To achieve durable change and sustained weight loss, kids need a lot of buttressing, a lot of outside support, and what’s more, they need the right kind of support. Anything that sounds like nagging will be rebuffed and have the opposite effect from wh …

In the field of sociology, the social environment pretty much includes everything that isn’t nature. In the field of psychology, here is one definition: Social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and …

Kellogg World Headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich.Previously, Childhood Obesity News considered the strange split personality of Kellogg. The corporation has donated money and support to a lot of good causes. For instance, FoodCorps (part of AmeriCorps) …

In his examination of the life of novelist and MacArthur Fellow David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max noted, “With the help of researchers, Wallace assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom, trying to understand it at an almost neurological level.” ” …

The Pleasures of LifeThe website Reddit is a font of crowd-sourced wisdom, where many people pass along the lessons they learned the hard way. In the “fat people stories” sections, the obese refer to themselves by the ruefully humorous term “hamplanet, …

Depression can be caused by interpersonal difficulties, and can in turn can cause further difficulties in getting along with other people. For people prone to overeating, this can result in a vicious cycle where social malaise causes unhealthy eating p …

Richman on a featured restaurant’s wallA new TV show called Man Finds Food was set to premiere last week, but the Travel Channel has postponed it because the would-be host, Adam Richman, is in disgrace. After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the school-based intervention program Pathways to Health, which grew out of the risk-behavior reduction program known as PATHS. Pathways to Health is all about sharpening and strengthening Executive Cognitive …

The school-based program called Pathways to Health, which is concerned with obesity prevention, developed out of an earlier program called PATHS that was designed to prevent violence and substance abuse. While they may appear to be very different probl …

Some kids are more sensitive than others and have a lower tolerance for teasing and bullying. This kind of persecution is bad enough when it originates from peers, but when a teacher or a coach says cruel things, many overweight children react by slidi …

Some news stories remain current and relevant for a long time. For instance, one branch of the United Nations is the Food and Agriculture Organisation, whose mission is “to make sure people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active …

Back in 2001, the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota surveyed 234 Girl Scouts and found that almost one-third of them were trying to lose weight. Most of these children were doing sensible things like shunning high-fat foods and eng …

For people who cope by eating the world, different emotional needs bring out different food cravings. Dr. Pretlow says: The book, Life is Hard, Food is Easy, by Linda Spangle, notes that specific types of foods are preferred to ease sadness versus stre …

A couple of years ago, Michael Pollan published a prediction in a piece for The Nation titled “How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System.” He believed that the food movement would be joined by the healthcare industry in taking on such battles as s …

Childhood Obesity News has been reflecting on the two aspects of Kellogg. Although legally they are separate entities, on a meta-level the different parts of Kellogg form a huge mythical being. With one hand, the giant collects money from people who li …

Over at Big Food Inc., “personal responsibility” is a favorite theme. Manufacturers do their best to make snacks and junk food addictive, then turn around and shake their collective finger at the public. They scold us for not accepting enough personal …

To recap: First, the Kellogg Company sells plenty of Honey Smacks, double chocolate S’mores Krave cereal, and Frosted Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts. Part of those profits go to the trust, along with a smaller sum gained from investing in other corporations t …

The idea of Kellogg as a sponsor is complicated because several different entities are involved. Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News mentioned the many programs backed by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In the 2013 fiscal year, the foundation gave away $259 …

When the journal Childhood Obesity started up, with financial sponsorship from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Fat Boy Thin Man author Michael Prager got in touch with the publisher and expressed concern about the dual role filled by the foundation’s vice …

From 2005 until June of 2010, a publication existed under the name Obesity and Weight Management. Starting in August of that year, its focus narrowed and its name changed. Childhood Obesity announced its intention to be the premier journal concerned wi …

A Kellogg’s Ice Cream Shoppe Frosted Rainbow Cookie Sandwich Pop-Tart The Kellogg Company has a split personality that is fascinating to people who care about and write about childhood obesity. Through its W.K. Kellogg Foundation, it funds researchers …

Last time, we left off with a quotation from spin doctor Jeff Nedelman, to the effect that “No one commissions research anticipating a negative response.” It would appear that when giant corporations pay for studies to show the harmlessness of their pr …

Coca-Cola and other comparable companies regularly inject their names into the news by sponsoring research projects, conferences, healthy-lifestyle initiatives, and similar rah-rah-get-healthy programs. All these efforts are designed to give the impres …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the question of how much responsibility schools should bear for preventing childhood obesity. In one way, it seems almost intuitively obvious that, especially in the early years, school is the right place to t …

Preventing Childhood Obesity: Evidence Policy and Practice is a book with global perspective, drawing relevant information from contributors from many countries whose credentials take up pages and pages. One of the points it makes is the necessity to s …

Count Brickula Some beverage industry spokespeople insist that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and artificially sweetened drinks are benign in their effects on the human body. Some of these mouthpieces even say there is no evidence to the contrary. Th …

  Believe it or not, there is still more to say about attacks against the sugar-sweetened beverage industry and all its kin, like artificially sweetened fizzy drinks and sports drinks; and more to know about the rebuttals they have offered in thei …

At the American Heart Association’s 2013 annual meeting, a Harvard postdoctoral research fellow named Gitanjali Singh presented some ideas that generated headlines and controversy. The topic was the public health hazard posed by soda pop in all its for …

Republished in a forum, this article originally came from the British newspaper The Times, and its title is “Sugar watchdog works for Coca-Cola.” In the past, the U.K. government had assigned scientists to determine how much of a person’s total energy …

Once the 2012 Olympics in London had ended, activists started trying to ensure that the next time would be different. In Britain, some of the entities calling for the end of junk food sponsorship of sporting events are the Academy of Medical Royal Coll …