The Melanie Warner blog post I wrote about in my most recent entry pointed toward a HuffPost column by Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale, that is as obtuse as it is interminable.

In "Is Sugar Toxic?" his New York Times Magazine cover story, Gary Taubes is clearly talking about manmade sweeteners, whether they are refined from beets, sugar cane, corn, or some other plant. Katz, however, defends sugar as it occurs in nature, first invoking hummingbird nectar and then mothers' milk. Continuing, Katz cites natural selection, evolution, and humans' innate taste for sweetness, all of which are entirely valid — if you're talking about sugar as it appears in nature. But Taubes wasn't.

I continue to be a big fan of Melanie Warner's Food Fight blog, and was glad to see her follow up on Gary Taubes's NYT Mag cover story, "Is Sugar Toxic," which I wrote about last week.

I am the guest of a longtime former colleague, Stan Simpson, on his WTIC-TV interview show on Saturday, but we taped the show Wednesday evening and video is already posted online. This links only to the first of three segments, but the other links appear just below the video window.

It was fabulous to spend time with Stan, as well as to say hello to several pals in the adjoining Hartford Courant newsroom. I was at the Courant from '84 to '93, and it was, in many ways, the best place I ever worked.

Connecticut-based insurer CIGNA is about to embark on a seven-month series of free telephone seminars to help people better understand eating disorders.

The first is next Tuesday, and will feature Stacie McEntyre, executive director of the Carolina House residential eating disorders treatment center.

Via Bettina Elias Siegel at The Lunch Tray, (a great site, btw) I saw this compendium of trenchermania: 83 American eateries that challenge customers with absurd mountains of food, offering not only to give it to them for free (or nearly), but to give them merchandise and to venerate them on walls of fame, if they can down the platters within a specified

One reason skeptics scoff at the notion of food addiction is that they eat, and so they think they know. And they do know their own experience, but they don't know mine or others' like mine. It's one reason I write on these topics.

Well, I've just completed a collection of short stories by someone who does understand, and whose wider distribution will achieve the goals I'm pursuing — to help people get it.

Somehow, in a life filled pretty consistently with thoughts of food and the consequence of obesity, I had not heard of "gay gainers" until a couple of weeks ago, when Zack Jordan, 29, got in touch via Twitter after reading, and liking, my book, "Fat Boy Thin Man."

Though visitors to 100 Terrace St. in Roxbury could be forgiven for not knowing that the Building Materials Resource Center and the Boston Building Materials Co-op are different entities, the two soon will be one and the same, under the name Boston Building Resources.

“We are making this change to make it easier to explain who we are and what we do,” said Matthew St. Onge, Boston Building Resources executive director. “The public has often seen us as a single organization because our names were so similar, and because the work of both organizations often overlaps."

I've read Gary Taubes's latest story in the NYT Mag, and though it warrants comment, I'm a little hesitant. The problem is that I've not given credence to his previous work, especially his paean to the Atkins Diet, because it advocated so strongly for a course I am sure did not benefit me, and this time I'm agreeing with him.