Mindfulness could help fight childhood obesity
It is becoming increasingly evident that obesity is a major problem in Western societies. Not only does the food to which we have access contain more carbohydrates and fats of poor quality, but also It is very common to try to dissipate the stress associated with work by making trips to the fridge , something unthinkable a few centuries ago.
Our problem is malnutrition, more than malnutrition, and this heritage seems to be drastically changing the health of the new generations, who from their first years of life learn unhealthy habits, both those related to poor diet and those that have to do with forms of passive leisure (excessive use of the computer and video games, etc.). In 2014, for example, around 15% of children in Spain had obesity problems, and 22.3% were overweight.
Permanent improvements in the health of children?
How to fight against childhood obesity? It is complicated, taking into account that, in addition to being produced by some learned routines and certain consumption preferences, obesity has a biological factor: impulsivity and lack of control over eating behaviors could be explained by an unusual connectivity between areas of the brain, as it happens in general with addictions.
If, in addition, we want the results of the intervention on childhood obesity to be maintained over time without relapses, everything becomes much more difficult, since we must act on both the behavior and the way of working of the brain and, by extension, the entire neuroendocrine system .
However, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University seems to have found evidence that childhood obesity can be combated through the practice of Mindfulness, which can be hypothesized from its discovery: the feeding problems in children would be explained, effectively , by a decompensation in the degree of neuronal connectivity when comparing areas related to inhibition and areas related to impulsivity. These results have been recently published in the Heliyon magazine.
Another scope for mindfulness
The key, according to the researchers, would be to identify the problem of obesity as soon as possible and develop a mindfulness program with them, which can be combined with other measures to tackle the problem. This could be another of the functions related to the field of health in which Mindfulness has proven effective.
These improvements could be explained by the Modifications in neuronal connectivity that seem to be associated with the practice of this activity and that predispose to a less impulsive behavior to a better control of one's behavior. And is that, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University, there are reasons to think that practicing Mindfulness helps rebalance the number of connections associated with inhibition and impulsivity, making some do not have absolute control over the others.
So, if childhood obesity was related to this type of decompensation, Mindfulness could be very useful to combat it. For that, however, they had to make sure that this type of imbalance in neuronal connections at least partially explained the appearance of obesity in boys and girls. And to solve this question they designed a study.
How was the investigation conducted?
The team of scientists obtained data on 38 boys and girls between 8 and 13 years of age, of which 5 had childhood obesity and 6, overweight. The data collected about these children included their weight, their answers in the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) which contained data on their eating habits, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of their brains.
From these data, they were able to verify that Both weight problems and habits related to childhood obesity correlate with patterns of connectivity between three areas of the brain : the lower part of the parietal lobe, related to the inhibition of behavior; the anterior part of the frontal lobe, associated with impulsivity; and the nucleus accumbens, associated with the feeling of reward.
Specifically, in children with overweight problems, the brain regions related to impulsivity were better connected to the rest of the brain than the areas associated with inhibition. The opposite happened in the individuals most able to avoid problems of obesity and the habits that lead to these, since the region related to inhibition was better connected to the rest of the neural networks than the area associated with impulsivity.
