Hey there. I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and we need to focus more on food addiction in children. And here's why. First, I want to start with a story. A few years ago, I was giving a presentation at Obesity Week. Obesity Week is, it's a week-long conference. It's massive, hugely well attended, the big industry event. I'd be curious to go now because at the time it was totally dominated by bariatric surgery talks and posters and stuff. I'm sure it would be really dominated by weight-loss drug posters and talks now. Anyway, I was there doing a poster presentation. I was in a massive auditorium with rows and rows and rows and rows of posters. And they happened to place me next to someone who was doing a poster about obesity in children and adolescents. It was a long day. We were there for hours presenting our poster, just talking to people, walking by.
I was presenting weight-loss data from Bright Line Eating®, and she asked about the Bright Line Eating program. I told her about it and she got so excited. She was like, "Oh my gosh, we should partner together. I know that these children and teenagers that I'm seeing who are presenting with obesity already in their young lives are addicted. They're hooked. And we try to help them to reduce consumption of a food that triggers them, but really what they need is your program. They need a full Bright Line solution. Please work with me. Let's partner together. Let's do a pilot study." I backpedaled and deflected and basically said no. My explanation was that I've always avoided working with children and adolescents doing Bright Line Eating, like putting together some sort of program for them because of my fear, my concern that parents who have a child who's struggling with their weight would see it and try to recruit their kid to do my program when the kid doesn't really want to.
I've always felt that Bright Line Eating is not for people who need it. It's for people who want it and are willing to work it. And children are vulnerable in their parents' house, kind of trapped there. I was not comfortable with the idea of parents foisting their notions of how their kids should eat onto their kids, especially because kids who are struggling with their food and their weight are really vulnerable to other people's perceptions. I just didn't want that, nor did I want some poor kid or teenager who was excited about doing Bright Line Eating to be trapped and stuck in a situation where their parent wouldn't buy them the vegetables that were needed or wouldn't support them in rearranging the kitchen or the cupboards to put those snacky foods away. Or if a child decides to change their eating, but the parent is not on board, it could be really threatening to a parent who isn't ready or willing to look at their own eating, and that could set up a really challenging dynamic in the house.
Anyway, I'm sure there are situations where the child or the teenager is excited about changing their eating and the parent is available and present and willing to help and they can get on the same page and it would be great. But my own sort of internal spidey sense is, I don't know that that's the majority of cases. My sense is that that might be the minority of cases and the rest of the cases are a train wreck and can potentially do harm. I said, "I really don't feel like I can be confident that in that scenario I would not be doing harm." She looked in my eyes and she said, "Doing nothing is doing harm because we know that these kids who develop obesity young go on to develop way worse outcomes. We know that for sure. The data there are really clear." Oh, and that hit me hard. I've never forgotten it. She's right. She's right. The data on childhood obesity are stark.
The first thing we know is that childhood obesity almost always turns into adolescent obesity, which almost always turns into adulthood obesity. The tracking, the persistence is so relentlessly consistent. That's not to say 100% of cases. Eighty, 90% of cases. That's the kind of range we're talking about, but that's a huge number. That's a lot of consistency. What we know is that catching it before it develops is mission critical. We also know that children and adolescents who are suffering with obesity are way more likely to develop poor mental health outcomes, increased risk of depression, poor self-image, mental health instability. We know that. The data there are clear as well.
There's also the challenge that type two diabetes, when it's developed in adolescence or childhood, is aggressive. It looks different than adult developed type 2 diabetes. It more rapidly leads to kidney failure, blindness, limb amputation, and is more likely to result in early death. It's an aggressive strain of type 2 diabetes. We also know from cardiologists that they're seeing plaque development in teenagers that looks like the arteries of someone who's 50 or 60 years old. Plaque development seems to be aggressive as well when kids are suffering from obesity in childhood and adolescence. Scary, scary data. It's just a horrifying profile.
What we need to be looking at is how to shift the landscape earlier. One thing to look at is how pregnant women are eating when they have a baby in utero. Here's a little science about how blood sugar works in utero. The fetus, of course, is attached to the mother by the placenta. Now, the thing about the placenta is that glucose, like blood sugar, travels right through it from the mother's blood sugar straight into the fetus' blood sugar, causing a blood sugar spike. So, if the mother's sitting there eating sugar and flour, eating candy, eating desserts, eating foods that spike blood sugar, bread, et cetera, et cetera, that spike in blood sugar translates right down into the fetus causing hyperglycemia. But guess what doesn't cross the placenta readily or at all? Insulin. Insulin's too big a molecule, doesn't make it across. So, in the first trimester and the beginning of the second trimester, that developing fetus' pancreas doesn't work yet. It's getting the blood sugar, and it has no defense against it. It has no insulin to block against that blood sugar. It just gets the blood sugar spike. The system develops an awareness of like, whoa, this blood sugar roller coaster is bad news. As soon as the pancreas of the fetus develops in the second trimester, it goes to town making insulin, and it causes something called hyperinsulinemia. You see these babies being born at over eight-and-a-half pounds. They're big babies. It leads to hyper growth, and it leads to the early development of type 2 diabetes. It leads to 10X outcomes of obesity. It leads to horrific outcomes later in life.
