“Mastication or Castigation” was the title of a previous Childhood Obesity News piece introducing Horace Fletcher, and soon, after some remarks about his significance, we will bid him farewell. There was more to his philosophy than just the idea that f …

To recapitulate: American historical figure Horace Fletcher preached the chewing of food into a state of liquefaction, as an aid to digestion and general well-being. Though he was for a time discredited, recent science has shown that there are indeed n …

By now it is almost universally acknowledged that there is such a thing as “eating your stress,” and that a lot of people do it. They tend to choose foods that maximize the amount of work their jaws need to do. Popcorn, potato chips, toffee, breakfast …

From time to time, Childhood Obesity News explores such concepts as process addiction, displacement activity, and body-focused repetitive behaviors. Discussing the evidence for the reality of food addiction, Dr. Pretlow has said, about one of its aspec …

Yesterday we closed with Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ both advising their followers to chew each bite of food into a liquid state. We have also talked about Horace Fletcher, the writer and lecturer who espoused the same rule. In the late 1800s and e …

Childhood Obesity News has been discussing the ideas of Horace Fletcher and more recent responses to fletcherizing. Fletcher’s ideas were wildly popular and widespread, then forgotten and discredited, and he was perceived as kind of a wingnut. In recen …

Yesterday we outlined the beliefs of Horace Fletcher, whose system of chewing food until it was liquified, known as fletcherizing, transformed his own life and, reportedly, the lives of those who followed his ideas. The U.S. Government flirted with the …

“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” How’s that for a catchy slogan? It was created by dietician Horace Fletcher, one of those historical crackpots who turned out to be right about a few things. In other words, yesterday’s weirdos sometim …

At the LA Podfest, which convened this past weekend, Christy Harrison spoke with comedian and actor Marc Maron, whose IFC comedy series is going into a second season. (The interview is 11 minutes long and contains explicit language.) While not as famou …

Last October, Dr. Pretlow was interviewed by another website for an article titled, “How’s this for scary, kids: Little or no candy on Halloween.” One of the interesting points made in the article was that the American Dental Association polled a bunch …

Halloween can be a horror for an overweight kid. It’s all about doing the exact thing she or he is not supposed to do — acquire and consume a bunch of sweets. But it’s also a lot of fun, and why take away any potential fun by skipping the holiday alto …

Let’s get an early start on Halloween this year, shall we? Before we start buying candy for parties and trick-or-treat, stop and take a breath and plan ahead. Because when a Web post shows up the day before Halloween, no matter how many great alternati …

Stanford University is backing a concept called the DOR program, which stands for “division of responsibility.” A research team, led by Dr. W. Stewart Agras, started with a total of 62 families in which at least one parent was obese or overweight, and …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News looked at the child feeding precepts of Dr. Susan Rubin, the holistic nutritionist whose philosophy derives from traditional Chinese medicine. Proceed slowly with a baby, introducing new foods one at a time and watchin …

Dr. Susan Rubin is a holistic nutritionist and health counselor who believes that the things a child eats make a difference in lifelong health, beginning with the very first foods. Much of her philosophy comes from ancient Chinese medicine, which trace …

At every possible opportunity, the American Beverage Association will circulate public relations messages that go something like this: Overweight and obesity are caused by an imbalance between calories consumed from all foods and beverages (total diet) …

In July, it was announced that the fattest nation title is no longer held by the United States but has passed to Mexico. Of the adults, almost 70% are overweight and 32.8% qualify as obese. One out of three teenagers is obese, and the amount of childho …

There are an estimated 1.4 billion overweight people in the world, of whom 500 million are obese. Typical of the actions performed by the World Health Organization (WHO) is a visit to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for a three-day workshop, described by the WHO …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News mentioned Great Britain’s childhood obesity situation. The healthcare market research company MackSense sells a report (for only $3,550) on the current state of obesity in the United Kingdom. Despite the cost of the do …

It’s still Childhood Obesity Awareness Month in America, but that doesn’t mean childhood obesity has ceased in the rest of the world. Not by a long shot! Last month, Chris Weller reported that the U.S. and Great Britain are about even, with childhood o …

As of September 1, columnist Morton Downey had counted 98 possible causes for obesity. Childhood Obesity News has been exploring the idea that, since many different factors contribute to the obesity epidemic, one of them might be BFRBs, or Body Focused …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the possible relationship between two phenomena — compulsive eating and body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) — sometimes known as displacement behaviors. The person subjected to BFRB will develop a beha …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News quoted from the Visions Adolescent Treatment Centers, describing some of the characteristics of Body-Focused Repetitive Behavior (BFRB), a condition which is said to affect millions of people. The purpose is to explore …

Previously, Childhood Obesity News talked about what Dr. Pretlow terms the childhood obesity perfect storm, the collection of factors present in our society that combine in endlessly fascinating ways to keep the obesity epidemic going. Like a mythologi …

Both the human psyche and the meat vehicle that carries it around are fully prepared to acknowledge chocolate fudge as a reward equal to cocaine. The same lights flash and, metaphorically speaking, the same bells ring. Any substance that sets off the f …

The first thing to know is that “ED” stands for Emotional Disturbances, and the second thing is that there is a standardized test called the SAED, which stands for Scale for Assessing Emotional Disturbance. Researchers from Australia’s Monash Universit …

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recently invented a mathematical model of energy balance as it relates to the development of childhood obesity. It accounts for changes is body weight caused by the consumption of cal …

We’re still in Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, and have been looking at the spectrum of news coverage over the past few months, which although it has not exactly inspired roller-coaster emotions, has tended to fluctuate. In the wake of the CDC repor …

Okay, so it’s been established that at the beginning of the year, the Centers for Disease Control study was a major big deal. Writer Lori Abbot focused on the comparison between New York City and Los Angeles, America’s two gigantic opposite-coastal met …

Tracking headlines over the past year or so, it’s hard to know what to think about the status of childhood obesity. Last summer, it was revealed that in some pockets of California — Alameda and Contra Costa counties — the problem seems to have gotten …