Pragerblog

Note: This is also posted at michaelprager.com/blog.

“Why are the missiles called peace keepers, when they’re aimed to kill?”

You probably recognize the Tracy Chapman lyric, from her song “Why?” and it arises in my mind this morning in response to the announcement by Kraft Foods that it will use the Smart Choices nutrition guidelines to determine which foods it will advertise to 6- to 11-year-olds.

On the face of it, the move suggests vision and leadership, and perhaps those are accurate impressions. Really, they could be — look at Wal Mart, which has legitimately gone from corporate scourge to corporate not-bad guy. But no one alive in today’s world should accept anything — except my pearls, of course — without looking a little further, and these are some of the points apparent:

* Just because they called it the Smart Choices program, doesn’t mean they’re smart choices. You know how they say that one should never get in an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel? I’d add to that axiom to say, Never listen blithely to those who spend tens of millions of dollars to shape what they say.

* Smart Choices was created, in part, by … Kraft Foods! Certainly, the program’s criteria require nothing to that Kraft Foods couldn’t swallow. Agreeing to follow your own paradigm — it’s not unlike setting up your own country, writing the constitution, and then pledging to follow it. Huzzah.

* The commitment is to use their guidelines in advertising to 6- to 11-year-olds. But what about those older, and especially to those younger? Here’s the lead to a document from the American Psychological Association:

Research shows that children under the age of eight are unable to critically comprehend televised advertising messages and are prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful, accurate and unbiased. This can lead to unhealthy eating habits as evidenced by today’s youth obesity epidemic. For these reasons, a task force of the American Psychological Association (APA) is recommending that advertising targeting children under the age of eight be restricted.

(It’s good to acknowledge that the APA is itself a large organization not without its own oxen to gore, but my assumption is that they are less commercially driven, and therefore less likely to seek to mislead. I’ll also concede that this statement addresses only TV ads, but I’m cavalierly extending it to all advertising. Make your own judgement. Anyway, back to the age range…)

* While claiming milestones, the announcement is mum about how it will advertise to most of the least-discerning group. My assumption is that the ability to discern increases with age, and that by age 6, many nutritional tendencies are set. Even in a far less sophisticated age of advertising, I know I was already an abnormal eater by that age.

* Smart Choices is a voluntary program. A primary reason to impose your own voluntary “safeguards” is to forestall actions that might not be voluntary. Please point out for me all the societal safety strictures that have been left voluntary, because “folks’ll do the right thing.”

* So what are these standards, anyway? Here’s an excerpt from a Smart Choices page:

Specific qualifying criteria were developed for 19 different product categories, such as beverages, cereals, meats, dairy, and snacks, based on the presence of nutrients to limit (e.g., fats and added sugars), nutrients to encourage (e.g., calcium and potassium), and food groups to encourage (e.g., fruits and vegetables, whole grains).

On its face, not too bad. But the little piece of evil (yes, a strong word, but I considered it carefully) is the word I bolded. According to my dictionary, a nutrient is “a substance the provides nourishment essential for growth and the maintenance of life,” which makes the “added sugar” in that sentence complete crap. No food has essential added sugar. They could have used a neutral word like “substance,” but they chose differently. Remember, these people put millions into saying exactly what they want conveyed.

* The issue here isn’t just wordplay, either:

No more than 25 percent from added sugar? Alert the frickin’ media. Same for the fat “restriction” of no more than 35 percent of calories. I guess that puts the kibosh on the Suet Supreme.

Meanwhile, gander at the “nutrients to encourage,” which is to say, “nutrients.” To qualify, a food must provide at least 10 percent of one of them. That means you’d have to eat 10 servings to get all you’d need. Of one of the nutrients. Doesn’t seem very healthful to me.

I’m not saying that Kraft, or any of the other food superconglomerates, never makes a healthful food. I’m sure they do. But let’s stay clear here: Their missions are to make profits, not to ensure our health. If they can do both, I’m sure they won’t object. But if they have to choose, which one do you think they’re going to go for? The money, of course — it’s what corporations do. Voluntarily.

Corporations, generally, are not agents of public welfare. To the extent that they are, it is because we have influenced them, not only through the imposition of involuntary regulation, but even more so through our making smart commercial decisions in the face of billions of dollars spent to influence us to do otherwise.

This is also posted at my other blog, Sustainably.

The facet I like most about Charlie Radoslovich’s Rad Urban Farmers business model is that he is a farmer without any land. From the top, you know he’s either a wacko or on to something significant. I’m thinking it’s the latter.

