hartman April 5, 2022 No Comments

Last fall, after a discouraging summer, the COVID-19 situation in many parts of the globe began to look even worse, especially for children. It had become a standard thought pattern to blame the unvaccinated — whether they were unwilling or simply unable — for the spread of the virus, but the evidence was mounting to show that this was not the entire case.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, it was becoming very clear that vaccinated people could also serve as reservoirs for the Delta variant. This of course added fuel to the anti-vax fire, being cited as “proof” that vaccines don’t work anyway, so why force people to undergo this incursion on their freedom? Meanwhile, Delta gained a reputation for making children more severely ill than previous versions.

The virus cranks it up a notch

In the U.S., older kids were being affected in life-changing ways, even if they avoided catching the actual disease. According to the findings of two surveys, about 20% of high school juniors and seniors said that the virus had impacted their college plans “a great deal.” (Most of the rest admitted to having been influenced a bit.) Rather than leaving for distant four-year institutions, the educationally ambitious were aiming, at least temporarily, for two-year solutions like local community colleges. Scott Jaschik wrote,

Some young people (7 percent) report that they no longer plan to attend college, and 16 percent say they plan to attend college later. Sixty-nine percent of disrupted graduates still believe that additional education would help them get a good job and 63 percent believe they would be successful, but only 45 percent believe the benefits of education would exceed the costs.

As in 2020, the approach of the traditional autumn school year opening was contentious, and meanwhile, the coronavirus introduced its new worst version. Dr. Peter Hotez wrote,

In South Africa, we have seen large numbers of young children become very sick from Omicron. If that happens here, we could see the nightmare scenario: Hospitals having their pediatric beds, adult beds and intensive care units overwhelmed with COVID patients even as the fully vaccinated healthcare staff calls out sick because of Omicron breakthrough infections.

At the same time in the U.S., New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs wrote that Omicron was producing “a worrisome spike in hospitalizations among children”:

Several states have reported increases of about 50 percent in pediatric admissions for Covid-19 in December. New York City has experienced the most dramatic rise, with 68 children hospitalized last week, a fourfold jump from two weeks earlier. Roughly one in 10 American children has tested positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic.

[A]cross the country last week, an average of 1,200 children each day have been hospitalized with the coronavirus. [N]early all the children hospitalized with Covid had one thing in common: They were unvaccinated or undervaccinated.

Still, Jacobs wrote, experts were not too worried because actually, even though more children caught Omicron, it was not making them any sicker than the previous variants had done. That optimistic assessment totally ignored the mounting evidence that long COVID is a very real threat to children. Oh, and have we mentioned that the links between COVID and obesity are very ominous too?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “High School Students Are Changing College Plans,” InsideHigherEd.com, 06/23/21
Source: “Op-Ed: How can we prevent a second winter of despair with Omicron?,” LATimes.com, 12/17/21
Source: “Omicron Is Not More Severe for Children, Despite Rising Hospitalizations,” NYTimes.com, 02/28/21
Image by Mike Finn/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids and COVID Last Summer

Pat Hartman April 4, 2022 No Comments

The rules around COVID prevention have been literally and figuratively “all over the map.” In many areas of the globe, groups have used their power to do what they believe is right — to protect the population from mass death, or to protect it from economic collapse, to name only two possible motives. Point being, the responses to the still very-much-alive pandemic vary wildly, and usually in ways that some other faction can reasonably challenge.

Prior to COVID, it was a lot easier to coast along on the sentimental and comforting belief that if something monstrous happened — if the Earth were to be invaded by creatures from outer space, or threatened by the approach of an asteroid — our differences would be set aside, and all of humankind would work together in harmony to prevent the disaster.

Things fall apart

Childhood Obesity News mentioned an article that appeared last year in The Lancet, presenting five major arguments against the relaxing of anti-COVID policies. At the time, the World Health Organization was saying that everybody, even the vaccinated, should be masked indoors. Other respected international organizations urged increased attention to ventilation and air filtration indoors, strict border quarantines, and some widely-neglected practices like testing and tracing.

Last July, Great Britain’s Fifth Wave moved The Guardian‘s science editor Ian Sample to warn that hundreds of thousands of younger people might be left with long COVID. He quoted Imperial College immunology professor Danny Altmann about a significant study:

From every version of Covid we’ve ever seen on the planet, we’ve got a rule of thumb that any case of Covid, whether it’s asymptomatic, mild, severe, or hospitalised, incurs a 10 to 20% risk of developing long Covid, and we haven’t seen any exceptions to that.

