Obesity Prevention: The Role of Brain and Society on Individual Behavior
Over the years, approaches to obesity prevention and treatment have gone from focusing on genetic and other biological factors to exploring a diversity of diets and individual behavior modification interventions anchored primarily in the power of the mind, to the recent shift focusing on societal interventions to design "temptation-proof" physical, social, and economic environments.
Understanding the numerous factors involved with body weight regulation and identifying interventions to prevent or treat the problem is an enormous task in and of itself. Addressing this issue in growing children is further complicated by the diverse challenges specific to children. Because of this, the field of childhood obesity is both extremely specialized and multidisciplinary.
Within the past two generations alone, child and adolescent obesity has more than doubled for some age groups and tripled for others. Consequently, the extraordinary number of school-age children now being diagnosed with what were once considered adult-onset disorders hypertension, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and related cardio-pulmonary conditions has catapulted pediatric obesity to the forefront of national attention. Yet even as recognition grows, reliable, scientifically tested information and methods often get lost in the media crush of quick fixes and hyped-up news stories.
After 30 years of advice to eat low fat, the United States, followed closely by many other, mostly but not exclusively, industrialized nations, is witnessing an unprecedented epidemic increase in obesity and diabetes, to name just two.
The cost of these developments to the individual and to society is enormous, and the projected cost for the future staggering. It is evident that the increase in obesity and diabetes is strongly related to faulty nutrition.
Proper nutrition is probably the most effective and cost-effective prevention for these and many other diseases, including most cancers.
It should be clear to anyone by now that proper nutrition involves much more than having three meals a day. The written media abound with nutritional advice and information. Many books promote often extremely controversial guidelines for weight loss and better health. Frequently, articles and books are based on unproven assumptions, anecdotal evidence, or single scientific studies that seem to point in one or the other direction. The reader who tries to make sense of it all tends to be utterly confused.
Yet, even though nutritional science is relatively young, it is a hard science and many aspects have been thoroughly researched. Our knowledge of other aspects, such as the functions and effects of many secondary phytochemicals, or the multiple interactions between many body chemicals during nutrition-related metabolism, is evolving continually. Nutritional science is an interdisciplinary endeavor based on chemistry, biology, physiology, and anatomy, which are often hard to understand and even harder to present in a condensed, easy to assimilate fashion.
