April 4, 2021 — When chocolate Easter eggs first appeared in the 1870s from Fry’s and Cadbury’s, they were a bit of a luxury. That continued for about a century, but the emergence of mass merchandising contributed to explosive growth for the business of Easter chocolates in the latter half of the 20th century. For one day in many […]
March 11, 2019 — An old and reliable bit of clickbait has just surfaced from a rather obscure journal. In SSM – Population Health, Emla Fitzsimons and Benedetta Pongiglione claim to have “causal evidence” that a mother’s employment effects a child’s BMI. Naturally, British headline writers went nuts. So now we have another round of the obesity blame game […]
June 19, 2016 — People hold onto some odd ideas about what constitutes helpful comments. “Don’t eat so much, you’re getting fat” are words that resonate into adulthood, especially for women. A new study by Brian Wansink, Lara Latimer, and Lizzy Pope explains how unhelpful such commentary can be. In a cross-sectional survey of 501 women aged 20 to 35 […]
April 19, 2016 — A new study in Appetite raises a question worth considering: how well does scolding work to improve eating habits and prevent obesity? The authors of this study observed how mothers express restrictive feeding behaviors: with negative or positive tone. They analyzed the characteristics of mothers and children that were associated with negative, positive, and total […]
May 22, 2015 — A research question that seems to get repeated ad nauseum is: “Do parents worry enough about their kids being fat?” Ask young people with excess weight and they will likely tell you that their weight gets plenty of attention. So please stop asking now. We’ve been showered this week with publicity for the umpteenth study of this […]
August 26, 2014 — Immortal words: “Don’t eat that, you’ll get fat.” Increasingly, parents are warned about the impact they have on their children’s body image. Leslie Sim, clinical director of the Mayo Clinic eating disorders program, recently told USA Today: Zero talk about dieting, zero talk about weight. Zero comments not only about your daughter’s weight, obviously, but zero talk […]
