Ask anyone, and “protecting our kids” is one of our highest values — we have child endangerment laws, and even well into their teens, we ignore their “consent” for some behaviors because we don’t think they’re old enough to know better.

But we only worry about intrusions on their bodies, not their minds.

I heartily recommend your reading this story from The Salt, NPR's food blog, which tells about NuSI, a 38-year-old billionaire's research initiative on obesity and nutrition.

The money lines:

I was talking politically with someone recently who advised me to back off on my desires and especially my expectations of what policies people will go for, and that raises a pretty fundamental question of advocacy.

Is it better to ask for what you want, or for what you think you can get?

I’m sure community and issue organizers have explored the question exhaustively. that they have concluded that no answer is always correct, and that they know when to zig and when to zag.

But I ain’t them.

According to research by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, the declared politics of school districts is an excellent predictor of their school-nutrition policies. Democrats, which generally believe in the power of government to improve lives, institute policies for better nutrition. And Republicans, who generally believe in the primacy of the marketplace, put fewer strictures on what can be sold to schoolchildren.

I wrote previously about a pair of podcasts that Kelly Brownell and Robert Lustig did back in April, but I wanted to take up another point Lustig raised.

Now that I'm back in the gym (three and counting), I'm catching up on podcasts that I don't have/take time for usually.

Last time I wrote, I decried the stain of Big Food’s insistence that “personal responsibility” should be the only standard of conduct, when it works its ass off to ensure it won’t be held responsible for its actions. It’s scum-suckingly low.

But here’s another part of its duplicity:

They.

Don’t.

Mean.

It.

It is the only logical conclusion.

I’ve visited this area of thought before, but it bears frequent discussion: Corporate — and corporate shill — calls for “personal responsibility” are nothing less than gross insults against reasonable people.

if a school district wasn’t using crossing guards and parents learned this, how long would it be before the outcry made sure that crossing guards were on duty?

If noxious chemicals were being left out in the chemistry labs and parents found out, how long would it be before safeguards and monitoring was in place? Would the teacher(s) responsible even keep their jobs?

And yet, when schools serve children meals after meals of crap — pizza, fries every day, ketchup as a vegetable, whatever — the knee-jerk is to blame the schools.

You may have noticed — and more likely not — I placed an addendum in my recent post about having gained weight, to identify the amount in question as about five pounds. Could even be 10 — I haven’t weighed myself with any regularity for years. What I know is that my clothing still fits, but a paunch that had left has now returned.