As a matter of fact, the mother's blood sugar stability is one of the most important factors determining that person's health after they're born and they grow up. It is so critical that women eat for stable blood sugar while they're pregnant, which I just got to say is not the advice they're given. You're eating for two, you're nauseous, have some crackers. People are generally not aware that this is a thing. Yeah. Challenging, challenging stuff. We also know, and these are rat studies, but we know that when you addict rats to our addictive diet, you give them fruit loops and cheesecake and sausage and foods to eat that are what we call the cafeteria diet. But I mean, that's ironic because a cafeteria should be just providing a balanced array of food. Anyway, scientists call it the cafeteria diet. When you give rats this kind of diet and they get hooked and they get fat really fast, and then you try to put them back on a balanced rat diet, like their rat pellets that you would get from the pet food store, they reject it. They won't eat it. They'll starve. They will starve. They will not eat it.
Just knowing this is important because as we addict our kids, as we teach them that the only thing worth eating at a birthday party is pizza and ice cream and cake, as we teach them that it's normal and all right for two thirds of their foods at least to be ultra processed foods, not really food, born in a factory and poured into a plastic bag. As we teach them how to eat like that, we already know if we're paying attention to the science that it's going to be really hard for them to go back to eating healthy food later in life. These are some of the reasons why it's so important that we look at obesity and food addiction in childhood, in childhood.
One last little piece of information here, the reality is that we will take action differently for our kids, won't we? We will. When a woman knows she's pregnant, often she'll stop drinking. She'll do her best to stop smoking, right? If she knew that how she was eating in terms of blood sugar peaks and valleys was hurting her developing baby, she would probably try to do something about that too. We create laws or standards about advertising addictive things to kids, cigarettes, alcohol. We don't advertise those things to kids. We don't serve them to kids. And so, the policy implications of getting clearer about food addiction in children and the cost of obesity in childhood, those policy implications are significant and they're a leverage point. It's like this is where we could band together and decide, okay, we really do need to do something about this for our kids. Maybe we wouldn't do it for ourselves or our society or general well-being, but we look at our kids and we think they deserve a better shot than that.
Two weeks ago, about, I got an email from a colleague of mine over in London and I was so excited. I read the whole email and I thought, "Oh yeah, I'm going to shoot a vlog on this." They've put together a conference, the International Food Addiction Children's Conference, and it's online only. It's an online conference and anyone's invited and the lineup of speakers is incredible. These are people that I know, some of them I know well, some of them I'm doing current research projects with, people I respect. We've got Dr. Nicole Avina from Princeton University talking about sugar addiction in teenagers and what we know about that. So, Dolly Van Tulleken, who I've never heard of is, I just looked it up because I know Chris Van Tulleken, right? And I've introduced you to his book, Ultra-Processed People. I'm like, who is Dolly Van Tulleken? Dolly Van Tulleken is the wife of his identical twin brother, and she's going to be talking at the conference. Erica Lafata is such an amazing person and researcher. She trained under Ashley Gearhardt, who's probably the world's leading food addiction research expert at the University of Michigan and Erica Lafata worked with her and Erica Lafata is going to be presenting at this conference. And Mauro Brero. So, Mauro Brero is from UNICEF. And a couple years ago when I went to a food addiction conference in London, I got to sit next to him for dinner. This was one of those long event banquet dinner things. So, for three hours I was sitting next to this man. What a fascinating human being. I got the sort of inside scoop, I feel like, on what's going on at the World Health Organization when it comes to food addiction, ultra-processed foods, obesity. I mean, so, wink, wink, sort of on the down low, what we need to be looking for from the World Health Organization first is a statement on ultra-processed foods. First, they're going to need to put their stake in the ground on ultra-processed foods, what they are, what the definition is and what their recommendations are about consumption of them. And that will allow probably a later potentially weighing in on the addictiveness of ultra-processed foods. Anyway, this guy and the work that they're doing at UNICEF, they're incredible and he's going to be one of the lead speakers and so many more. I mean, Michael Moss, he wrote Hooked and some of the other books. Investigative Journalists looking at big food companies. There's so much good stuff here.
What I love about this conference is people coming together around the world to look at the issue of how do we stop this before it started? How do we get underneath it? How do we prevent the development of food addiction in children and obesity? Because downstream, it gets harder to deal with. We do that here at Bright Line Eating, but it's not easy, right? It's not easy.
The cost to attend this thing is super nominal. I make nothing off it. Nobody makes anything off it. It's a nonprofit. It's just your donation goes to support the tech that it takes to put the conference on. Then I think there's a children's health fund or something that any extra goes to, but it's a nominal registration fee. You will get recordings of the event, so you don't have to be able to attend live to sign up and secure your spot and just make sure that you get the recordings. I can't recommend this highly enough. This is really, really cutting edge research, policy, advocacy, an understanding of the lay of the land globally. It's going to be really fascinating. So, I encourage you to register. There's a link down below so that you can register. It's in mid-November here, 2026, but after the fact, they may have a link so that you can still get the downloads, the recordings of it.
I just am excited that we're all thinking more and talking more about childhood and adolescent food addiction and obesity because when it develops early, it's harder to stop. It's a fast moving train and there's no brakes on that train sometimes. It's tricky. And as we know more and more about it, our responsibility increases, doesn't it? It does. All right. That's the weekly vlog. I hope I'll see you there at that conference. It's going to be a good one. See you next week.
