Motivated by this post, I'd like to revisit a very important point about food addiction, as I experience and understand it: Getting the diagnosis, which in almost every case is a self-diagnosis, did NOT release me from responsibility for what I eat.

I'll repeat: Nobody ever held me down and forced food into me. I was totally, completely responsible for what I ate — and, I still am!

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.

More from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale's recent f.a.c.t.s. report on Food Advertising to Teens and Children:

Children’s exposure to fast food TV ads is increasing, even for ads from McDonald’s and Burger King, who have pledged to reduce unhealthy marketing to children. Compared with 2007, in 2009 children (6-11) saw 26 percent more ads for McDonald’s, 10 percent more for Burger King, and 59 percent more for Subway.

I now have a set of videos that I hope will be another avenue to spread word of "Fat Boy Thin Man" and the ideas contained therein. A couple of them are readings from the book, but this one is the centerpiece:

The other night, some toy store's TV ad boasted its "lowest prices ever," and its absurdity was enough to break through my ad defenses, although not deeply enough that I remembered the offender.

How ridiculous, how absurd. 

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.

A robot assigned to me by Google hunts the internet relentlessly for uses of the term "food addiction," and it succeeds many times a day. One of the reports from 11/22 has 10 of them, which is on the larger size, but I get three to four of these reports every day.

On the face of it, that should hearten someone who's determined to broaden the discussion of obesity in America to include food addiction as a cause of some of it. (I assure those who might wonder if I realize: Food addiction is larger than obesity, but obesity as a result of food addiction is the one I am best versed in.)

But when I wade into these robo-reports, I see that we're not nearly there yet.

I've always said that my book is a counterpoint to all the research, clinical experience, and other professional inquiry into food addiction, and that when our mutual perspectives become mainstream thought, it will have been far more attributable to their scholarship and experience than anything I did. 

That's why I'm excited to contemplate the third annual conference of the Society of Food Addiction Professionals, which will be Jan. 28-30 in Houston. I'll be participating for the third year, and serving as MC for the second.

In the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity's recent f.a.c.t.s. report (which I'm highlighting as a continuing series), "40 percent of parents report that their children ask them to go to McDonald's at least once a week; 15 percent of preschoolers ask to go every day."

These kids today! Where do they get such ideas?

From McDonald's, of course, through its endless marketing efforts, which saturate TV but go far beyond it, to 13 websites, banner ads, and social media.