Purdue Ingestive Behavior Research Center symposium 2007: influences on eating and body weight over the lifespan--childhood and adolescence.

摘要

The papers in this special issue are based on presentations made at the second biannual symposium sponsored by the Ingestive Behavior Research Center of Purdue University. The topic of this symposium was: "Influences on Eating and Body Weight over the Lifespan - Childhood and Adolescence". In the past decade, obesity has moved from our peripheral vision to front and center as we have all been taken aback by the realization that our population has become alarmingly obese or overweight, a trend which now extends globally. Maybe even more startling regarding our future has been the more recent observation that increased obesity and associated diseases are overtaking our youth. The characterization of increased obesity at the population level as being recent - occurring mainly in the last 30 or so years - has led to the argument that it must be due largely to the "obesogenic" environment that has evolved over a similar time frame, rather than to accumulation of gene mutations, which is too slow a process to account for the rapidity of this trend. Of course however, there must be some interaction of the obesogenic environment with each person's behavior and physiology, which are partly inherited, as many people have maintained a healthy body mass index (BMI) in this environment.Based on the suspected dominant role of environment, one strategy for dealing with the obesity epidemic/pandemic has been to identify the key environmental variables promoting weight gain and to determine how they interact with our various biologies to produce (or fail to produce) obesity and associated disorders such as the metabolic syndrome. This theme was examined fairly broadly in the first Purdue IBRC symposium in 2005, involving sessions on dietary influences, development, physiological systems and learning. Given the urgency of intervening in the rapidly increasing obesity of our youth, the goal of the present symposium was to focus on development., In particular, we examined how different environmental variables influence eating behavior and weight regulation of children and adolescents, and how these variables might alter various physiological systems to support these influences. Additionally, a session on eating disorders was included because these disorders typically involve aberrant ingestive behaviors that begin during adolescence and the predisposition to developdisordered eating may be present at earlier ages. Further, it is possible that direct comparison of symptoms, etiologies and treatments of obesity and eating disorders may provide new insights based on both their similarities and their differences. For instance, could a better understanding of the neural pathways and behaviors that support the near starvation of anorexia be used to oppose the mechanisms that drive the hyperphagia that contributes to obesity?