When I published my broadside yesterday about registered dietitians, I said that it reflected views I’d held for a while but that they’d boiled over in the past little while.

I didn't know Bart Hoebel well; anyone who did might be offended to hear that I think I knew him at all. But I did spend a weekend with him, and about 50 others, a few years ago, and he left an impression.

Hoebel, a psychologist at Princeton who led ground-breaking research on addiction to sugar, died last week at age 67.

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:

"...the current emphasis on personal responsibility as the anecdote [sic] to increasing obesity rates may have minimal effectiveness.

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.

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.

So yeah, it's a big time for us. Not only did UConn win (I was a Nutmegger for 9 years), but it was our 7th wedding anniversary yesterday!

But yes, I'm also referring to the above story, which ran last night on ABC's "World News Tonight." It came together quickly; I saw the producer's e-mail about 2:10, and I had arrived back home for perhaps 10 minutes when the videographer arrived, 20 minutes early, at 3:25.