A friend recently visited the show and announced that after years of struggling with her weight she’s decided to have bariatric surgery. It made me sad. I’ve experienced the same ups and downs, but I always believed there was a natural answer for me. It took a while to find that answer, but I did, and I’ve been all the happier for it. My solution came with no anesthesia, no surgery, no hospital stay, no recovery period and no side effects.

I believe what my friend is experiencing is an addiction to food. But instead of treating obesity like an addiction to food, doctors often treat it like a disease.

What health practitioners and others in the field of weight loss all too often fail to address is the patient’s relationship with food. Unlike drugs and alcohol, food is a necessity, and abstaining forever is not an option.

Robin Quivers: Exploring Solutions for Obesity

Fat Thanks to Sunita K. for the tip!

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Sales of Cheese – NYTimes.com

According to Penn State researchers, restaurants can help tackle the obesity epidemic by creating reduced-calorie meals.

In the survey, 72 percent of the 432 respondents said they could trim off 10 percent of the calories in meals without customers noticing differences in taste, and 21 percent said they could trim off at least 25 percent of the calories.

How chefs can help combat obesity by creating reduced-calorie meals