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.

The extent to which stigmatization is responsible for smokers quitting is impossible to tell. For smokers who don’t quit, it’s not always a physical addiction.

Society now finds it easy to blame and hate smokers, even to the point of directly confronting and denouncing them, which is not the case with obesity, yet.

Smoking and obesity are alike enough so that anyone interested in controlling obesity will look to the anti-smoking movement for advice.

Why has counseling for smoking cessation historically been more successful than obesity counseling?

Smoking prevalence and eating disorders are intertwined in the human psyche, but research conclusions about the relationship are not solid.

One study indicated that among people in a quit-smoking program, binge eaters were less likely than normal eaters to abandon nicotine.

While smoking is socially discouraged, it is not easy to argue that obesity really impacts the non-obese.

Professionals who deal with obesity are interested in how people quit smoking as those therapeutic interventions might be transferrable.