Just when it seemed that mukbang could not get any more bizarre, a new wrinkle appeared, featuring only the sound effects of eating for ASMR devotees.

There are aural experiences that some people would do anything to escape, but others willingly listen to sounds that would send a misophone into a straitjacket.

Ordinary people who record their mukbang experiences on social media provide useful anecdotal evidence — the fertile ground from which evidence is born.

Originally, no one connected mukbang with the danger of promoting eating disorders, but, increasingly, health officials are considering the trend problematic.

Leaving the mukbang video performers aside for a moment, what do the millions of viewers get out of this strange preoccupation?

The videos that glorify binge-eating allegedly started with the noble intention of alleviating loneliness.

What is going on with this incredible profusion of un-wellness videos? Why are people compelled to surrender their consciousness to a hobby as weird as mukbang?

If you have never heard of mukbang (pronounced mook-bong), consider yourself lucky. We wish that we had not heard of it.

There are many truly disturbing side effects of the pandemic that darken the lives even of people who never caught the virus.

Despite this being a new disease with less than a year’s worth of data on hand, we already have indications that the long-range outlook is a nightmare.

Any onset of mental disturbance, whether first-time or episodic, is likely to make the victim vulnerable to harmful consequences, including eating disorders.

COVID-19 is not satisfied by leaving survivors with a collection of residual physical symptoms, including those that could linger. It also attacks the psyche.

During the pandemic, a high level of stress many kids are experiencing can bring out latent eating disorders and other mental illnesses, now and later.

If ever there was a time to encourage a child’s slightest interest in anything besides food, it is now, when a lot of us working or learning from home.

Children’s states of mind are important, including when it comes to preventing childhood obesity, and now, the kids’ anxiety levels are going nowhere but up.

In addition to obesity and COVID-19, a third pandemic has joined the crew — PTSD — leaving generations of kids scarred.

Even back in June, predictions were being made of catastrophic results from school closures. Currently, none of the patchwork solutions is satisfactory.

The virus has both direct and indirect effects on the obesity pandemic. Other problems contribute to obesity by providing emotional deprivation and boredom.

We have been tracking the ways in which COVID-19 and obesity do little favors for each other that pay big dividends to both of them.

Some reporters looked into the exercise situation for the kids during the pandemic’s lockdowns and remote learning and found it to be as bad as predicted.

One of the lessons we should be learning from the pandemic is that childhood obesity is an accessory to murder, and we can’t let it slide.

Yes, we’re still talking about the ways in which, like a couple of hostile juvenile delinquents, obesity and COVID-19 are partners in crime against humanity.

People who are chronically obese are likely to be affected much acutely than average-weight people by its good friend and enabler, COVID-19.

Conditions are perfect for an obesity epidemic that will leave all other obesity epidemics in the dust, and both COVID-19 and the obesity epidemic are beasts.

Part of the battle against childhood obesity involves assuring that children are able to access nutritious food, yet it’s been an uphill battle in the U.S.

We continue listing all the groups that are upset by the newest version of the Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines.

The Dietary Guidelines run to 835 pages, and still, a number of parties are ticked off over what they consider to be crucial omissions, like addressing obesity.

The dietary guidelines are renewed every five years. In the past, objectivity among the policymakers has been questioned by government watchdog groups.

The global obesity plague and the plague caused by COVID-19 were destined to form a mutual aid society, which is a polite way of saying, a deadly partnership.

It’s not a sedentary and germ-free lifestyle making American kids fat. Amazonian children are more active and cope with more germs yet don’t burn more calories.