Grand Challenges in Eating Behavior Research: Preventing Weight Gain, Facilitating Long-Term Weight Maintenance

The Specialty Section Eating Behavior covers a wide range of topics related to food, nutrition, and eating both in animals and humans. These include cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses to food and food-related cues; individual, social, cultural, and developmental factors affecting eating behavior and food choice; interactions of body image perception and physical activity with eating and appetite; eating disorders, and many more. Contributions in all of these areas are welcome. An area, which embraces most of these topics, concerns one of the biggest challenges of our time: preventing and treating obesity. Obesity is defined as a condition of excessive fat accumulation in adipose tissue to the extent that health may be impaired (World Health Organization, 2000). Although the health threats of obesity have already been described for centuries (Haslam, 2011), obesity has not been a major public health problem until prevalence rates started to rise so extensively over the last decades that it can now be considered a global pandemic (Ng et al., 2014). Obesity is the result of a positive energy balance, that is, energy intake exceeds energy expenditure. While increasing energy expenditure obviously requires engaging in an effortful activity (e.g., exercising), decreasing energy intake appears to be a simpler method at first glance: individuals merely have to eat less food or substitute previously consumed energy-dense foods with other foods that are less energy dense. While behavioral treatments that aim at increasing physical activity and/or reducing energy intake are successful in promoting behavior change and, therefore, weight loss, the majority of individuals usually regain weight after termination of such programs, often even exceeding the initial weight after a few months or years (Lowe, 2015). The most successful (and long-lasting) non-behavioral weight-loss treatment appears to be bariatric surgery (e.g., gastric bypass; Colquitt et al., 2014). This approach, however, is unsuitable as a panacea for all obese individuals due to substantial downsides such as surgery costs, complications during or after surgery, adverse effects (e.g., dumping syndrome), the need for lifelong nutritional supplementation, or overstretched skin as a result of the rapid weight loss (de Zwaan et al., 2014). Thus, there is an urgent need for developing new or modifying existing weight-loss treatments. Indeed, research on new ways how to decrease unhealthy food intake seems to be flourishing. The recent rise in eHealth technology (e.g., mobile health applications using smartphones or other portable devices, Internet-based interventions) has created an opportunity …