Whereas everyone recognizes that increasing obesity rates worldwide are driven by a complex set of interrelated factors, the marketing actions of the food industry are often singled out as one of the main culprits. But how exactly is food marketing making us fat? To answer this question, we...

Background: Most dietary programs fail to produce lasting outcomes because participants soon return to their old habits. Small behavioral and environmental changes based on simple heuristics may have the best chance to lead into sustainable habit changes over time. Objective: To evaluate...

In this era of increasing obesity and increasing threats of legislation and regulation of food marketing practices, regulatory agencies have pointedly asked how “low-fat” nutrition claims may influence food consumption. The authors develop and test a framework that contends that low-fat...

In this era of increasing obesity and increasing threats of legislation and regulation of food marketing practices, regulatory agencies have pointedly asked how “low-fat” nutrition claims may influence food consumption. The authors develop and test a framework that contends that low-fat...

Effective and simple screening tools are needed to detect behaviors that are established early in life and have a significant influence on weight gain later in life. Crowdsourcing could be a novel and potentially useful tool to assess childhood predictors of adult obesity. This exploratory study...

Objective: What predicts whether a child will be at risk for obesity? Whereas past research has focused on foods and eating habits, this study departs from a food-centric approach to examine how various dinner rituals might influence the BMIs of children and adults. Methods: In this study of 190...

Objective: Excessive intake of fast food, soft drinks, and candy are considered major factors leading to overweight and obesity. This article examines whether the epidemiological relationship between frequency of intake of these foods and Body Mass Index (BMI) is driven by the extreme tails ( /-...

Background Obesity prevalence has risen in fifty years. While people generally expect media mentions of health risks like obesity prevalence to follow health risk trends, food consumption trends may precede obesity prevalence trends. Therefore, this research investigates whether media mentions...