Is It All About Money?

Each day, the American public is greeted by the news that yet another product or service is becoming either painfully expensive or increasingly impossible to obtain at any price. Periodically, we are met with unwelcome surprises. For example, it has recently come to the world’s attention that to build and maintain the hardware needed for immense Artificial Intelligence citadels will raise the price of both water and electricity to levels terrifying to contemplate.

At the same time, the astute reader will have noticed that certain words occur frequently in the titles and posts here at Childhood Obesity News. Those words are “cost” and “price,” along with several other appropriate synonyms, adjectival variants, and even polite euphemisms.

This site has discussed individual costs, institutional costs, societal costs, financial costs, psychological costs, emotional costs, and more; all paid directly or indirectly by the parents of obese children and, of course, by the kids themselves.

The crux of the matter

Here is the problem. “On the ground,” as the expression goes, those different types and degrees of prices are actually paid by pretty much everybody (except for a tiny percentage of villains who design and maintain the system, and profit from it). Among the vast majority of the population, many varieties of prices are paid.

The point being pursued here is that the vast majority can also jolly well decide to do something about it. One way or another, we really all need to take some responsibility. This does not mean trying to make laws to control the behavior of individuals. (They tend not to react well, so trying is usually a waste of energy.)

However, corporations are not people and are not entitled to human rights. We humans, especially the ones who hope to prevent childhood obesity, can take it upon ourselves to discipline manufacturers. Among other points of contention, they need to stop adding certain ingredients to their purportedly edible products.

We are well within our rights to insist that corporations behave themselves. We could easily take some of the energy we use to tsk-tsk at the parents of overweight children, and apply it to curbing the worst instincts of our corporate oppressors.

Oh, those prices

The vast majority of the population consists of many more types than just obese children and their responsible adults. Directly or indirectly, recognizably or covertly, one way or another, all sorts of prices are paid — and not just by these children and their parents but, eventually, by everybody who belongs to the whole society — yes, even the skinny kids and the childless adults. Still, maybe we could recognize the futility of picking on obese people and cut them a break. A lot of that energy could be constructively redirected.

Let’s back up for a minute and glance at a very recent item of medical news, which says,

Researchers from the UK and Finland said that people with obesity were seen to have a higher risk of being hospitalised or dying due to SARS-CoV-2 infection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the venerated journal The Lancet, obese people may be as much as 70% more apt to be hospitalized for — and even die of — an infectious disease like pneumonia, flu, or COVID-19. The professionals behind the study ask readers to exercise caution before generalizing, because, of course, many factors are involved.

No scientists want the public to read more into their published work than what they intentionally placed there. Still, the study did encompass well over half a million subjects and…

“As obesity rates are expected to rise globally, so will the number of deaths and hospitalisations from infectious diseases linked to obesity,” author Solja Nyberg, from the University of Helsinki in Finland, said.

Like so many other studies, this one also demonstrated the futility of being mean to obese people, who may not even be around long enough to feel the effects of that wasted negative energy.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Data centers for AI use huge amounts of electricity, water, driving up costs and climate concerns,” CBSNews.com, 02/13/26
Source: “ Obesity Raises Risk Of Hospitalisation, Death From Infections By 70%: Study,” NDTV.com, 02/11/26
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Childhood Obesity on the Brain

An impartial observer from some other solar system, sent to garner facts about Earthlings, would eventually run up against the dislike of body fat that prevails among so many people in so many cultures. To the interplanetary visitors, the answer, including whether there even needs to be an answer, might seem obvious: “Don’t become obese.”

The scholar from afar would do the equivalent of scratching their head, musing… How much sheer brain power, how many thousand cumulative years of academic study have been devoted to dwelling on this mystery? How many lab animals have been sacrificed in pursuit of weight-loss knowledge?

The impulse to highlight a certain article published by Dr. Pretlow is irresistible. With every passing year, it becomes more demonstrable that the issues surrounding obesity and body image can impact a person in ways that are not only difficult for a non-professional observer to imagine but which, in some cases, lead to appalling results.