Back in the USA, more than 20% of new COVID-19 cases were pediatric. The California public health authorities ruled that K-12 students must be masked inside their buildings or be barred from the premises. In San Francisco (known for its high vaccination rate), although 76% of the residents age 12 and over were fully vaxxed, a goodly number of people were still masking in stores. Nevertheless, daily new cases multiplied by a factor of four. In Los Angeles, UCLA announced a vaccination requirement for students who wanted to return for fall classes or use campus facilities.

Last July, 20% of U.S. COVID patients were concentrated in Florida. In late summer, Missouri hospitals were full of unvaccinated people in their 20s through 40s, a lot of whom died. In Louisiana, the school-age child demographic accounted for the third-largest number of new infections. Texas Children’s Hospital reported increasing numbers of kids, some in ICUs and even on ventilators. In Tennessee, where children’s hospitals were almost full, a political “leader” threatened to sue officials who dared to require masks in schools. In St. Louis, doctors observed an increase in COVID-19 among pediatric cancer patients.

By autumn, there was talk internationally of a quite credible “monster variant” that would be able to effortlessly mow down younger adults, teens, and children. Through social media, caring and cautious people shared stories of their own experiences, and what was going on in their areas. So did people with less clear motives, like this anonymous contributor:

In Colorado, you draft a letter to the school board telling them you object to vaccination on philosophical or religious grounds, and your unvaxxed children can go to school. In Kansas, it has to be a religious objection.

At any rate, the belief that young and/or fit people were safe was a myth long overdue for busting.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young,” TheLancet.com, 07/07/21
Source: “Delta surge ‘could leave hundreds of thousands with long Covid’,” TheGuardian.com, 07/13/21
Image by Philippe Put/CC BY-SA 2.0

Kids, COVID, and Numbers

Pat Hartman April 1, 2022 No Comments

For the longest time, a lot of people got away with saying that children don’t catch COVID-19, or if they do catch it, they don’t get very sick or don’t stay sick for very long. In some minds, those inaccuracies are still held as truths.

A year ago in the USA and the world, conditions were sporadically and randomly loosening up. At the same time when more deadly new virus variants appeared in Montana, the state’s governor rescinded all mask mandates. In America at the time, there had been at least 600,000 COVID fatalities, but only 113 of them had been children younger than five years.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the new strains were killing babies and young children at an unprecedented rate. In June two doctors voiced their concerns to The New York Times. They are Dr. Peter J. Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology, and Dr. Albert I. Ko, whose area of expertise is the epidemiology of microbial diseases. They pointed out that in Brazil, more than 2,200 children younger than 10 had died of COVID, and that total included more than 900 kids under five.

At the same time, word came from Israel that most of their recent cases were the new and greatly feared Delta variant — and half of those fresh victims were children:

Israel’s Health Ministry recommended […] that the country vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds, following the outbreaks of the Delta variant of coronavirus in the country. However, only about four percent of children in this age group have been vaccinated against the virus.

In late summer, Great Britain experienced a “third wave” of COVID and paradoxically decided to loosen preventive restrictions to the point of almost abandoning them altogether. The Lancet reported on five big objections to that policy:

First, unmitigated transmission will disproportionately affect unvaccinated children and young people who have already suffered greatly.

Second, high rates of transmission in schools and in children will lead to significant educational disruption…

Third, […] the government’s strategy provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants.

Fourth, […] significant impact on health services and exhausted health-care staff.

Fifth, […] these policies will continue to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and marginalised, deepening inequalities.

These are all strong arguments that seemingly should stand up anywhere. Childhood Obesity News will continue to look at the tug-of-war between COVID-19 restriction loosening and restriction tightening as it has continued to play out over the past months.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Brazil, India COVID-19 variants reported in Montana,” DailyMontanan.com, 05/08/21
Source: “Why Are So Many Children in Brazil Dying From Covid-19?,” NYTimes.com, June 4, 2021
Source: “PM Bennett: Israel Facing ‘New Coronavirus Outbreak’,” Haaretz.com, 06/22/21
Source: “Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young,” TheLancet.com, 07/07/21
Image by Jernej Furman/CC BY 2.0

Shady Doings at the DGA

Pat Hartman March 31, 2022 No Comments

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, reissued on a five-yearly basis, have caused unrest before, mainly among professionals whose job it is to comment on nutrition-related government actions. The most recent iteration of the guidelines stirred mild interest by including babies and toddlers. But a Harvard Health Publishing article also brought up another matter:

Criticisms revolve around the authors’ reported financial ties to the food industry and the discrepancies between the published guidelines and the recommendations submitted to the authors by the scientific advisory committee.

