When we talk about obesity, the common advice is often to just eat less and exercise more. That’s a simplistic recommendation, which makes it seem like a person’s willpower is the only thing that determines their approach to food and, consequentially, their weight. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in their study which appears in the journal ‘Social Science & Medicine’, decided to investigate the combination of biological, psychological, and sociological factors that help or hinder how young children learn to regulate their appetite. Their study says that children are born with a capacity to regulate appetite based on hunger and satiety signals, but with exposure to environmental factors, their eating is increasingly guided by other motivations. If child health experts understand their susceptibility to various factors, they can identify and modify the environmental influences that make them overeat and put on weight. Then there can be more refined approaches to support children’s healthy-eating behaviour.
