Obesity not caused by lack of willpower - psychologists

Obesity is not a choice and making people feel ashamed results only in them feeling worse about themselves, a report by top psychologists says.

It calls for changes in language to reduce stigma, such as saying "a person with obesity" rather than an "obese person".

And it says health professionals should be trained to talk about weight loss in a more supportive way.

A cancer charity's recent ad campaign was criticised for "fat shaming".

Obesity levels rose by 18% in England between 2005 and 2017 and by similar amounts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This means just over one in four UK adults is obese while nearly two-thirds are overweight or obese.

But these increases cannot be explained by a sudden loss of motivation across the UK - it is a lot more complicated than that, according to the British Psychological Society report, which concludes it "is not simply down to an individual's lack of willpower".

Stress and trauma
"The people who are most likely to be an unhealthy weight are those who have a high genetic risk of developing obesity and whose lives are also shaped by work, school and social environments that promote overeating and inactivity," it says.

"People who live in deprived areas often experience high levels of stress, including major life challenges and trauma, often their neighbourhoods offer few opportunities and incentives for physical activity and options for accessing affordable healthy food are limited."

Psychological experiences also play a big role, the report says, with up to half of adults attending specialist obesity services having experienced difficulties in childhood.

And stress caused by fat shaming - being made to feel bad about one's weight - by public health campaigns, GPs, nurses and policymakers, often leads to increased eating and more weight gain.

Comedian James Corden recently spoke out against fat shaming, saying: "If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there'd be no fat kids in schools."

“If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there’d be no fat kids in schools.” — @JKCorden responds to @billmaher's call for the return of fat shaming. pic.twitter.com/asXmlNEx4L

— The Late Late Show with James Corden (@latelateshow) 13 September 2019

Psychologists can use their expertise to help train health professionals to communicate better on obesity, says Dr Angel Chater, report author and reader in health psychology and behaviour design at the University of Bedfordshire.

"If the treatment for obesity was easy, we wouldn't be here and wouldn't have written this report," she says.

"You might have the best willpower in the world, but if you don't have access to the right food, the right environment, the best start in life... it will be tough."

Learn from smoking
The government should approach the problem of obesity in the same way as smoking, the report says.

British Psychological Society chief executive Sarb Bajwa said: "It has taken action at all levels for decades, from government policy to helping individual smokers, but we are now seeing significant reductions in the level of smoking and the health problems it causes.

"Psychologists have the science and clinical experience to help the health service do the same for obesity.

"We can help, not just by devising ways of helping individuals, but also by advising on public policy which will help create an environment in which people find it easier not to become obese in the first place."

However, the psychologists are not in favour of obesity being classed as a "disease", because, they say, this could take the focus away from behavioural changes that could succeed.

(Source: BBC)

Father sues McDonald's over 'advertising' of Happy Meals

A Quebec father has launched a class-action lawsuit against McDonald's, alleging the company's Happy Meals break strict provincial laws against advertising to children.

Since its debut in 1979, the Happy Meal has been a staple of McDonald's menu and a go-to meal option on family road trips.

But some parents are decidedly unhappy about the hold the fast-food empire has over their children's stomachs.

Antonio Bramante is the lead plaintiff in a newly certified lawsuit that alleges McDonald's is unlawfully aiming advertising at children under 13 years of age.

That would violate the province's strict youth consumer protection laws.

Mr Bramante, a father of three young children, says he eats at McDonald's about once every two weeks on the urging of his children, according to the court documents.

He estimates he has spent hundreds of dollars on Happy Meals, which are children's meals that come with toys.

The Quebec father says the toys are often linked to popular film releases and his children often want to return to the restaurant so they can complete their set of toys.

He also claims the restaurant is directly targeting children by displaying the Happy Meals toys at their eye level.

Ice resurfacers are among the toys available in Canada

"In today's world, parents have to choose their battles. And what's the easiest thing to give into? It's to feed your children," says Joey Zukran, the Montreal-based lawyer who filed the class action on Mr Bramante's behalf.