Now, why on earth would the authors neglect to utilize the information compiled specifically, and at the taxpayers’ expense, for that report? HHP went on to explain,

This potential conflict of interest can lead health care professionals to doubt how tightly the recommendations adhere to scientific literature and wonder how to provide evidence-based information to patients.

Foreshadowing accurately predicted that someone — in this case, the journal Public Health Nutrition at Cambridge University Press — would take up the line of questioning about what it characterized as some “stunning” conflicts of interest (COI). The paper was in fact specifically written to scrutinize the advisory committee’s perhaps too-cozy relationship with the food and pharmaceutical industries, and to examine the mechanisms that had been in place to (supposedly) disclose and manage conflicts of interest.

The terminology itself is a bit misleading. There is no conflict of interest between the members of a governmental committee who speak up on behalf of various products and services, and the companies that reward them for making recommendations advantageous to those companies. The desires and goals of those parties are quite neatly aligned.

No, the conflict lies in the fact their alliance is against the interests of the public, in our roles as taxpayers and as guinea pigs for the products and services they advocate, and as patients who wind up sick and financially depleted by dishonest reportage of the science. In fact, that is what the 20 researchers set out to prove:

We hypothesed that these committee members, who oversee the science for the most influential dietary policy in the U.S, might have significant COI that would be relevant to their decision making.

The report includes some very gnarly-looking charts tracing the relationships between the specialists who are paid by giant corporations to influence policy, and the academicians entrusted with the mission of telling the government what policies it should make and enforce. The report concludes,

Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences had connections with multiple members.

A PDF file of the document is available to anyone who wishes to download it. Keep an eye out for such key phrases as…

– bias
– influence
– transparent
– trustworthy
– direct interest
– corporate interests
– measures to disclose
– current ethics process
– prolonged relationship
– contrary to the standard
– self-reported disclosures
– public trust and confidence
– not made available to the public
– contrary to the recommendation

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “New dietary guidelines: Any changes for infants, children, and teens?,” Harvard.edu, 01/26/21
Source: “Conflicts of interest for members of the U.S. 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee,” Cambridge.org, 03/21/22
Image by David Goehring/CC BY 2.0

Confusion Over How to Make Every Bite Count

Pat Hartman March 30, 2022 No Comments

Yesterday, we looked at the current set of official suggested eating habits for Americans. This directory is revamped every five years by the Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Department of Agriculture. When first issued, apparently the newest guide seemed so banal and predictable, it was difficult for any reviewer, whether critical or approving, to come up with a hot take.

Last January, Harvard Health Publishing posed a question: “New dietary guidelines: Any changes for infants, children, and teens?” In the first paragraph, Claire McCarthy, M.D., wrote, “Babies and toddlers are included for the first time,” so that would count as a change. Among the disadvantages of careless eating, obesity is named the first-rank consequence:

Right now, 40% of children are overweight or obese, and research shows that they are likely to stay that way or get worse. Since children rely on parents and caregivers for their food, this is on us. We literally have their lives in our hands.

There is a very useful suggestion to parents, to take small steps, like eliminating one unhealthful treat at a time from the shopping list.

For those in the field

A more professionally-oriented article was published by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), an editorial piece titled “Translating the 2020–2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines into Clinical Practice.” It begins by noting that the whole question of what to eat is “remarkably contentious and fraught with strongly held personal beliefs and preferences, as well as substantial financial and disease implications.”

The AAFP authors pointed out the pros and cons of the reconstituted Guidelines:

The current report’s strengths include the addition of dietary patterns for infants and toddlers, pregnant and breastfeeding patients, and older adults, and user-friendly images and text…

One new recommendation is that infants exclusively consume human milk for the first six months of life with continued consumption of human milk in addition to complementary foods at least through the first year.

There were also weaknesses:

Compared with the scientific literature, the updated guidelines overemphasize the importance of consuming dairy and animal-based proteins such as beef, pork, and chicken, while underemphasizing the importance of consuming whole grains and completely avoiding the discussion of minimally processed grains.

One suggestion seems like it would need to be closely monitored by a medical professional, rather than attempted by parents without backup:

There is an official recommendation to introduce potentially allergenic foods (i.e., peanuts, eggs, cow’s milk products, tree nuts, wheat, crustacean shellfish, fish, and soy) starting at six months to prevent development of food allergies.

The piece goes on to make the point that traditional physician training in the United States places very little emphasis on nutrition. The reason for this neglect is an eternal mystery. Medical professionals specialize in the body’s various systems and parts but seem to nurture a blind spot a mile wide, about this one very basic matter. Every bit of every body is made out of food. If not for food, not one part, organ, or limb would even be there.

