There is overweight, and then there is perception of overweight. This is one of the areas investigated by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) program which, under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, …

We know Robert Pretlow, M.D., as a pediatrician and childhood obesity expert, director of Weigh2Rock.com, writer of many articles (most recently, an important one published by the journal Eating Disorders), and author of Overweight: What Kids Say. As w …

Dr. Pretlow has developed an iPhone application with interesting potentialities in the area of childhood obesity. Below, he describes the impetus behind the innovation and retraces the thinking that inspired it: Charleston Children’s Hospital came to u …

Of course, kids and teens are crazy about social networking. The need for social approval and interaction is deeply ingrained. Its dark side may show up as the type of unwholesome peer pressure that can lead to undesirable behavioral outcomes. But the …

Not done yet? Nope, there is always plenty more to say about sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and the machinations going on around them. The soda pop industry is up to all kinds of mischief, and a lot of concerned health professionals are devoting thei …

Surely, nobody thought we were done with the subject of SSBs? Not hardly. Those initials stand for “Self-Sabotage in a Bottle.” Just kidding. They stand for sugar-sweetened beverages, and that’s shorthand for all of them, whether fizzy or non-carbonate …

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture says the average American eats 150 pounds of sugar per year (see illustration). People who care about the childhood obesity epidemic never run out of things to say about sugar. William Dufty’s classic Sugar Blues was publi …

Dr. Pretlow was extensively quoted by Marsha McCullouch, R.D., who interviewed him as one of the main sources for an article titled “Is Your Child Overweight?” in the print publication LiveRight. The topics are stress and food cravings in children, and …

This summer, Dan Harris and Maggy Patrick of ABC News put together a devastating report on the question, “Is ‘Big Food’s’ Big Money Influencing the Science of Nutrition?” The food industry has been accused of “deceptive science and advocacy,” a charge …

Not long ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement titled “Children, Adolescents, Obesity, and the Media,” which addressed those subjects with the organization’s usual thoroughness. The Introduction begins, Obesity represe …

The way law professor Joel Bakan sees it, two huge trends are colliding. At a certain point in history, children were recognized as people, and, furthermore, as a class of people deserving of a protected status. It became generally acknowledged that th …

In the realm of the childhood obesity theory, this story is destined to be seen by some as cutting-edge, and by others as coming from the left field. It’s from Maryn McKenna, who has written and published extensively about health issues. Guess what, hu …

Last time, we looked at how junk food, fast food, and snack food, more accurately known as pseudo-food, all have the common origin point of being specifically designed to create an unhealthy dependency. Some call it food addiction, and its reason for b …

Snacks, junk food, and hedonic foodstuffs in general are all too often nothing more than mere foodlike substances. These ersatz edibles are precisely engineered by the armies of food scientists. The goal is not maximum nutritional value, or even any nu …

Unlike some other social phenomena that are either celebrated or deprecated, childhood obesity has been allotted not a day or a week, but an entire month. We are still in the second annual Childhood Obesity Awareness Month (COAM). How is it being obser …

Since the February 2010 launch of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, what has been happening? Has anything changed in the year since the first Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, in September 2010? Has childhood obesity awareness evolved during this …

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” could probably extend to Part 108, but rest easy, this will be the last one for a while. The Office of National Drug Control Policy tells us that the two main worries of parents are childhood obesity and drug abuse (which …

Chef Domenica Catelli is a food authority who takes a militant stand, who speaks of the fight against childhood obesity, and who wants us to step up to the front lines today and celebrate Childhood Obesity Awareness Month by making one positive change. …

Apparently, knowledge is not a solid rock but a vast expanse of shifting sands. A wise man once said, “There is enough evidence in the universe to prove anything,” and he might have had a point there. Another wise man said, “The ideal consumer is a con …

Influence can be exerted on the brain chemically or electrically. In the realm of chemistry, many of the examples have to do with the food that fuels the body and brain, how a person is influenced to eat more or less of it, and what kind of food they c …

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist of The EEG Institute, and we have mentioned him before in the context of MindStream Academy and Dr. Adela Chirita-Emandi, who applies the Othmer method in her pediatrics practice in Romania. Dr. Othmer, who w …

Deborah A. Stokes and Martha S. Lappin tell us that while peripheral biofeedback monitors responses of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, such as respiration and galvanic skin response, neurofeedback monitors the activity of the centr …

Will it never end? Sometimes it seems as if, in the effort to quench the obesity epidemic, nothing is ever quite nailed down. Chocolate milk, for instance. To think about how many hours of debate have been spent on chocolate milk, is to cringe. In some …

Really, is there solid ground anywhere? Every time you turn around, researchers are casting doubt on what other researchers have pretty well established as fact. Take monosodium glutamate (MSG), for instance. It has starred in the role of the obesity v …

Both of the articles mentioned here today are worth reading in their entirety, but we’ll just give a little tantalizing taste. For the Bangor Daily News, registered dietician Marcia Kyle put together some hints toward a sane and healthful on-the-road e …

Sleep may be the last frontier whose mysteries will ever be penetrated. It’s still a puzzler, and its relationship to obesity even more so. “Everything You Know Is Wrong, Part 2” discussed insufficient sleep. Does it do anything besides make kids crank …

It seems to have been pretty well accepted, in childhood obesity circles, that proximity is destiny. Studies from several different parts of the globe have confirmed that when kids live and/or go to school near fast-food outlets, they tend to get fat. …

Not long ago, we looked at some of Kevin Richardson’s ideas about the obesity epidemic and quoted one of his sayings, which is worth repeating: The ideal consumer is a confused consumer. Confusion can be created in many ways. In discussing the deleteri …

“Obama’s Food Police in Staggering Crackdown on Market to Kids,” written by Audrey Hudson, has racked up an astonishing 12,000 Facebook recommendations and more than 700 comments. If the comments were somehow communicated to a scholar 500 years into th …

For just a little while, it seemed as if questions about the relationship between breastfeeding and childhood obesity might have been answered. The journal Pediatrics published an article suggesting that childhood obesity could be minimized if babies w …