Few things are more obvious here at Sustainably than that my unalterable belief that food addiction exists. Duh. Read more »

Before Friday morning’s presentation at the BEDA national conference by Marian Tanofsky-Kraff, I would have assumed that binge eating in children is an excellent predictor of developing binge-eating disorder and other conditions. Read more »

I heartily recommend your reading this story from The Salt, NPR's food blog, which tells about NuSI, a 38-year-old billionaire's research initiative on obesity and nutrition. Read more »

Next up in my recent cavalcade of wholly credible voices who endorse the notion of food addiction thoroughly is Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Read more »

It is passe, if not cliche-ish, to say that MRI images of the brain show similar activity for some people shown food images compared with cocaine addicts shown coke images.

But a study at Dartmouth College — published April 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience — goes a step further, using images from the brain’s rewards center to predict who is likely to gain weight six months hence.

Not only that, but researchers used the same technique to predict sexual desire. Read more »

In April 2009, I attended an invitation-only conference on obesity in Bainbridge Island, Wash., and it was one of the best strokes of good fortune I’ve yet encountered, not only for the knowledge that was shared but for the relationships I got to form. Read more »

I mentioned after my appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California a couple of weeks ago that a podcast would result, and that I would mention when it was available. Well, it is, which I learned when someone who'd listened to it tweeted to me about it.

My opinion is that anyone would be best served by listening to the whole recording. Please do not overlook that point when I say the following: Read more »

Welcome to another installment of “10 Words or Less,” in which I ask interesting people for brief answers to brief questions. Today’s participant is a clinical psychologist and author who holds the nation’s first endowed professorship in eating disorders, at the University of North Carolina. Remember, please: No counting! “10 words” is about attitude, not addition, and besides, let’s see you do it. 

Name Cynthia Bulik
Born when, where 1960, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Residence Chapel Hill, NC
Family situation Married, three kids
A transformative event from your childhood “The death of my brother, Mark. I was 9. He was a premature baby who lived one day.”
When did you know you wanted to research ED? “My sophomore year in college. I was invited to do rounds with George Hsu, the attending physician for an eating disorders program in Pittsburgh.”
A surprising fact about you “I’m a [national-level] gold medalist ice dancer.”
Read more »

So it turns out that when I wrote yesterday about the Jane Brody squib in the Times yesterday, referred there by my friend Ron-the-voracious-reader, I had actually been referred slightly elsewhere, to the mainbar of what Brody wrote. She was reporting the release of a series of reports in the British medical periodical The Lancet that address the growing obesity epidemic. Read more »

Almost a year ago, I wrote aboutNicholas Christakis's Ted Talk, which showcased his research about connectedness in social networks.

What would have been my mild interest was heightened by his using obesity as an example: He said his research showed that if your friends were obese, your chances of being obese were 45 percent higher. Even more freaky was his suggestion that if friends of your friends whom you'd never met were obese, your chances were 25 percent higher, and that you had a 10 percent greater chance of being overweight if your friends' friends' friends were.

Turns out, his conclusions haven't been accepted into scientific fact just yet. Writing yesterday in the Boston Globe, reporter Carolyn Y. Johnson recapped the significant doubt that has bubbled up: Read more »