The human condition

It is not so very hard to change or disguise skin color, at least for the short term. Making the hair look different is almost laughably simple. To appear as a member of the opposite sex has largely been possible since people started wearing clothes. It may not be easy, or officially approved, but in most societies throughout history, it has been doable. As time goes on, that potentiality has grown for at least a percentage of folk, depending mostly on financial capability.

But… and it’s a big butt…

Okay, that is a lousy pun. Moving on… A person can be made to look taller, but to appear shorter requires some skillful trickery. A person can so easily be made to look corpulent, but to achieve the illusion of slimness is incontestably a challenge, involving a whole different sort of visual phenomenon. To achieve the illusion of a smaller body requires considerable effort — training in visual aesthetics, access to specialized supplies and equipment, and good lighting.

The sad fact is, it’s pretty much a one-way trick. To appear bigger and fatter is almost infinitely possible, depending only on how many pillows a person could tie on with ropes, or how clever a balloon-suit they could hide themselves in before inflating it and hoping not to sit on any sharp object.

All of which only emphasizes how relatively impossible it is to go the other way. Sure, optical illusion and an excellent tailor can do a lot to disguise a hefty physique. And let’s not start in on the possibilities offered by photoshopping and AI, which can work their seeming magic to portray a human as gigantic or svelte. Messing with images is so easy and obvious, it doesn’t even really belong in a serious discussion like this.

The logical answer

The obvious solution is to simply not be so big! Eat less than is needed. Use up a lot of energy. It will take time, and the task will be difficult for various reasons, but of all potential metamorphoses, it seems, in theory, at least, to be the most possible. Theoretically, to become a person with a smaller body ought to be the easiest transition of all.

So then, what is the problem? What is wrong with you and me and millions of overweight Earthlings who just can’t get it together and shed the pounds? How many thousands of hours of thought and experimentation have been utilized over the years to figure this out? How many words and bytes have we utilized in trying to first grasp the problem at all, and then to explain it to others?

More or less than required to figure out transportation without fossil fuels? More or less than has been spent trying to avoid (or facilitate) nuclear annihilation? Why is slimming down a human body such an imposing, vast, difficult, problematic, wearisome chore?

Groping for clarity

We could quote some dismal and/or shocking statistics about Obesity, Growth Of, but that would be needlessly boring. One more question comes to mind, a major one, and basically the most important reason for all this soul-searching. Just exactly how badly does this whole subject of weight damage young people who, truth be told, have quite a lot of other troublesome issues to deal with? (It is tempting to go with a colloquial expression there, like “These poor kids have too much on their plates already.” But, no.)

Now, veering back to the original puzzling topics that inspired the discussion, the entire point here was to pose yet another question. Despite the struggle to avoid and suppress obesity having been spectacularly unproductive so far, maybe some kind of a step back could be taken. Possibly, we could temporarily, just as an experiment, set aside many of the thoughts we have been accustomed to holding onto, about these matters.

Of course, many visitors here have already read the work authored by Robert Pretlow and Suzette Glasner, titled “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment.” For those who are familiar and for newer readers too, some interesting notions dwell, awaiting discovery, in its pages. In particular, interested professionals and laypersons alike might meet up with ideas that could blossom into useful revelations and actual change.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” NIH.gov, June 2022
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Weight-Loss Drugs Earn Piles, Boatloads, and Oodles

As a simple search reveals, what are loosely called GLP-1 drugs have been a hot topic for a long time. Many people make plenty of profit from them, but published reports indicate some dissatisfaction among companies and individuals who would prefer, rather than a mere plenitude, to reap piles, boatloads, and oodles of money instead. As one authority explains,

GLP-1 is the natural hormone that your body makes… Semaglutide is the medicine that copies what your natural hormone does… You are not taking the hormone itself. You are taking a medicine that knows how to do the exact same job as the hormone.

The Garrison Center, a renowned think tank, has been calling public attention to matters related to semaglutide, to the point where some characterize this focused attention as whistleblowing. The colorful metaphor is borrowed from sports, where when an official lets out a blast on his whistle, that constitutes a ruling that the action taken by a player on either team was outside the realm of actions permitted in the game.