Quebec prohibits marketing to children under the age of 13, making it one of a handful of jurisdictions in the world to essentially ban all advertising geared towards children.

The province has also had a law since 1980 that restricts marketing unhealthy food to children.

"McDonald's has a legal obligation to respect that law and they're not, in Quebec at least ," Mr Zukran claims.

There are three exceptions, with conditions, to Quebec's advertising law: for ads in children's magazines, for promoting a children's entertainment event, and for advertising via store windows, displays, containers, packaging and labels.

Mr Zukran says he is ready to argue McDonald's is not covered by any of these exceptions.

A Quebec court judge issued a ruling certifying the lawsuit last week.

Anyone who purchased a McDonald's Happy Meal in Quebec from November 2013, even if they are not Canadian residents, can request to be part of the class action, Mr Zukran says.

Children at McDonald's

It seeks both compensatory and punitive damages and an order to prevent McDonald's from continuing the alleged practice.

McDonald's has about 300 stores in the Canadian province.

In a statement, McDonald's Canada told the BBC it has received the ruling certifying the lawsuit and plans to examine it carefully.

"We are aware of our obligations under Quebec's advertising laws and reiterate that we do not believe this class action has merit," it said.

McDonald's is one of the world's biggest distributors of toys in the world, driven in large part by Happy Meals sales.

This is not the first time the Happy Meals toys have been the target of a lawsuit.

In 2015, the US Children's Advertising Review Unit, a self-regulatory body, advised the company to focus its advertising on food and not its Happy Meal toys.

The company agreed to take the advice into consideration for future advertisements.

In 2010, the restaurant chain faced a charge that its advertising violated California consumer protection laws.

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group based in the US, was eventually dismissed.

The claim that the company exploits children in advertising also made its way into the longest court case in UK history.

The "McLibel" case pitted the fast-food empire against two Greenpeace activists who had distributed leaflets entitled "What's wrong with McDonalds - everything they don't want you to know"

It is estimated McDonald's spent millions in legal fees suing the couple for libel. The couple defended themselves after being denied legal aid.

In 1997, a judge ruled in favour of McDonald's, but found the leaflet's claim that the company exploited children in advertising to be true.

(Source: BBC)

Sweets at supermarket checkouts to be banned in fight against childhood obesity

Selling sweets near supermarket checkouts and offering two-for-one deals on junk food will be banned under a government campaign against childhood obesity.

Ministers are also considering barring cartoons from promoting junk food and are consulting on making it illegal to sell energy drinks to anyone under the age of 16.

The Telegraph claimed health secretary Jeremy Hunt will introduce a watershed preventing products high in salt or sugar being advertised before 9pm, similar to the one prohibiting sex and violence to be shown early in the evening.

Unlimited refills of sugary soft drinks in restaurants may also be outlawed by the child obesity strategy, the newspaper claimed.

It said that consultations on restricting and banning certain sales would be launched before the end of 2018.

A report was cited as saying: “Where food is placed in shops and how it is promoted can influence the way we shop and it is more common for HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt) products to be placed in the most prominent places in store as well as sold on promotion, for example, with ‘buy one get one free’ offers.”

The report comes the day after research was released showing around half of television food and drink adverts seen by children are for HFSS products or for fast food restaurants.

Supermarkets will be banned from selling sugary foods near the checkouts ( Getty )

The advertising of junk food products has been banned during children’s programmes since 2007, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on Thursday found that 70 per cent of TV campaigns for HFSS products or restaurants and bars are screened prior to the 9pm watershed.

Evidence from Ofcom suggests that in 2016 children spent 64 per cent of their viewing time watching television outside children’s programming.

The news comes as prime minister Theresa May faces pressure from MPs to crack down on childhood obesity.

The Health and Social Care Committee has suggested that failing to ban the broadcasting of adverts promoting junk food before 9pm would “call into question” Ms May’s commitment to tackling the issue.

On Wednesday, the committee also said that, to improve childhood obesity rates, cartoon characters should be banned from promoting junk foods.

