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.

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.