I wrote previously about Sue Shekut's blog post triggered by a Men's Health story titled "I Hate Fat People," by Richard Cunniff, and now I return to the story itself. It is excellent, full of reporting and original thought, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly.

Sue Shekut, the owner of Working Well Massage in Chicago, riffs off a Men's Health article and gets to the question of what's causing the US obesity problem. 

A European Commission report says that half of Europe is either overweight or obese, and that in most member states, rates have doubled in the past 20 years.

They've got nothing on the US, where two of every three American adults — about 145 million — are considered in one of those categories, but they're gaining. 

The Bakersfield Californian publishes my op-ed on the food industry's efforts to escape responsibility for what its products are doing to Americans, while harping on the eater's responsibility for choosing what it makes.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel also ran the piece.

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.

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.

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.