Mindfulness could help fight childhood obesity

It is increasingly evident that the obesity It 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 fridge, 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 a 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, about 15% of children in Spain had obesity problems, and 22.3% were overweight.

Permanent improvements in children's health?

How to fight childhood obesity? It is complicated, taking into account that, in addition to being produced by some learned routines and certain consumption preferences, the Obesity has a biological factor: impulsivity and lack of control over eating behaviors could be explained by a connectivity unusual among 

areas of the brain, as it generally happens with addictions.

If, in addition, we want the results of the intervention on childhood obesity to be maintained over time without falling into relapses, everything becomes much more difficult, since action must be taken on both behavior and the way the brain works and, by extension, the entire neuroendocrine system.

However, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University appears to have found evidence that childhood obesity can be combated by the practice of Mindfulness, which can be hypothesized from its discovery: feeding problems in children would be explained, effectively, due to a decompensation in the degree of neuronal connectivity when comparing areas related to inhibition and areas related to impulsiveness. These results have recently been published in the journal Heliyon.

Another field 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 been shown to be effective.

These improvements could be explained by the changes in neural connectivity that seem to be associated with the practice of this activity and that predispose to less impulsive behavior and better control of one's own behavior. And it is that, according to researchers from Vanderbilt University, there are reasons to think that practicing Mindfulness helps to rebalancing the number of connections associated with inhibition and impulsivity, making some do not have absolute control over the others.

So, if childhood obesity were 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 neural connections explained at least in part the appearance of obesity in boys and girls. And to solve this unknown, they designed a study.

How was the research carried out?

The team of scientists obtained data on 38 boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 13, of whom 5 had childhood obesity and 6 were overweight. The data collected on these children included their weight, their answers on the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) containing 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 sensation 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 impulsivity. inhibition. The opposite occurred in the individuals most capable of avoiding obesity problems and the habits that lead to them, since the The region related to inhibition was better connected with the rest of the neural networks than the area associated with inhibition. impulsiveness.