Experts tell people what type of fuel to put in their different kinds of vehicles, or risk the deterioration and ruination of the car or truck in question. And the people listen! If only we would pay a similar amount of attention to what we put into our bodies!

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “New dietary guidelines: Any changes for infants, children, and teens?,” Harvard.edu, 01/26/21
Source: “Translating the 2020–2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines into Clinical Practice,” AAFP.org, November 2021
Image by Kyle Pearce/CC BY-SA 2.0

Make Every Bite Count

Pat Hartman March 29, 2022 No Comments

How have we not yet mentioned the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025? Well, maybe there were a few other newsworthy topics in play, like for instance a global pandemic that has been working in tandem with the previously existing childhood obesity epidemic to create a real mess.

So let’s start with a useful summary from an official U.S. Government website, calling out the top 10 features we should be aware of. First, these suggestions are for everybody, whether they are healthy, sick, or at risk, regardless of what life stage they happen to be in. The recommendations of course need to be “customized” to fit with “personal preferences, cultural traditions, and budgetary considerations.”

That third item covers a lot of ground in real life, what with widespread poverty and some pre-existing conditions like food deserts. Taking safety precautions against COVID-19 is also expensive. Lucky households can afford to have grocery store employees compile their orders and deliver the food and other items to their homes. Some healthy grownups have been unable to go out and shop, even if willing to take the risk, because they need to be home taking care of children, elders, or sick family members.

Good ideas

We are encouraged to choose nutrient-dense foods, sometimes known as the stuff that’s good for you, and to shun “foods and beverages higher in added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium,” otherwise known as junk food. Since we should only consume a limited number of calories each day, we are encouraged to exercise the powers of discretion and choice as thoroughly as possible. The slogan for that concept is, “Make Every Bite Count.”

Oh, and alcohol. Limit alcohol is the government’s advice, and now that everyone is aware of that, it will not make an iota of difference to people who like to drink. Also, the advice is to limit added sugars to less than 10% of the individual’s daily caloric intake. There is an interesting footnote about how the Guidelines…

[…] recommend limiting intakes of added sugars and alcoholic beverages, but do not include changes to quantitative recommendations from the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for these two topics, because the new evidence reviewed since the 2015-2020 edition is not substantial enough to support changes to the quantitative recommendations for either added sugars or alcohol.

This passage suggests that members and institutions of the scientific “establishment” have not really gone out of their way to expose the evils of sugar, which shouldn’t be that hard of a job.

These new Guidelines include recommendations for special cases, like pregnant and lactating women. They urge reducing portion sizes. They also emphasize that solutions lie not only in what we eat but how we eat, which includes a lot of shady territory. If you want to change someone’s consumption lifestyle, it is easier to break their jaw (four to six weeks of liquids only) than to break their habits. And yet,

Research shows that the ongoing pattern of an individual’s eating habits has the greatest impact on their health.

Research also shows that the average American achieves a score of only 58 (out of a possible 100) on the Healthy Eating Index quiz. In other words, painful and regrettable words…

Most Americans still do not follow the Dietary Guidelines.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Top 10 Things You Need to Know About the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025,” DietaryGuidelines.gov, undated
Image by U.S. Government/Public Domain

The Industry As an Agent of Addiction

Pat Hartman March 28, 2022 No Comments

As ill-behaved and ruthlessly acquisitive as corporations can be, it would still be wrong to blame them for things that are not their fault. There are ways of getting on the food addiction (FA) bandwagon that can lead to trouble. For instance, the public starts to demand better legal protection. But as H. Ziauddeen and P. C. Fletcher noted in “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?,”

Enforcing the relevant legislation is not always straightforward with drugs that are clearly identified and is likely to be far more problematic with foods.

In other words, to try and police Big Food about this would open up a can of worms or a hornet’s nest or some undesirable result; because there is too much room for legal charges to be challenged; because there are too many unanswered questions about whether FA is even “a thing.”

This is an example, drawn from the pages of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, of the misunderstandings that need to be straightened out before blame can be apportioned:

We perceive the necessity, and at the same time the difficulty, to clearly separate known causes of overeating, which without knowledge of the underlying process (e.g. leptin deficiency, hypothalamic tumor) could be labeled as an addictive behavior.

No sooner is one question answered, than another one pops up. This is one reason why it is so important to figure out the whole food addiction puzzle. As in any meaningful debate, there are different points of view, and hopefully all parties realize that sometimes even the most reasonable-looking course may turn out to be a false path. It hurts, but it happens.

The implications of all this are quite staggering, especially when extended into the FA realm. When everybody has limited amounts of time, money, patience, and other resources, why risk traveling at 80 MPH in the wrong direction?

