Regard de Kurt Ehrmann In olden times, crusaders ransacked a continent looking for the Holy Grail, and alchemists competed to rediscover the Philosophers’ Stone that could turn base metals into gold. In more recent centuries, humankind has labored to f …

Last week was pretty much Coca-Cola week at Childhood Obesity News, culminating in a partial list of our previous posts on the topic. Still, interesting events remain to be mentioned. In the autumn of 2014, Claire Suddath and Duane Stanford wrote for B …

Coca-Cola just might be the single corporation most mentioned by Childhood Obesity News, which can hardly keep up with the never-ending flow of bad behavior manifested by the world’s most hated beverage manufacturer. Coca-Cola’s flagship product, of co …

Following the activities of Coca-Cola can be a fascinating pastime. Even if the company’s antics don’t show up on one’s radar immediately, looking back on the corporation’s woefully misguided application of its expertise is just as much fun. That is, i …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News discussed how becoming accustomed to sugar-sweetened beverages at a young age is associated with a constellation of behaviors, like proceeding to consume even more SSBs than kids who didn’t start so young, watching mor …

Photographer Zac Zellers says, “Coca-cola discreetly delivers some coke to our school cafeteria in the humblest of ways.” The U.S. government first contributed to the rise of childhood obesity by tinkering with the rules surrounding sugar production an …

[montage of junk food]This site covers the social, political, economic, and health impacts of childhood obesity. A common thread that runs through our site is the exploration of food addition. Food addiction remains a controversial topic; many are in d …

According to the latest figures, 52 percent of pet dogs in America are overweight or obese: about 43 million dogs. The cat statistics are even worse—an estimated 57 percent of cats, or 55 million animals, are overweight or obese. There has been an alar …

Slender women are preferred by many as “the face” of a company Recently, Childhood Obesity News looked at one of the many reasons to help children maintain normal weight. Researchers have presented convincing evidence that obese boys will grow up to ea …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at how large corporations and small companies try to keep their employees healthy. No doubt this effort is partly for altruistic reasons, but the economic reality is that insurance costs a lot, and the more the i …

Today’s kids have a lot to cope with. Just like the members of previous generations, they must achieve academic success and jump through all the other traditional hoops in order to enjoy the independence of having jobs when they grow up. On top of that …

Yesterday’s subject was the decreasing tolerance shown by companies for risky health practices among their employees. For her report for CNN, Katherine Reynolds Lewis consulted several experts, including Jim Winkler of the consultancy firm AON Hewitt. …

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned before that the young people taking part in the pilot studies of the W8Loss2Go smartphone app are strangely unexpressive about their unhappiness. This is puzzling because Weigh2Rock, Dr. Pretlow’s immensely helpful …

Christopher Bergland is connected with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an organization primarily concerned with the childhood obesity epidemic. Its project is the Healthy Schools Program, which operates in 27,000 American schools. He is also a …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking into the lives and thoughts of some formerly obese people to see what can be learned. For a CNN iReport, Linda Roche shared the story of her earliest educational experiences: By the time I started kindergarten I …

The reader will enjoy Dr. Pretlow’s account of his experiences at the 2009 ECOG  scientific meeting, where he conducted a plenary session and introduced the idea that the childhood obesity epidemic is caused by emotionally driven comfort eating, which …

A website called Experience Project contains a personal history titled “I Am Fat and Have Been Almost My Whole Life.” The writer describes herself as five-foot-three, 298 pounds, and 13 years old. Her day starts with 3 tubs of ice cream, then Mom cooks …

Fernando Botero Sculpture The varieties of fat acceptance range from mild to extreme. In the realm of health and safely, obesity must be acknowledged as something that exists in society, and is likely to continue for some time. Take the crash test dumm …

Every day, knowingly or not, we meet up with people who used to carry around excessive weight, and who somehow figured out how to get rid of it. More importantly, they figured out how to make it stay gone. We meet them online too, in discussion groups …

Consider Fattitude: A Body Positive Documentary. The jokes practically write themselves. “Heifer, I’m positive your body is fat!” When someone attempts to present obesity as a condition that is acceptable and maybe even desirable, the temptation for cr …

A few years back, someone posted a video online that featured a toddler, still on the bottle and quite chubby, who smoked 40 cigarettes a day. It went viral, accumulating 27 million views and inspiring a huge number of disapproving comments as people s …

Dr. Pretlow’s latest paper, “Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,” will soon appear in the highly-respected print publication Childhood Obesity and can also be found online. Today, let’s gain a …

A new paper, Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,  will appear in the next print edition of the journal Childhood Obesity. This publication signals another advance in spreading the idea of using …

The introductory material about Bite Size can be found in the earlier Childhood Obesity News post about Emily, one of four young people whose stories are told by the film. We also “met” Moy, a gaming enthusiast and novice filmmaker. Today’s discussion …

Bite Size is a captivating film that follows the weight loss journeys of four American kids. Childhood Obesity News already took a close look at two of them, Emily in Florida and Moy in Southern California. The other two young people are both from Miss …

The film Bite Size explores the lives of four young people, ranging from age 11 to 13, then catches up with them one year down the road. It tracks the weight loss journeys of two girls and two boys, all diagnosed as clinically obese. Two are coastal ki …

Comedian Doug Stanhope has an un-cordial relationship with his sister-in-law. In one of his bits, for a Showtime Special, he characterized her as a “humorless ____” with the second word being a very rude term indeed. But she should not have been offend …

Mardis Gras Childhood Obesity News is exploring the idea that for a large part of the Western world, the religious season of Lent has served as a trial run for quitting sugar. For some, it has no doubt been inspirational, and led to permanently sugar-f …

In the spirit of the previous post, “Why Everything You Know is Wrong,”  here are some contrarian viewpoints on various foodstuffs that are said to affect childhood obesity. Carbohydrates: Kris Gunnars collected a number of “debunked nutrition myths,” …

In Colombia, a charitable organization called Gorditos de Corazon (Chubby Hearts) received a heartfelt plea from the unemployed mother of 10-month-old Juanita Valentina Hernandez. For reasons that no one yet understands, the little girl weighs as much …