Sedentary lifestyle, including television viewing and video-game playing, is widely criticized as an obesity villain.

The gut microbiome, allergy, addiction, leaky gut syndrome, and autoimmune disease have been shown to be connected.

Childhood Obesity News discusses the duodenal switch surgery, which is reserved for patients with a BMI of over 50.

In 1849, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote words that became a proverb: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The saying is just as true in English: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Five years ago, Michael F. …

In discussing the food industry’s promise of self-policing in the realm of child-targeted advertising, we saw how Nestle wiggled out of taking responsibility for cheating when they introduced three varieties of Girl Scout cookie-based candy bars. The c …

The food industry is fighting efforts to improve nutritional value of foods traditionally marketed directly to children.

In Australia, Coca-Cola Amatil sued the government for promoting the 10-cent beverage container recycling idea.

McDonald’s and Coca-Cola Company continue to want more junk-food addict customers, and at an even younger age.

It was a busy year for Coca Cola Company, the world’s largest purveyor of liquified sugar, tooth decay, and childhood obesity.

Activists in the U.S. and overseas campaign for sale bans or at least warning labels for sugar-sweetened beverages.

In the final quarter of 2015, the Coca-Cola Company was taking a lot of heat, what with one thing and another. The very well-respected Lancet published an editorial that illustrates the corporation’s talent for shifting blame. The source of the trouble …

It would have been nice to go back to ignoring the Coca-Cola Company for a while, but it is such a busy corporation, the notices keep piling up. Regarding 2015, the final quarter alone provided plenty of fodder for criticism as the company appeared to …

In a very recent post, we quoted Dr. Ruopeng An, whose research team determined that… If people simply substitute diet beverages for sugar-sweetened beverages, it may not have the intended effect because they may just eat those calories rather than d …

As a nation rife with obesity, Mexico ranks even above the U.S. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, senior author of a recent Tufts University study, has this to say: In Mexico, where more than 10 percent of the population has diabetes, approximately 30 percent o …

On a list of the the most abused foods in America sugar-sweetened beverages always score among the top entries. James Greenblatt, the chief medical officer of Walden Behavioral Care (treatment centers that concentrate on eating disorders), joins the ch …

This picture shows the “Holidays Are Coming” truck, which yearly visits more than 40 locations in the United Kingdom. Last year, 2015, saw more pushback than ever, including harsh words from Parliament member Keith Vaz who said: The Coca-Cola truck is …

Twenty-two thousand is a pretty decent-size subject pool for a study, but the result given by this one could have been arrived at through mere common sense. The University of Illinois found that… […] diet-beverage consumers may compensate for the a …

While not much progress has been made in preventing childhood obesity, it is known that early is better – early as in pre-conception, if possible. It is more than clear that the younger a child starts being overweight, the longer that child will probab …

The Teen-Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery, which is known as Teen-LABS for short, aims to document “the efficacy and complications of bariatric surgery in the adolescent surgical patient and its role in the overall management of obesity pri …

Is disease prevention a sufficient justification for performing surgery? Opponents of neonatal circumcision would say no; on the other hand, women with the genetic predisposition to breast cancer want the choice of bilateral mastectomy just in case. It …

Gastric sleeve-themed items by Etsy craftspersons A piece in GeneralSurgeryNews.com makes an excellent point – Although bariatric surgery is performed on unprecedented numbers of teenagers today, the number of procedures performed—and the availability …

Weight loss saves lives and reduces the likelihood of numerous co-morbidities. Alas, the effects rarely last. Without surgical intervention, it is said that “only 2% of severely obese teenagers can lose weight and keep it off.” So a case can be made th …

  For a time, a Chinese youngster named Lu Hao was one of the most photographed children in the world, because he was billed as the fattest boy in the world. In March of 2011, he was 3 years old and weighed 132 pounds, the equivalent of 5 normal-w …

In regard to the worldwide obesity epidemic, Dr. Pretlow has referred to the concatenation of events and influences as the “perfect storm,” a term borrowed from meteorology that refers to large-scale synergy. It is what happens when a number of element …

Analysis of data provided to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) by thousands of American children and teenagers revealed that on any given day, 22% of them eat pizza. Difficult as it may be to believe, this is actually an imp …

Childhood Obesity News has been exploring factors suspected of contributing to the obesity epidemic, including low income, a virus, a medical history that includes childhood cancer, odors, distraction, and too much variety. A recent study published in …

The human digestive tract has its own ecosystem inhabited by trillions of beings whose ability to influence our health appears stronger with every new study. In particular, the organisms inside the gut seem to wield uncanny power over the presence or a …

California’s Central Valley What if a single damaging environmental condition affected 40% of the world’s children? Would that explain the obesity epidemic that also affects such a large percentage of kids worldwide? Several studies have linked secondh …

These words are from Dr. Frederica Perera of Columbia University, a winner of the prestigious Heinz Award from the Heinz Family Foundation: Exposure to endocrine disruptors in the air can alter the normal hormonal signaling and affect growth and develo …

The introduction can be found in yesterday’s post, so let’s jump right into a pile of things that have been named as obesity villains. Childhood Obesity News neither endorses nor refutes these by listing them, but merely reports on the possibilities. B …