Such a ban would mean that characters such as Tony the Tiger and the Milky Bar Kid would have to be dropped or used to promote healthier products. And cartoon characters from the latest summer blockbuster would no longer appear on the packaging or adverts for fast food.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokeswoman said: “We’ve always said that our 2016 plan was the start of the conversation, not the final word on obesity.

“We are in the process of working up an updated plan, and will be in a position to say more shortly.”

At the end of 2017 figures from the NHS showed obesity among children starting their first year of primary school had grown for the second year in a row.

The figures showed 9.6 per cent of reception-aged children in 2016-2017 were obese.

(Source: Independent)

How Oreos work like cocaine

Research made national news this week that the cookies are more addictive than psychoactive drugs. That claim may be exaggerated, but the neuroscience of junk food addiction is nonetheless fascinating and relevant—mentally, physically, and socially.

"Nothing gets me high as that sandwich cookie does. But I love the filling most. I rub it on my roast, mix it in with my coffee, and spread it on my toast. I love the white stuff, baby. In the middle of an Oreo." —al yankovic, "the white stuff," 1992

***

The rat stands in a plastic maze. At the end are two rooms, each decorated in its own unmistakably unique, gaudy fashion. The rat knows them both. Inside one room, he has received injections of morphine or cocaine. In the other, he's gotten injections of a saline placebo. The rat has learned to prefer the drug room.

He even chooses to lounge in the drug room after the injection supplies have dried up. It's kind of like how you might hang out in the parking lot outside of an old high school, remembering the glory days; or at the apartment of an ex-lover, befriending the new tenants. Your ex-lover is dead, but it still feels good.

"High-fat, high-sugar foods are stimulating the brains in the same way as drugs of abuse and can be considered as a potentially addictive substance."

Joseph Schroeder and student Lauren Cameron, in Schroeder’s lab (Bob MacDonnell/Connecticut College)

This is a paradigm called conditioned place preference. It's a standard behavioral model used to study the Pavlovian rewarding and aversive effects of drugs. Dr. Joseph Schroeder's rats are not pioneers.

Schroeder is an associate professor of psychology and director of the behavioral neuroscience program at Connecticut College. Last year, Jamie Honohan was a senior student researcher in Schroeder's lab and scholar in the college's Holleran Center, which focuses on social justice issues, public policy, and community action. Honohan was interested in the obesity epidemic—specifically, why there is more obesity in urban, low-socioeconomic-status populations, and the role of a lack of nutritious food.

So Honohan came to Schroeder with an idea for some research based on the rat conditioning model. What's a thing that both rats and humans like? Sewers, tunneling, hammocks, ... Oreos. That's it. Oreos are also cheap calories, widely available, and contribute to the obesity epidemic. Would feeding Oreos to the rats in this model have the same conditioning effect as giving them drugs?

Honohan, Schroeder, and some other students designed an experiment. In terms of behavior, the Oreos did it. The rats trained with Oreos spent just as much time in the Oreo room—as opposed to a boring rice-cake room, even after there were no Oreos or rice cakes—as did the rats trained with cocaine or morphine.

Then the researchers went a step further.

What if we cut open their brains, too, they wondered.

A small child who ate too many Oreos. Kidding, it's a rat. (Bob MacDonnell/Connecticut College)

"We examined the nucleus accumbens," Schroeder explained to me, "which is the brain’s pleasure center. We measured the expression of a protein there [c-Fos]. So it basically tells whether that brain center is being turned on or not in response to a behavior. And we found that there was a greater number of neurons that were activated in the brain’s pleasure center in animals that were conditioned to Oreos compared to animals that were conditioned to cocaine [or morphine]."

"Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."
"What that indicates," Schroeder says, "is that, perhaps, high-fat, high-sugar foods are stimulating the brains in the same way as drugs of abuse and can be considered as a potentially addictive substance."