The ever-popular list format

Every so often someone publishes a list with a provocative title like “10 Foods That Are More Addictive Or As Addictive As Drugs.” In one such roster, compiled by Oliver Taylor in 2018, soda, potato chips, and cookies were well represented. Rats prefer chocolate cookies filled with frosting to rice cakes, and that’s a fact. Wheat is on this list too, touted as “an addictive food that no one seems to notice.” (Years later, the harmfulness of wheat is still hotly debated.) Sugar, of course, coffee, ice cream, cheese — all the usual suspects.

People can get addicted to meat, apparently, because of a natural stimulant. Taylor says,

Hypoxanthine even has the same properties as caffeine. Older meat contains more hypoxanthine, which is why some people exhibit withdrawal symptoms and a serious craving for this type of food if they do not eat it for a while… Meat contains other addictive substances like guanylic and inosinic acids…

Stay tuned for more about the “substance addiction versus behavioral addiction” debate, and how it relates to childhood obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept? — NCBI,” NIH.gov, January 2013
Source: “’Eating addiction’, rather than ‘food addiction’, better captures addictive-like eating behavior,” ScienceDirect.com, November 2014
Source: “10 Foods That Are More Addictive Or As Addictive As Drugs,” Listverse.com, 08/26/18
Image by rebelxtned/CC BY-ND 2.0

The Unpleasant Secrets of Coke

Pat Hartman March 25, 2022 No Comments

A paper with a dozen authors, published a few years ago, said,

Certain foods have rewarding and reinforcing properties; for example, high sugar-high fat combinations are rewarding for rodents and humans alike.

And sure, in the olden days, from a survival perspective, it was good and necessary to chow down on every energy-dense calorie-packed morsel you could find. But now we are stuck with bodies full of evolutionary anachronisms. Unlike our ancient ancestors, most people today do not cope with feast/famine cycles, nor are they up and moving for most of their waking hours.

Here we are in an obesogenic environment with a lot of obesogenic habits, and more to eat in a day than our great-grandpas had in a week. Now,

[…] formulations of processed foods have been designed to maximize palatability and reward… Such properties are not confined to simple taste (sweetness, saltiness) but encompass more complex blends of taste, flavor, smell, texture and even the sounds produced by preparation or consumption.

In the previous post, the last remark was about how potato chips so adroitly get their hooks into people. Let’s move on, to how a beverage that pairs superbly with chips is also quite addictive, and how the bosses of Big Food discuss these matters that are of the urgent individual and societal importance.

A very high-ranking officer explained a lot of things to Michael Moss for his piece in The New York Times, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” For readers who are not familiar with corporate-speak, “control as much market share as possible” translates to “make as much money as possible.” In an effort to do this,

Coke extended its aggressive marketing to especially poor or vulnerable areas of the U.S., like New Orleans — where people were drinking twice as much Coke as the national average — or Rome, Ga., where the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day. In Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta, the biggest consumers were referred to as “heavy users.”

Okay, no surprises there. In hot weather, people like cold fizzy soda. And Atlanta is the HQ of Coke. But in the next part Moss directly quoted the executive, about the two crucial elements in the financial calculations — drinks and drinkers:

“How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”

Let’s replay that last bit. “It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.” Is that cynical, or what? In other words, addicting people is good business. A smaller number of dedicated users will bring in more revenue than a larger number of casual users, and the money guys know it.

Certainly, it is still important to advertise to attract new customers. But old customers should never be taken for granted. They can be cultivated into super-customers, who might spend more than they should, harm their own health, and step past the bounds of decency in other ways. A hooked person is not just a steady customer, but one who, over time, is likely to consume even greater quantities of the product during each fiscal year.

And the language. “My users,” he calls Coke drinkers. With the implication that he owns us.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “’Eating addiction’, rather than ‘food addiction’, better captures addictive-like eating behavior,” ScienceDirect.com, November 2014
Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Kate Ter Haar/CC BY 2.0

Ingestive Behavior Gone Awry

Can’t say no

No means no

Coronavirus Chronicles — Yes, Kids Get COVID-19

By the first month of 2022…

Coronavirus — Denial and Delusions

The virus cranks it up a notch

Coronavirus Chronicles — Kids and COVID Last Summer

Things fall apart

Kids, COVID, and Numbers

Shady Doings at the DGA

Confusion Over How to Make Every Bite Count

For those in the field

Make Every Bite Count

Good ideas

The Industry As an Agent of Addiction

The ever-popular list format

The Unpleasant Secrets of Coke

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources