Hoping to meet up with my brothers and sister in belief of food addiction, I have a Google alert trolling for the term. Most of what I get is crap — spammers who put out popularly searched words so Googlers will arrive at pages they wouldn't otherwise visit.

Mark Haub is professor of nutrition at Kansas State University. To prove, apparently, that nutrition is more important than calories, he's sharing about his latest diet, which features nothing but junk food. From a US News web page:

One of the ways I express why I wrote "Fat Boy Thin Man" is to say that if you and I canvassed any random group about "solutions" to obesity, they wouldn't respond with anything like my experience. Since my experience works (for me), and the best-known "solutions" don't seem to be solving much, I figure I have valuable information to share.

Thanks to my colleague Pat Hartman over at Dr. Robert Pretlow's blog Childhood Obesity News, here's a decent companion to my post yesterday about the science behind food addiction: The early adopters of food-addiction thinking.

I commend to you this article on The Delano Report (drzarkov.com) about how food addiction, "considered fringe just five years ago, is fast becoming a mainstream view among researchers as new studies in humans confirm initial animal findings, and the biological mechanisms that lead to 'junk-food addiction' are being revealed."

The NYT looks at vegetable-eating habits in America, and the trends are not good.

Quoting a study by market researchers the NPD Group, it said that "the number of dinners prepared at home that included a salad was 17 percent; in 1994, it was 22 percent. At restaurants, salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner dropped by half since 1989, to a mere 5 percent."

Part of what drives my "food addiction is real" mission is the need/want to be smarter than everyone else. (No, I'm not proud of it, but it is true.) So why, then, do I get so much pleasure when I hear or see other voices saying essentially the same things that I am? It should ruin it, but doesn't.

Not to be redundant, but to catch all my new readers up to speed, my issue is food addiction, both personally and professionally. I am a food addict, and I believe that well more than 10 million Americans are as well.

In one slight sense, it doesn't matter. My extensive experience is that when I accepted standard addiction treatments that go back decades, I started losing weight and now I've kept about 160 pounds off for almost two decades.

With results like that, who cares what they call "it," right?

This post relates to the one immediately before it, but I wanted to give it its own headline: The acquaintance between Dr. Tarman and the Acorn folks has led to a five-day food-addiction workshop at the Renascent Center in Toronto beginning Oct. 20.

To register, you can call Sandra Elia at 416-986-0006. 

Apart from my former Boston Globe colleague Renee Graham, this will probably fall mostly on bored ears. I can't draw a larger point or demonstrate very much of anything from it, and yet I fail to self-edit.