“Tackling childhood obesity: What role should industry take?”

That’s the headline atop foodnavigator-usa.com’s story from a panel at the Institute for Food Technologists’ annual meeting last week in Las Vegas, and I had to think, “are you kidding me?”

I’ve written about the word “obesity” before, as some sort of bogey-word best not spake, in case someone might take offense. I concluded in that post that, OK, if using a different word would allow someone to get help they’d otherwise shun, fine. But you can see from my phrasing in the first sentence, I’m still working on meaning it.

I’m a supporter of my local farm stand, a retail outlet of the farmer with the most acreage under till in New England. I go there for the fresh, locally grown produce at decent prices, and enjoy knowing that I’m supporting not only a local business but an improbably strong agricultural survivor in the sea of suburbia.

They sell a lot more than local produce, and I’ve recently been taken greater heed of where stuff comes from, declining to buy the Argentinian and Chilean apples, pears, etc., because of the food miles.

Here's the thing about Bloomberg's idea to ban sales of large sodas: He's actually acting!

Yes, the ban has holes in it, such as not covering every conceivable high-sugar beverage. And no, if it works to perfection, it will barely dent the obesity problem in only one part of the world. But any sort of success would endorse trying the same or similar measures elsewhere.

Bloomberg sees the same problem we all do, and he's *doing* something, which already has moved more focus to the problem, and to solutions.

Over the years, people have occasionally opined that the kit of actions that has allowed me to lose 155 pounds and keep it off 20 years is "a lot." 'Course, "a lot" is a relative term, but not a useful one necessarily. "A little" or "a lot" both miss the point of a desired outcome; "enough" is the only thing that matters:

If you want an outcome, are you doing enough to get it?

And how do you know if it's enough? Within a wholesome range, you can judge by results.

If you're getting the results you want, you're doing enough.

As an editor of 30 years and a paid wordsmith for even longer, I am sensitized to the use of language, and I continue to be tickled by the way Big Food twists the words of others to make their arguments seem absurd.

A case in point is how the soda industry is reacting to New York City's ban on super-large sodas. They proclaim the unfairness of putting all of obesity's blame on soda alone, for example, when no is doing that.

As you know, I talk about obesity and I talk about food addiction, always trying to make clear that the two aren’t analogous.

You can be obese without being a food addict, and you can be a food addict without being obese. It’s true that there is significant overlap between the populations, and it’s also true that engaging in behavior that leads to obesity can also lead to food addiction, especially if one has the genetic predisposition.

A two-page brief from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is an excellent resource for learning about how to keep the costs of obesity under control.

Not only does it have some of the key numbers (i.e., $147 billion a year in "extra" healthcare costs arise because of obesity), but it argues for a few policy changes that could begin to cut into the bulge.

This isn't my only thought on the subject, or even the primary one; I expect to pen that in the next day or two. But I see legitimate, informed citations of food addiction — as opposed to dumb tweets such as "OMG, cayenne-encrusted popcorn shrimp balls dipper in cranberry honey mustard, my new food addiction! — almost every day. Here's another one, from Nourish, a short video featuring Dr. Nadine Burke.

From the US Centers for Disease Control.