I was the guest of Deborah and Karen of the Book Goodies podcast last night, and though I'm still looking for the audio, here's a brief print interview we did together.

The first time I saw this, I just sent a tweet, pointing out that Zagat blog — which one would think would understand about food — was ignorant on a major point, that “guilty pleasure” and “fast-food ‘addiction’” are not the same thing. But now I see, via my Google Alert for “food addiction,” that it’s a series, and they’ve got to stop.

Heretofore, the criticism I'd heard about BMI was that it overstated the problem of obesity, which wasn't very believable. Forget statistics and just look around: Only a liar or a fool in denial could go to a mall, or an airport, or a stadium and not see lots of people who are overweight.

Earlier, I reported that I'd been interviewed for about an hour from London by the BBC show "Horizon," which is equivalent to PBS's "Nova." Yes, it was pretty exciting.

They called back a while later and said, yes, they wanted to interview me on camera during their visit to the States to film a story on food addiction, and there followed a second hourlong phone interview, this time with the show's director.

As you know, my specific lens on the globesity pandemic is food addiction, which I specifically say is a significant contributor, but not “the” cause.

I do find that having a viewpoint sometimes causes me to put less weight on other outlooks, strictly as a reaction, before I get to consider their merits.

A persistent theme in my topics lately has been the hypocrisy and rank dishonesty of corporations and their spokesman, such as when they insist on the standard of personal responsibility, but refuse to take the same responsibility for their own actions.

On my way to another installment of that, I really want to ask: Why aren’t more people — most people! — offended when they are lied to and manipulated? Most people are, when they realize it, but somehow, when corporations do it ... all the time, it’s just business as normal.

Here's my most recent Toastmasters speech, which I gave yesterday at our club in Lexington. I'm particularly happy with it, and the time is only about 7 minutes.

Tell me if you have thoughts about it.

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.