Ending Childhood Obesity Through Healthy Eating & Exercise?
I recently witnessed two teenagers in a group, one advising the other how to lose weight. The first teen glibly proclaimed, All you gotta do is eat healthy and exercise! Whereupon, the second teen indignantly retorted, That is sooo not it!!! I know what to eat, I just can’t resist bad food!! And exercise is, […]
Does Dr. Evil Work for the Food Industry?
Dr. Janet Hull holds a Doctorate in Nutrition and a Master’s Degree in Environmental Science, and is a Licensed Certified Nutritionist. She is one of the leading opponents of the artificial sweetener aspartame, and is also against the presence of caffeine in processed foods and soft drinks. And what’s wrong with that? Dr. Hull says, […]
Hyperpalatable Foods: Science or Science Fiction? Part 2
A lot of creativity goes into persuasion, as in advertising and marketing fast foods, and a lot of originality goes into efforts to deal with the obesity epidemic. A great deal of creative energy is found in the projects of Public Matters, an organization described thusly: Public Matters is an interdisciplinary California-based social enterprise comprised […]
Hyperpalatable Foods: Science or Science Fiction? Part 1
What do we know about the chemical commonly known as salt? According to David Kessler, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, over-eating might be due to… the combination of fats, sugars and salt used by food manufactures to trigger a ‘bliss’ point in the human brain. Sarah Hughes said that, in […]
The Nature of Food Addiction
Relatively speaking, one of the disadvantages of food addiction is that obesity often follows. Plenty of alcoholics are able to hide their condition. People who are hooked on street drugs or prescription meds are often able to function in society without being recognized as addicts. But food addiction shows. Picture a 400-pound guy on a […]
Bigger Clothes, Bigger Kids? On Fashion and Obesity
Sometimes, people pay attention to the oddest things. The obesity epidemic crept up with its associated signs and symptoms — for instance, a lot more cases of diabetes — but what really made headlines was when, for example, school officials noticed that kids could no longer fit into chairs. Remember a couple of years back, […]
Reviews, Presentations, Publications
Here is a very exciting development. Dr. Robert Pretlow’s “Addiction To Highly Pleasurable Food as a Cause of The Childhood Obesity Epidemic: A Qualitative Internet Study” will be published in the summer edition of Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. The study, which will appear in Volume 19, #4 (In Press) July/Aug/Sept 2011, […]
Media Reactions to Yale Food Addiction Study
We talked last time about the validation given by the recent Yale study, to the idea that food addiction is a reality for some people. Of course, the story was immediately picked up and expanded on by numerous other media, all with their own particular slants. For basic information about how the study was conducted, […]
It’s Official: Food Addiction Is Real
Well, better late than never! Dr. Robert A. Pretlow, numerous other medical professionals, and very many obese people (whose experiences were previously dismissed as “anecdotal evidence” and “non-validated data”) have been saying for years that food addiction is as real as any other officially identified addiction. It is a problem most appropriately viewed through the […]
Weight Loss Surgery, Part 5
In “Weight Loss Surgery, Part 4,” we looked at the experiences of some grownups with bariatric surgery. But what about the kids? Is weight loss surgery (WLS) recommended for obese children and youth? Dr. Laurie Barclay discussed this for Medscape not long ago, summarizing research that had been reported in the medical journal Clinical Obesity. […]