Learning to Eat in an Obesogenic Environment: A Developmental Systems Perspective on Childhood Obesity

Currently, children are developing in an obesity-promoting, or obesogenic, environment, which has emerged within the past 3 decades. This rapid change provides a rare opportunity to investigate the phenotypic outcomes that result from the expression of human genetic predispositions in a new environment. Unfortunately, the environmental changes that have occurred are associated with epidemic obesity rates in all age groups. Using a developmental perspective, this article argues that this probabilistic outcome is not predetermined, however. The article also provides examples of learning paradigms-familiarization and associative and observational learning-that present opportunities for parents and caregivers to restructure children's environments in early life, increasing the likelihood of healthy weight-status outcomes in the context of the current obesogenic environment.