HEIDI SNYDER, 46, of Port Townsend, Wash., is a certified nutrition consultant and a holistic health educator. She is fabulously versed in both the constituents and the wholeness of food, as I rediscovered when we both attended the Society of Food Addiction Professionals conference recently in Houston. Before we parted on Sunday, I asked her to play my typical short-question interview game, in which the questions — and, by my request, the answers — are 10 words or less. Remember, please: No counting. It’s a goal, not a rule.

A tenet of my argument about obesity is that Americans don't lack for knowledge about nutrition, but choose not to apply it because nutrition is for sissies.

I could be wrong about that.

A poll by Consumer Reports Health says that 9 out of 10 Americans consider their diet  "somewhat," "very," or "extremely" healthy. Yeah, right. Fattest nation on earth, one of whose chief cultural exports to the world is fast food.

I wrote previously about Sue Shekut's blog post triggered by a Men's Health story titled "I Hate Fat People," by Richard Cunniff, and now I return to the story itself. It is excellent, full of reporting and original thought, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly.

General Mills says it has reformulated a quarter of its products this year to improve their health characteristics. As a trent, this is good news, of course, and not only because we are what we eat.

One of my repeating tropes lately has been to ask those who rail against government involvement in setting nutrition standards, "what's your solution?" To me, it's not enough to wax nostalgic on parental guidance as the way to resolve the national obesity crisis, not necessarily because it wouldn't work, but because so few are using it!

When I saw a tweet about this post at NaturalNews.com the other day, I quickly responded, decrying how Kansas State professor's Mark Haub's junk-food diet proves nothing of what it purports to while confusing a very important topic — nutrition in America.

Here's another finding from the Rudd Center's f.a.c.t.s. report on the relationship of food advertising and children:

Faced with fresh assaults on fast food from politicians and anti- obesity activists, the restaurant industry is gearing up to fight back, emphasizing the role fast-food businesses have played in providing jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.

That's the lead paragraph from a story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, and I just have to laugh at the attempt to misdirect.

Actually, my headline is wrong. Fast food is absolutely a battlefront in the culture war. But that's part of the misdirection I wrote in my previous post.