Parents want to know what to do about childhood obesity. The answers are difficult ones because most of them involve a change in philosophical outlook and/or everyday behavior — a change made by parents, that is. When we parents set out to fix our kid …

Cars and clothes are two of the things most dear to the hearts of Americans. People actually believe such nonsense as “You are what you drive.” And “Clothes make the man (or woman).” So, imagine how unpleasant it must be to weigh 300 pounds in a societ …

In his book Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs shares childhood memories of avoiding all of his mother’s efforts to feed him a healthy diet. Children can be cunning little people, as he proves in the essay called “The Wonder Boy.” Burroughs writ …

Kids have a natural talent for identifying baloney. They love to compare what parents say on Monday to what they say (or do!) on Tuesday, and if it doesn’t match up, look out! The average child possesses a highly developed critical sense that is consta …

A complete list of things that parents can do to avoid childhood obesity would probably contain 7,000,000 items, but fortunately it’s not necessary to know all of them. One thing a parent can do is to be aware of a child’s priorities. A little kid is p …

As parents, we have endless opportunities every day to guide our kids, and it would be a shame not to pick up on at least a few of them. Coach Ed Poirier of Attleboro, Massachusetts, recently published a piece called “Letting free range kids do their t …

In the food area, the addiction that people most readily admit to is sugar. The easiest way to convince a person that food addiction is real is to challenge them to quit sugar for a month — in all forms, including high fructose corn syrup and artifici …

It has become obvious that diet and exercise are not the only factors contributing to obesity. There are some physiological states that can make a dangerous difference. Dr. Pretlow says, Such conditions as Cushing’s syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and …

Hormones control metabolism, growth, development, the function of tissues, and a person’s mood. We have specialized organs for the production of hormones, and, just to keep things interesting, other organs can also secrete hormones as their second job. …

The magazine Childhood Obesity used to be known as Obesity and Weight Management, until its focus became more defined. It seems to be getting off to a faltering start. After an announced debut date of June 2010, the first issue did not appear until Sep …

There is a type of journalism that discourages the public from thinking about certain things. In a print newspaper, a sensitive piece of news can be buried in the third or fourth section. If an announcement might provoke a lot of dissent, it can be hel …

One amazing feature of the childhood obesity epidemic is that so many things correlate with it. When that happens, it’s always very tempting to assume a cause-and-effect relationship. Sometimes the relationship exists, other times not. Of course, poor …

Marching down the left-hand side of the homepage at My Addiction, there is a list of nearly 30 possible addictions. Sugar addiction is not lumped in with food addiction or eating disorders. No, sugar addiction is in a category all its own. And if there …

How evil is sugar? Let us count the ways. Or rather, sing along as Gary Taubes counts them. Taubes is an independent investigator in health policy, connected with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is of course deeply concerned with the obesity …

We are looking at the basic components of the controversy over taxing soda pop. Last time, we talked about why sugar-sweetened drinks, or SSDs, are particularly being singled out as childhood obesity villains, and how different jurisdictions have handl …

Every time the idea of a tax on soda pop is mentioned, the debate grows lively and centers around some basic issues: Why pick on soda? Will people stand for it? Will food corporations put up with it? Has a soda tax actually been shown to reduce childho …

It has been a bad year for infant cereal. On the last day of 2010, Eryn Brown of the Los Angeles Times reported that a good time to start worrying about a baby’s obesity potential is about nine months. And then, on February 14, Childhood Obesity News g …

In advanced cases of overweight, up to and including morbid obesity, in teenagers and adults, the answer becomes clear. Many, many people are addicted to food in the same way an alcoholic or cocaine addict is hooked. They can only help themselves throu …

We’ve been looking at various proposed answers to the childhood obesity problem. A small percentage of babies could be helped by making sure that their bottle-feeding phase does not extend for much over a year, and should certainly be finished by age t …

In the Journal of Pediatrics, Brigid Huey begins by explaining this particular aspect of the childhood obesity puzzle: Experts agree that obesity prevention should begin before children enter school. But due to a lack of conclusive data, health care pr …

Kathleen Blanchard, a Registered Nurse and freelance health author, reports for EmaxHealth on a study compiled by the Cardiovascular Center at the University of Michigan, which says it is extremely rare to find a genetic basis for childhood obesity. Bl …

Does anything work to prevent childhood obesity? Once it has taken hold, can anything pull a child loose from its clutches? As many thousands of years as humans have been on earth, you’d think we would have figured this thing out by now. What kind of n …

The Weigh2Rock website has invited kids aged 18 and under to download the PDF version of Dr. Robert A. Pretlow’s book, Overweight: What Kids Say, for free. Since then, kids residing in countries like Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, as well as the …

Jennifer Joyner is Assignment Editor at WRAL-TV in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and also works in radio, among other pursuits. She also published a book entitled Designated Fat Girl: A Memoir. Starting from morbidly obese at 330 pounds, her book cover …

Everybody wants to know: Is there anything that works to prevent childhood obesity? And if so, what is it? The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wonders, too, and not only in a general, curious way. The Foundation has a specific goal, to reverse the growi …

Most anti-childhood obesity programs, whether they are prevention-oriented or cure-oriented, have one thing in common: they need money. Whether the source of funds is the government, a foundation, or an eccentric millionaire with a mattress full of lar …

Because of concern about childhood obesity, a bill was introduced in Virginia that would require elementary and middle schools to offer 150 minutes of physical education per week. In her story about it, Rosalind S. Helderman included an extensive list …

What can help end the childhood obesity epidemic? That question includes a lot of other sub-questions. Two of them are “What can prevent kids from growing overweight in the first place?” and “What can help kids who are already overweight?” So when we a …

The online magazine Slate asked its readers for their best ideas about how to shrink childhood obesity. A dozen submissions were picked, reporter Christy Harrison tells us, half of them by the readers themselves. Six more were chosen by a panel of judg …

The Yale study “Neural Correlates of Food Addiction” has changed the landscape. Medical professionals and even regular people who were previously voices crying in the wilderness have been vindicated to a very great extent. And more of these regular peo …