Category: Food Addiction

All addictions have one purpose, to avoid pain. All displacement behaviors have one purpose, to avoid pain.

There are behaviors that animals and people might engage in to relieve the discomfort of a threat, whether physical or intangible. This includes comfort eating.

On reading Anne M. Fletcher’s book, “Sober for Good: New Solutions for Drinking Problems,” you might notice the parallels with overeating and obesity.

Emotional eating is probably the biggest cause of childhood obesity while labeling is just another word for name-calling, and name-calling never ends well.

Let’s look at some thoughts that have been voiced and recorded about the role of parents in their children’s recovery from obesity.

When addictive behaviors are the issue, the surroundings and the people in those surroundings are crucial. This applies to food addiction and obesity as well.

A continuation of the series chronicling the quest for knowledge about the central nervous pathways responsible for establishing metabolic control.

In chronological order, Childhood Obesity News looks at studies and discoveries about the intersection of oxytocin with weight loss.

In most cases, an addicted person comes back from “getting clean” into the same environment where the addiction took hold. This never bodes well.

We are keeping an eye on AD04, because the drug is believed to have the potential to treat not only AUD but opioid use disorder, gambling, and obesity.

The opioid antagonist naxolone is also known to alleviate food cravings, which lends credence to the idea that food and/or eating can be addictive.

A roundup of Dr. Pretlow’s past and upcoming presentations, including two lectures in December at the World Obesity Federation 2019 Regional Conference in Oman.

Is enabling obesity a form of child abuse? Should parents who allow their children to become morbidly obese be prosecuted? Some think so.

Is it any wonder that parents turn away from the complicated issue of childhood obesity in despair, and spend their energy addressing other problems?

How are parents supposed to teach the younger generation to cope with stress by mobilizing healthy responses rather than diving into comfort eating and obesity?

Per one school of thought, there are three major parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. What are the differences?

Some believe that talking to a child about is or her weight is inevitably harmful, but what can concerned parents do?

An exciting upcoming CHLA study will look into “An Addiction-Based Mobile Health Weight Loss Intervention With Coaching.”

Taste receptors warn the brain not to let toxins into the body. Because we ingest so much crap, most contemporary humans have messed-up taste capacity.

Desirable taste causes people to compulsively overeat, and compulsive overeating causes weight gain.

MSG goes by many aliases, appears in almost every processed food product, and is virtually inescapable.

The tricky part with MSG (glutamate) is that it appears on food labeling under several dozen terms, some of them very innocent-sounding.

As time goes on, researchers become more adept at pinpointing the exact mechanisms by which glutamic acid works its dark magic.

Some studies show processed MSG might be linked to childhood obesity.

But is fat technically a taste, or more of an oral sensation, belonging to a different sense, touch? The jury is still out.

The problem with food additives, of which salt is one, is that they make food delicious, so some people eat too much and grow obese.

The key to umami is more than MSG. It takes a couple of other substances too, and, as it turns out, umami tastes awful on its own.

Although the pathways of causation are not clear, researchers have noted that inflammation and obesity are often associated.

MSG makes food more tempting, which is a problem because most of the humans on the planet appear to already find food much too tempting.

This post finalizes the summary of posts about the intersection of overuse with tobacco, alcohol, and food. One area not covered yet is the presence of pharmacological intervention in tobacco, alcohol, and food limitation, so we have that to look forwa …