The trouble started because, although Novo Nordisk holds a patent on semaglutide, when there was an officially-declared shortage, another outfit was allowed to make and sell it too. Thomas L. Knapp thoroughly explains what happened when the telehealth company Hims & Hers had the temerity to sell semaglutide at a lower price than the rightful patent holder. Given that Hims & Hers would not even be allowed to market the stuff in the first place, had an exception not been made, this was regarded as a very hostile move.

The Novo Nordisk legal team pointed out that not only was the shortage officially declared over, erasing the justification for letting the other company sell the product, but something else was glaringly wrong, namely:

The fact is that their medicines are untested, and they’re putting patients at risk.

At this point, the whole narrative takes an unexpected turn, and journalist Knapp points out an absurdity:

[T]he difference between semaglutide from Hims & Hers and semaglutide from Novo Nordisk is the name on the label.

Novo Nordisk was charging around $150 a month, and Hims & Hers aspired to sell the same amount of the identical product for about $50 a month. But that detail is minor, compared to another matter, described as follows:

The whole POINT of Novo Nordisk’s attempt to enforce its patent is to CREATE a shortage of semaglutide in pill form… The patent, if enforceable, allows Novo Nordisk to charge customers AT LEAST three times as much for its pill as the market says it can be sold profitably for. Hims & Hers wouldn’t offer it for $50 if it expected to lose money doing so.

The purpose of patents, Knapp explains, is…

[…] to create artificial shortages so that inventors don’t have to compete with others who may copy their inventions — or even independently invent similar things… While I’m skeptical for the wildest claims about the benefits of GLP-1s, they’re clearly beneficial to enough people, in enough ways, that we should ask why governments are handing out price-gouging opportunities, in the form of monopolies, on them.

This is a gnarly situation whose resolution could resonate far and wide, affecting much more than this tempest in an industrial teapot. Meanwhile, despite widespread and fanatical acceptance, it is totally possible that the entire semaglutide market, which may have promised too much too soon, could totally collapse.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is GLP-1 the Same as Semaglutide?,” SemaglutideMedics.org, 11/13/25
Source: “Semaglutide: Artificial shortage is Novo Nordisk’s business model,” TheGarrisonCenter.org, 02/10/26
Image by Peggy_Marco/Pixabay

Overweight Awareness Monitors at Home

Gender roles are still very much in place, and if Mother does most of the shopping and cooking, she controls what appears on the dinner table. Or maybe Dad cooks, and Mom does the monthly weigh-in or waist measurement. A recent post pointed out how beneficial it would be if all parents in the dicey situation of being expected to keep an eye on a child’s weight were able to do that effectively.

Related posts have been picking away at the challenge of how to encourage parents to engage without arousing new instances of counterproductive behavior patterns that have already done incalculable damage.

Revolutions do happen

Several decades back, Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) began a long reign of ascendency among the child-rearing demographic in general. Grown-ups found Dr. Thomas Gordon’s advice easy to take on board, and children responded to the techniques. (As a bonus, parents found that the same precepts could often be adapted to the sometimes brutal and stifling adult world.)

P.E.T. revealed itself as being pretty close to a one-size-fits-all program. In the obesity prevention realm, what seems to be needed is a similarly effective method of dealing with the potentiality of a child developing a weight problem — without increasing the likelihood that the child will develop a weight problem.

Home, sweet what?

Where do weight problems come from? One clue is revealed by an article titled, “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds.” The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children has proven very useful over the years to the numerous researchers who have mined it for all sorts of raw data and suggestive conclusions. Some of the matters it looked into included…

[…] the association between parenting style during early childhood and a child’s weight later in childhood and in early adolescence, late adolescence and early adulthood.

Conscientious self-reporting by the adults originally involved helped sort them into four categories, according to parenting style:

1. authoritative (maintain clear boundaries but are also warm)
2. authoritarian (maintain strict discipline and show little warmth)
3. permissive (empathic but have few rules)
4. neglectful or uninvolved (emotionally uninvolved and have few rules)

The offspring of 2 and 4, authoritarian and neglectful, were…

[…] more likely to have a higher weight than those who experienced authoritative parenting. The results for permissive parenting were not statistically significant.

Researcher Alexa Segal told a journalist, “Authoritarian mothers are characterized by being demanding and controlling, while having low warmth and responsiveness,” said Segal. This style sounds familiar to the fans of comedian Marc Maron, as we have seen.

