Category: Food Addiction

Can anti-obesity efforts, especially those imposed by government orders, borrow from smoking cessation efforts or programs designed to end alcohol addiction?

A University of Cape Town neuroscientist Dr. David Hume discusses microbiome and the immune system in relation to dietary choices and obesity intervention.

“Food Psych” podcast creator Christy Harrison says that food is food, and it’s time to stop labeling with our brains and start listening to our intuition.

This is a continuation of the list of posts that examine the parallels between tobacco, alcohol, and the overconsumption of food.

Even with problems that seem comparable, like the widespread use of tobacco and alcohol, it is surprisingly difficult to transfer solutions to other areas.

If a policy or an intervention made a dent in smoking, alcohol abuse, or other common vice, can it be useful to stop the obesity epidemic?

Here continues the summary of posts that examine the efforts to eliminate smoking, and how they might be adapted to quell the obesity epidemic.

Can compulsive overeating be vanquished by the same kind of laws that have banished smoking? Maybe, but not without a lot of protest.

More highlights from a Childhood Obesity News series of posts about smoking, drinking, and problem eating, and the connection between them.

How would the measures intended to curb smoking and deal with alcohol addiction translate to childhood obesity prevention?

All food advertising directed at children should be banned. Food companies are no dopes: an addicted kid is a customer for life.

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.

In the realm of positive mental and emotional associations, smoking, drinking and overeating are capable of forming self-reinforcing loops.

What is the rationale for government involvement in either smoking or the eating patterns that lead to obesity?

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.

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.

We are looking at the similarities between two public health menaces, nicotine and the overconsumption of food, that threaten to bring on an obesity epidemic.

DSM-5 doesn’t accord food dependency the courtesy of calling it a substance abuse disorder; nor does the industry bible specify Tobacco Use Disorder treatments.

There are similarities between nicotine addiction and compulsive overeating, and cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacological intervention might help both.