Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 8
The Psychological Food Dependence-Addiction Paradigm is a very simple concept. People, yes, even kids, can become addicted to high-calorie, low-nutrient, hedonically engineered substances that masquerade as food. Food can be a drug of abuse, and it’s a lot easier for kids to get hold of than most other drugs of abuse. The good news is, […]
Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 7
Many parents have heard about food addiction, just like they have heard of other theories and discoveries in the childhood obesity field. And, for some, there is a compelling reason not to think about the food addiction paradigm as it applies to the lives of their own children. It’s the same reason why we find […]
Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 6
We have been thinking about not thinking, specifically about why some parents avoid thinking about childhood obesity in general, and about food addiction in particular. Part of the problem is that even if the latest theories about obesity are correct, it’s too late to do anything differently. For instance, the bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding debate. There […]
Why Parents Don’t Want to Hear About Food Addiction, Part 5
Yes, we have talked before about why a lot of parents just don’t want to hear about food addiction. But there are so many reasons! Some parents don’t believe that food addiction exists. Some may accept the new paradigm in a general sort of way, and be willing to look through the “psychological food dependence-addiction […]
The Unnatural Sweetener
A disturbing aspect of childhood obesity is that, in an attempt to avoid it, children are ingesting large amounts of aspartame (marketed as Equal, NutraSweet, Canderel, Equal-Measure, Spoonful, Benevia, etc.) and other sweeteners that have really bad health consequences. One of the most vocal critics of aspartame, Dr. Joseph Mercola, certainly has a way of […]
The “DSM-5” and Obesity, Part 2
We looked yesterday at the difficulties faced by the editors of the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-5, as explained by Gary Greenberg, who also talks about the currently favored method of considering an array of symptoms. Until a more “scientific” way can be found, the hope is to move away from either/or definitions of […]
The “DSM-5” and Obesity, Part 1
We’ll get to the obesity relevance in a minute, but meanwhile, here is an interesting detail about the upcoming revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The Roman numerals are being dropped in favor of Arabic numbers, so the new version will actually be DSM-5. Another footnote of interest: the third […]
Comfort Eating, Food Addiction, and the DSM-V Manual
Not long ago we mentioned Jennifer LaRue Huget, the Washington Post reporter who began to take seriously the notion of food addiction after meeting Michael Prager. This is encouraging, because childhood obesity won’t be stopped until food addiction is understood to be as real as addiction to hard drugs, alcohol, and even the range of […]
Comfort Eating and Regular People
The psychological food dependence-addiction lens is a new and still somewhat unpopular paradigm, because it has to do with addiction to food as the cause of much obesity. Looking through that lens, we see that while legislative measures are useful, what really needs to be addressed is the tendency of people to become addicted, at […]
Comfort Eating and Carrie Fisher
Yesterday we discussed the difficulty, for parents and health professionals concerned about childhood obesity, in having a positive effect, or making any impact at all, on the production, advertising, or availability of junk food. Call it less-than-optimal food, call it pseudo-food, or call it ingestible matter that does the body more harm than good. Especially, […]