Prof. Louise Baur of the World Obesity Federation has pointed out the difficulty of raising healthy kids in the modern world. On the other hand,

This study highlights the fundamental importance of parents in raising healthy children.
Parents who are able to set appropriate limits for their child, while bringing warmth and sensitivity to the relationship, may be better able to help their child be as healthy as possible.

But then… There is always the risk that parental participation, or even just a reasonable level of concern, could backfire and be perceived as fat-shaming. When emotions are raw, almost anything that another person says or does is susceptible to interpretation as hostile. Despite a helpful website that offers an entire series of articles about obesity prevention, sometimes the chemistry simply isn’t right.

Perhaps the best answer is, hook the kid up with Brainweighve, then stand back and hope they figure it out.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Parent Effectiveness Training,” GordonTraining.com, undated
Source: “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds,”
TheGuardian.com, 10/18/22
Image by trthiet182/Pixabay

Parents As Overweight Awareness Monitors

Yes, of course parents are legitimate observers and recorders of their offsprings’ weight. However, this does not give them license to make a child’s life miserable by harping on the subject, or to blab about it to friends or strangers.

In a best-case scenario, a mom or dad is reasonable, tactful, sensitive, and several other adjectives that imply sanity, about how and when to weigh the child with a problem. If dangerous amounts of lard are obviously accumulating, what kind of reminder might be effective, and not make matters worse? It would be smart to seek advice from a qualified pro.

For instance, controversy might be avoided by designating a certain day once a month to check in with the scale and make a note on a chart. Although a parent has the authority to be an Overweight Awareness Monitor, and maybe even the ability to intervene reasonably, this is by no means an opportunity for sarcasm, shaming, threats, or any other brand of intimidation.

Parents need to have their stuff together

Just a few years back in Britain, a long-term study of 19,000 families concentrated on the emotional stability of new parents. The mothers and fathers of babies both have concerns, though not necessarily the same ones. The dads might worry more about making enough money to feed everybody and keep a roof over their heads. The moms might be more anxious about the new baby’s birth weight and their ability to figure out how to breastfeed successfully.

In any case, if parents feel shaky about their social, mental health, and economic situations, that can spell difficulty for the new family member. Researchers noticed a subtle difference between dads and moms:

The analysis found that fathers’ distress reported in infancy, but not during toddlerhood, was associated with steeper increases in BMI and excess body fat for both girls and boys. However, mothers’ distress reported in both infancy and toddlerhood was associated with steeper increases in BMI and excess body fat in only girls.

Every time a new subtlety or wrinkle is found in an aspect of parenting that is under the microscope, legions of graduate students rediscover the passion that brought them to the field in the first place, and renewed impetus to figure out exactly what is going on. Here is another quotation regarding this same University College London study, and others like it:

Distress experienced by mothers and fathers in the first few years of a child’s life, particularly during infancy, is linked with accelerated weight and excess fat gain from age 5 to 14 years, according to new research being presented at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) held online this year.

Next steps

When a child is on the verge of sliding over into the overweight segment of the population, it seems obvious that their parents ought to take an active part in keeping track of the stats, and to qualify themselves as capable of determining when some sort of professional intervention appears to be called for. But as we have seen, their best intentions and efforts may be impeded by problems they could use knowledgeable health with. And sometimes…

There are two words that experts especially regret having to apply to parents: “neglectful” and “authoritarian” — otherwise known as “not caring” and “caring too much” — because in either case, their children just might turn out overweight. And while these parenting styles may seem at first glance to be opposites, they have been determined by highly placed academics to spring from the same source: a lack of emotional warmth.

This was learned by observing the families of 10,000 children. Usually, such reluctance to accept interference is founded in a very basic belief that goes something like,

This is how my parents raised me, and I turned out fine.

Parents can be so defensive that many professionals, even those from such prestigious institutions as Imperial College’s Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation, tend to regard the subject as taboo. Naturally, Childhood Obesity News is eager to take a closer look at this thorny problem.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Emotional distress in fathers and mothers linked to heightened risk of overweight in their children,” 05/19/21, EurekAlert.org
Source: “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds,” TheGuardian.com, 10/18/22
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