That concept has been shown before, but remains important. In a 2010 study published in Nature Neuroscience, rats who spent 40 days eating bacon, sausage, cheesecake, and frosting—someone please market that combination; I mean please don't—became "addicted." They continued eating even in the face of electrical shocks. Non-addict rats did not. The researchers, at Scripps Research Institute in Florida, likened the brain activity in the addict rats to that of cocaine and heroin addicts.

"We make our food very similar to cocaine now," commented an unmoved Dr. Gene-Jack Wang at the time. Wang is a biomedical imaging researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "[Now] we purify our food," he said. "Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."

Wang also drew an interesting parallel between the social roles of processed food and cocaine. People have chewed coca leaves for 4,000 years, but the pure cocaine alkaloid was not isolated until the mid-19th century. It was more potent and addictive. American manufacturers were quick to put it in everyday products.

Like junk food, the ubiquitous coca extract products came to be most notoriously abused among underprivileged populations. Civil unrest and white panic around "negro cocaine fiends" at the end of the 19th century played a role in the removal of the alkaloid from Coca-Cola and its criminalization shortly thereafter. A century later, the still more potent, cheaper crack cocaine hit ghettos so disproportionately that African-American leaders like California representative Maxine Waters called for a Department of Justice investigation into the possibility that the drug's introduction was a CIA plot against inner-city black Americans.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it.”
The plot this time, according to journalist Michael Moss in Salt Sugar Fat (among others) has been squarely attributed to a manipulative food industry—companies like Nabisco, Kraft, General Mills, Mars, etc.—formulating products that play on "the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still."

Dana Smith is a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at the University of Cambridge. She told me that while the junk food-cocaine analogy seems valid, her concern about the publicity around Schroeder's research this week is that media outlets—including NBC, CBS, ABC, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Gawker—have said Oreos are as or more addictive than cocaine.


"This study did not offer rats a choice between Oreos and cocaine," Smith said. So that conclusion is not a valid one.

She also notes that similar headlines a few years ago—"Fatty Foods Addictive as Cocaine in Growing Body of Science"—around research by Dr. Nicole Aveno at Princeton, basically made the same point. We've known for a while that junk food is habit-forming.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2011. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The response at the time from American Beverage Association consultant Richard Adamson is emblematic of the industry position: denial and underplaying that junk food is addictive. “I have never heard of anyone robbing a bank to get money to buy a candy bar or ice cream or pop.”

Although, then, this July in Portland: "Man With Machete Robs Market of Candy, Pizza."

Coincidence?

Dr. Carl Erickson of the University of Texas Addiction Science Research and Education Center has also objected to using the term addiction with regard to foods, arguing that it is not comparable to the pull of a drug, and that it cheapens public perception of addictive disorders.

The idea of the food desert—that sometimes the only place to get food in your neighborhood is a 7-11—still hasn't landed with people who see obesity solely as the province of weak will.
Schroeder will fly to San Diego next month to present the Oreo rat study at the conference of the Society for Neuroscience. His findings do not constitute a novel idea, and some news bits about it may be hyperbolic, but the comparison between junk food and cocaine is in ways apt and important. The obesity message warrants continued hammering, as the epidemic costs the United States around $147 billion every year. (See: The average man's body.)

The idea of the food desert—that sometimes the only place to get food in your neighborhood is a 7-11—still hasn't landed with people who see obesity, like drug abuse, solely as the province of weak will. There is a web of educational and social factors to consider. This week's study and news cycle brings these ideas back into the conversation. Valid public health awareness can be born of exaggerated headlines on Facebook walls.

It's when we get into discussions of social justice and scale of abuse that the effects of junk food and recreational drugs can begin to be compared. “Even though we associate significant health hazards in taking drugs like cocaine and morphine," Honohan said, "high-fat/high-sugar foods may present even more of a danger because of their accessibility and affordability."

Finally and inevitably, there is the note that this study is an animal model. We are not rats. At the end of the day, though, we both love hammocks. And, Honohan noticed, just like so many humans confronted with an Oreo: Many rats “would break it open and eat the middle first.”

(Source: The Atlantic)