Somehow, in a life filled pretty consistently with thoughts of food and the consequence of obesity, I had not heard of "gay gainers" until a couple of weeks ago, when Zack Jordan, 29, got in touch via Twitter after reading, and liking, my book, "Fat Boy Thin Man."

In my focused world, the release of Ashley Gearhardt's (et. al) study advancing the evidence for food addiction has been a welcome thunderbolt from several directions. Unreservedly.

But nothing is perfect, and I must quarrel with the report's closing words:

Quite appropriately, stories have been cascading out of the media since April 4, when researcher Ashley Gearhardt, a post-doc at Yale, and her colleagues released a study that correlates people who scored high on a food-addiction questionaire they developed with increased brain activity when given food cues.

This website, Sociological Images, says that this campaign that purports to fight childhood obesity is shaming to fat kids.

I think they have it wrong.

What I see are short statements by four fat kids who are telling the truth about what it's like to be fat.

It is probably impossible to live a black-and-white life, though certainly addicts like myself will try. The only route to comfortable success is to contemplate the grays and adjust when necessary.

That comes up for me today as I continue a discussion of how our family chooses its protein. To many, that might sound like liberal-sissy stuff, but we are convinced of the essential values of nutrition and responsible consumerism, and wish more people were.

We had the first conversation at our house last night contemplating a different family approach to eating protein. It arose from a couple of threads that have been entwining in my mind for a while: the processed nature of soy protein and the environmental values of grass-fed animals and getting it locally.

It is very easy to get caught up in the excitement of being seen, especially by an entity with the broad reach of a national television network, but it helps me to get back, as quickly as possible, to the real issue, which is food addiction.

The core of my message, in "Fat Boy Thin Man" and on this blog, is that food addiction is real and that both for individuals and for all of us collectively, important changes will necessarily follow once we understand.

In the mediocre film "Lunch Line," which I saw a week ago Sunday as part of the Museum of Science's "Let's Talk About Food" series, famed "lunch lady" Ann Cooper makes the observation that "many registered dietitians don't have a strong background in cooking and food."

I suppose it's a mark of achievement for Marie Claire's online component that I feel moved to comment again on something it published, considering it's not a site I visit.

Back a while, there was the firestorm that ensued after an MC writer confided her revulsion when she saw fat people. It brought thousands of horrified retorts within days, and I was asked to comment by a Boston-area health website.