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.

The Salt, NPR's food blog, carried the news today that McDonald's will beging posting calorie counts of its products, which is definitely news. This is what happens when groups like Corporate Accountability International organize the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who care about nutrition to apply enough pressure that even the most prominent corporations choose to change.

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.

I'm now a "health hero," at least in the lingo of the blog at Re-Body Weight Loss Nutrition. Next up: The Nobel, for sure.

Regardless, I'm pleased how the interview went, and with the presentation they made, and so I link to it.

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that I have added professional speaking to my quiver of strategies to carry the messages I wove into "Fat Boy Thin Man." In addition to the little notice I added in the upper left of this page, I've also established a space at fatboythinman.com to extol my ever-so-considerable virtues (please note my wink in that reference).