If a policy or an intervention made a dent in smoking, alcohol abuse, or other common vice, can it be useful to stop the obesity epidemic?

Here continues the summary of posts that examine the efforts to eliminate smoking, and how they might be adapted to quell the obesity epidemic.

More highlights from a Childhood Obesity News series of posts about smoking, drinking, and problem eating, and the connection between them.

All food advertising directed at children should be banned. Food companies are no dopes: an addicted kid is a customer for life.

Could the means used to reduce consumption of alcohol and tobacco be adaptable to the seemingly unstoppable epidemic of food overconsumption in the U.S.?

Can any anti-smoking measures be adapted to anti-obesity efforts? Public opinion does alter, and legislation can change behavior to a certain extent.

Any effort at persuasion through public relations can fail if it is perceived as shaming, and public health campaigns that rely on stigmatization can backfire.

If one third of our kids were suffering from asthma due to air pollution, we’d take draconian measures. Why is childhood obesity different?

Many drinkers and smokers consciously or unconsciously believe that they should not, so they’re OK with “sin taxes” — but it’s more complicated with junk food.

With tobacco and alcohol, the government both encourages and chastises their existence, sale and use, while profiting from the sale.

Portion control is all-important, and can be practiced both at home and out in the world. Banning “all-you-can-eat” restaurants might help.

Overeating is as much a threat as drinking and smoking to Americans’ health and the national budget. Can the methods used to fight any one of them cross over?

Clamping down on smoking in hospitals led to the first industry-wide ban of workplace smoking, and the idea caught on in other businesses.

Smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and overeating can take a toll. If a methodology can reduce one of those problems, is it transferable? If not, why not?

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at measures taken around smoking, and, to a lesser extent, around alcohol, that are transferrable to obesity prevention.

Attempting to make overeating socially unacceptable, like smoking, seems like a good idea, but public relations experts do not always strike the right note.

Advertising copywriters use different details, but the pitch is the same — an appeal to the customer’s FOMO. It works with tobacco and it works with junk food.

Even though specific brands are not shown, there is an alarming rise of tobacco use in on-demand or streaming visual content.

After the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, smoking in movies is said to have decreased according to three metrics — proportion, enumeration, and duration.

In the realm of positive mental and emotional associations, smoking, drinking and overeating are capable of forming self-reinforcing loops.

Campaigns that promote healthy eating and exercise may be counterproductive. Those programs should instead educate kids as to why they overeat, and how to cope.

What is the rationale for government involvement in either smoking or the eating patterns that lead to obesity?

The proposed Harvest Box program for SNAP recipients was widely criticized as a “solution without a problem.”

Smoking and obesity are so closely associated because what helps to defeat one might also vanquish the other, or so do the researchers hope.

The McKinsey Global Institute came up with 74 intervention levers in which the obesity epidemic is believed to be vulnerable to pressure.

There is no evidence that stigmatizing overweight and obese people motivates them to lose weight. Instead, information, skills and support are the tools needed.

Childhood Obesity News looks at the limited efficacy of anti-smoking shaming and the almost non-existent usefulness of shaming in the abolition of obesity.

While public anti-smoking campaigns have proven effective, there is collateral damage to the emotional well-being of a particular group: lung cancer patients.

There are reasons why stigmatization is unable to play as large a role in stemming the obesity epidemic as it does in slowing down the rate of smoking.

It would be inaccurate to claim that stigmatization “works” when it comes to both smoking and obesity.