​Mindfulness Could Help Combat Childhood Obesity

It is increasingly evident that obesity is a major problem in Western societies. Not only does the food we have access to contain more carbohydrates and poor quality fats, but It is very common to try to dissipate the stress associated with work by making trips to the refrigerator something unthinkable a few centuries ago.

Our problem is malnutrition, more than malnutrition, and this inheritance 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 nutrition 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 boys and girls in Spain had obesity problems, and 22.3% were overweight.

Permanent improvements in children’s health?

How to fight childhood obesity? It is complicated, considering that, in addition to being produced by 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 body. brain, as 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 Action must be taken both on the behavior and on the way the brain works 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 their discovery: feeding problems in children would indeed be explained. , due to 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 journal Heliyon.

Another area of ​​application for mindfulness

The key, according to the researchers, would be to identify the obesity problem 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 changes in neuronal connectivity that seem to be associated with the practice of this activity and that predispose less impulsive behavior to better control of one’s own behavior. And, 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, ensuring that some do not have absolute control over the others.

Therefore, if childhood obesity were related to this type of decompensation, Mindfulness could be very useful to combat it. To do this, however, they had to ensure that this type of imbalance in neuronal connections explained at least in part the appearance of obesity in boys and girls. And to resolve this mystery they designed a study.

How was the research carried out?

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 were overweight. The data collected on these boys and girls included their weight, their responses on the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) which included data on their eating habits, and magnetic resonance images (MRI) of their brains.

From these data, they were able to verify that Both weight problems and habits related to childhood obesity correlate with connectivity patterns 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 sensation of reward.

Specifically, in boys and girls with overweight problems, brain regions related to impulsivity were better connected to the rest of the brain than areas associated with inhibition. The opposite happened in individuals who were better able to avoid obesity problems and the habits that lead to them, since the region related to inhibition was better connected to the rest of the neural networks than the area associated with impulsivity.