Gotta love a target-rich environment, and that’s what this NBC News story provides: Fat-shaming may curb obesity, bioethicist says.

The kerfuffle continues over the conflict of interest that exists between the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics and the many Big Food giants who sponsor it.

This is the Coke commercial you may have heard about, in which it "tackles" the obesity problem it helps to perpetuate with gauzy images and assertions that range from questionable to bullshit.

Well, actually, it's the commercial's video, but paired with a more honest audio track in which some of Coke's egregious statements and oversights are pointed out.

I've mentioned Phil Werdell enough times that he has his own keyword on the site, and I'm happy to spread word of his work any time I can. He's a friend and a mentor.

Today, I'm spreading word just a little bit farther, or differently, via Today's Honoree, a website that recognizes someone every day. I'm not sure how I found them; more likely, they found me via a broadly cast e-mail campaign, which is not to say spam.

I've been taking a break from blogging, not to get away from it but to concentrate on a 9,000-word speech and accompanying slide show I'm giving in February. I don't know if you've noticed but Klout sure has, dropping me from 61 to 57, so far. I wish I knew what that meant.

A few items have been hanging around the desktop, waiting for me to do something with them, so I'm just tossing them all into this news salad (ugh, another stupid food allusion, like that weak-ass headline).

Like most folks, I'm a sucker for "best" lists, and this is the season for them. From Civil Eats comes a list of the year's best food and agriculture books, and I wanted to share it. It combines mainstream titles such as Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland and The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz with an excellent range of other titles I was glad to learn about.

There is plenty that Big Food could do to lessen its crushing effect on national health, and for a moment there, it seemed as though it wanted to hear some ideas. But then it realized what it had done and said "screw you" to the nice doctor it had invited. So Dr. Yoni Freedhoff made his slides into a presentation for you and me ... and possibly, some of the Big Food foot soldiers who would have seen the presentation in its intended forum, if their peeps weren't such dicks.

I thought I’d discuss self-regulation in a different context than in my last post, which was titled, “‘Self-regulation?’ That’s like ‘no regulation,’ right?” Then I was referring to Big Food, which argues that it can police itself and therefore deserves no interference from public-health meddlers.

I’d been saving Jon Entine’s post in Forbes on a back screen for a while, motivated by the headline, “Is 2013 a Watershed Year for the Anti-Obesity Movement?”/ and I finally got to it.

What a bunch of hooey!