In addition to the video I posted yesterday in which pediatrician Nadine Burke speaks my language, namely “food addiction,” I have been heartened to see the concept of food addiction spread inexorably into the mainstream.

I generally like and am informed by The Salt, a blog on food topics by NPR. But April Fulton’s something-or-other on pink slime is a piece of ill-expressed junk.

It's a little weird following Indiana TV reporter Jenny Anchondo on Twitter, because she tweets things like "Right two lanes of I-65 SB closed near Keystone Ave. due to crash http://pic.twitter.com/XncxoXMA," and "When @Fox59sjones is happy, everybody is happy. He got a 2 for 1 from the vending machine today. #Score."

This isn't my only thought on the subject, or even the primary one; I expect to pen that in the next day or two. But I see legitimate, informed citations of food addiction — as opposed to dumb tweets such as "OMG, cayenne-encrusted popcorn shrimp balls dipper in cranberry honey mustard, my new food addiction! — almost every day. Here's another one, from Nourish, a short video featuring Dr. Nadine Burke.

From the US Centers for Disease Control.

I gave this speech about food addiction last week at my Toastmasters club in Lexington, Mass.

The audio isn't the best, but it IS there. Also, if I were editing, I'd have eliminated the first two minutes or so, and if you want, you could skip ahead to that point. Prior to that, the speaker is my friend, author and public speaker Roberta K. Taylor.

I am like most people in that I have a) tired of "the latest study" because it seems you can always find one that says the opposite of the last one and b) interest in studies that confirm my world view.

But that's not why I'm sharing this nugget:

Headline: Report Suggests That Your Supermarket May Affect Your Weight

The linked post from Marian Nestle’s blog recounts the hasty retreat from a plan in Massachusetts to bar school bake sales, and it encapsulates so much of the nation’s nutrition problem.

In the uproar that resulted, opponents argued that it would make it harder to raise money for class trips, etc.; not resolve the obesity problem; and tread on local rights.

It is passe, if not cliche-ish, to say that MRI images of the brain show similar activity for some people shown food images compared with cocaine addicts shown coke images.

But a study at Dartmouth College — published April 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience — goes a step further, using images from the brain’s rewards center to predict who is likely to gain weight six months hence.

Not only that, but researchers used the same technique to predict sexual desire.

I’m reminded of the “lock box,” which was a largely unsuccessful political gambit promoted by Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run as a way to make Social Security tax increases more palatable. The idea was that we would ensure that taxes collected for this purpose would not be redirected, making it just one more tax increase.