Microbiome Kit Aside from the potentially worrying fact that it was partially funded by two gigantic food manufacturers, there is more to know about the Washington University School of Medicine study on which Dr. Jeffrey Gordon worked with Vanessa Rida …

Last week, discussing a study performed at Washington University School of Medicine, Childhood Obesity News wondered whether a study with four sponsors, two of whom were Mondelez and Kraft, may not be totally reliable. To entertain suspicions about suc …

Yesterday Childhood Obesity News discussed a study indicating that the correlation between obesity and an unbalanced gut microbiome could be more than coincidental, and might indeed be a cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers working with laborator …

“The Gut Microbiome and Childhood Obesity: Connecting the Dots” was published in the June 2015 issue of the journal Childhood Obesity. This interview with Noel Theodore Mueller, who is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University Medical Cente …

Childhood Obesity News has been discussing how, for some time now, people have been referring to obesity as “the new normal.” This normalization is related to the growth of the “Goldilocks Syndrome.” The term has more than one meaning, but in the conte …

Childhood Obesity News continues to explore the complicated links between antibiotics, prematurity, ototoxicity, obesity, and epigenetics. A child born early is more likely to become obese than a full-term child. To prevent infection, it is likely that …

As Childhood Obesity News recently pointed out, deaf children are at greater risk of becoming obese, and that is only one aspect of a complicated five-way relationship between hearing loss, obesity, prematurity, antibiotics, and the passing along of so …

We are familiar with the idea that in the United States, children of color are more susceptible to forces, including their own genetic makeup, that cause childhood obesity. There is another demographic whose vulnerability has nothing to do with race: t …

Edward Archer, Ph.D., works at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Nutrition and Obesity Research Center, where his bio says: He is an obesity theorist and computational physiologist, and has a broad interdisciplinary background with graduate deg …

Edward Archer, Ph.D., studies obesity at the Nutrition and Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His fields of expertise are many—computational physiology, psychology, nutrition, exercise science, and epidemiology. Yet, in …

Once upon a time, Ruben Meerman lost 15 kg (more than 30 pounds) and wondered where the weight had gone. The doctors he asked didn’t seem to know. He conducted a survey of 150 health professionals, of whom “more than half thought that fat was converted …

MyFitnessPal is a popular phone app that reveals the number of calories in a serving of any of the 5 million foods whose vital statistics are stored in database. When Randy Dotinga wrote about a study focusing on the app, he noted that the study “doesn …

In his paper written for the journal Eating Disorders, Dr. Pretlow stated that today’s youth appear to be “victims of boredom, stress, and depression in an addictive, comfort food environment” and added: Accordingly, a perfect storm may be contributing …

In the struggle to reverse the childhood obesity trend, one of the most pervasive tropes about junk food is to “tax it like tobacco.” In 2008, at the National Childhood Obesity Congress, Dr. Pretlow met Steven K. Galson, who was at the time the acting …

Stress triggers the fight-or-flight reflex, and it doesn’t even require a stressor as obvious as a pinched tail. Boredom is a little-recognized and under-appreciated stressor, which many children and adults intuitively self-medicate by chewing gum. The …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking back at Dr. Pretlow’s presentations at various conferences throughout the years. Let’s resume with 2011, when “Addiction to Highly Pleasurable Food as a Cause of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic” was the topic at t …

Slender women are preferred by many as “the face” of a company Recently, Childhood Obesity News looked at one of the many reasons to help children maintain normal weight. Researchers have presented convincing evidence that obese boys will grow up to ea …

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned before that the young people taking part in the pilot studies of the W8Loss2Go smartphone app are strangely unexpressive about their unhappiness. This is puzzling because Weigh2Rock, Dr. Pretlow’s immensely helpful …

Christopher Bergland is connected with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an organization primarily concerned with the childhood obesity epidemic. Its project is the Healthy Schools Program, which operates in 27,000 American schools. He is also a …

Dr. Pretlow’s latest paper, “Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,” will soon appear in the highly-respected print publication Childhood Obesity and can also be found online. Today, let’s gain a …

It becomes more and more evident that all addictions are one. Apparently, whichever addictogenic behavior or substance gets to a person first will lay claim to an addiction-prone person, and if that addiction is ostensibly cured, another one will step …

Addiction guilt is one of the facets of Dr. Pretlow’s investigation of childhood obesity, and today we look at what several experts say about guilt, and the subtle differences between guilt and shame. These observations include an assertion that might …

A new paper, Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,  will appear in the next print edition of the journal Childhood Obesity. This publication signals another advance in spreading the idea of using …

Everyone eats breakfast every day, at least in the literal sense. The first meal, no matter what time it is consumed, breaks the fast, or period of abstention from eating that includes sleep. But conventionally, breakfast takes place in the morning, wh …

It often seems like there’s very little solid ground anywhere in the world of obesity. Breakfast, for those lucky enough to have food available, is a subject that never ceases to enthrall people concerned with weight loss. For instance, do the results …

“Weight cycling” is a classier term for yo-yo dieting. Linda Bacon, Ph.D., is typical of the experts who say that yo-yo weight cycles are common to dieters and do harm to health. In the opposite corner is a New England Journal of Medicine article that …

The topic of meal size versus meal frequency has not yet been exhausted. Neither has the thin or possibly nonexistent line between frequent small meals and snacks. Many authorities have opinions for or against snacking, and many researchers have garner …

A nosology is a system of disease classification, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is promoting a new one, the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News outlined the basic characteristics of the systems alread …

The W8Loss2Go smartphone application is designed to halt food cravings and stop the urge to snack between meals. The 5-month program starts by eliminating the most tempting “problem foods” one or two at a time, a process which was shown by the prelimin …

With one of the major eating festivals on the horizon, Childhood Obesity News looks to Scientific American’s Ferris Jabr for information on the toxicity (or not) of sugar. This topic also fits into the “everything you know is wrong” niche for contested …