He told me he didn’t devise the ideas, but he’s certainly on the front edge of the wave. If he’s successful, think how much land under lawn-grass cultivation could be converted to productive use.

Anyway, a key component for him is finding OPL (other people’s land), so here’s a bit of perspective from Christine Zendeh of Lexington, whom I interviewed for my Globe story but whose comments I wasn’t able to use.

Zendeh and her husband, Soheil, have given over a 20×25-foot plot of land with excellent sun to Radoslovich. They can expect to get up to 10 pounds of fresh, locally grown produce a week, all for the initial investment of about $100. It’s cheap, but they’re the landlords, after all. Radoslovich, meanwhile, will sell what doesn’t go to landowers at the Lexington Farmers Market.

It’s interesting to note that they won’t reap produce only from their yard. Radoslovich said each plot varies not only in size but in soil and light conditions as well. That means each site will yield different crops, and he’ll consolidate before handing out shares.

Zendeh said they were admirers from the start.
“We thought this was just a brilliant, creative, wonderful idea. We’d been looking into sustainability and being connected, providing for what you need, locally, so we don’t use all the fossil fuels, etc.”

Zendeh said the family has purchases CSA shares before, wanting to support local farmers, whose skills she admires. “I’m not much of a farmer, and Charlie has made that portion of our yard productive and fertile.”

She described her food outlook as “the whole Alice Waters thing.”

“I know when you get something fresh, and it hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides, you can actually eat it. Like eating a real tomato, instead of a plastic tomato.”

In a story for the Boston Globe food section, I introduce three green-thumbed green thinkers who are raising produce on former lawns. Costs and yields vary, but community building, sustainability, and locavorism are common to all three approaches.

Researchers at UCLA have co-opted genes in E. coli and plants that burn fat and inserted them into rats, allowing the rats to eat a high-fat diet while showing activity and body size exhibited by thin rats.

Link to the Technology Review article.

The genetic alterations enabled the animals to convert fat into carbon dioxide and remain lean while eating the equivalent of a fast-food diet. [emphasis mine.]

The feat, detailed in the current issue of Cell Metabolism introduces a new approach to combating the growing obesity problem in humans. Although the proof-of-concept study is far from being tested in humans, it may point to new strategies for borrowing biological functions from bacteria and other species to improve human health.

This is just wrong, imho. First, the story later notes that because the fat isn’t converted into sugar, “which could have the dangerous side effect of promoting high blood sugar and diabetes.” Instead, the story said, it’s as if the fat disappears in thin air. Though I don’t know the volumes of CO2 we’re talking about, do we really want to celebrate a new way to get 6 billion (and rising) people producing more greenhouse gases with every breath? (I dunno; this comment may be akin to the global-climate-change deniers who mock the rest of us by saying that carbon dioxide is “natural,” done by every living being. How could that be bad?)

It’s wrong secondly because the world doesn’t need a technology that allows it to continue consuming at American levels. The costs of profligacy in food have individual effects, of course, in all the gross and misshapen bodies, ill health, and early mortality. But it has collective costs as well, such as all the resources that go into producing all the “extra” stuff we stuff into our faces, ’cause we can.

Likewise, even the individual effects are not confined only to bloat and blighted quality of life. There is a theory that substance abuses (and their consequences) are nature’s signals of spiritual pain, in the same way that exploding pain in one’s chest is nature’s signal of a heart attack.

The implication is that even if science can take away the physical manifestations of a malady, it doesn’t mean the malady is no longer present. Would you really think yourself better off if, say, you didn’t feel pain when you were on fire? It wouldn’t hurt, but you’d be severely injured.

Through years of dieting and hundreds of pounds lost, my life didn’t start getting better — I didn’t start experiencing a routine state of happiness — until I addressed some of the reasons that were feeding my overfeeding, instead of just the overfeeding itself.

If they can come up with gene therapy that fills my spiritual deficit, great. But the current prospect, to me, is just another example of humankind’s ignoring a problem and addressing the symptom instead.

I believe I mentioned earlier that G. and I had planted a veggie garden, our first foray into food farming. We took some pictures, which could be more documentary than they are, and could serve in the “what-not-to-do” section of the primer.

I built the frame out of a 16 foot 2 by 10, cut into two 5s and two 3s. The outdoor screws I had were 2 1/2 inches long, which, I observed, probably should have been longer, but I didn’t feel like going to the store again, so I just went ahead, and the result seemed sturdy…

But then we tried it here, and tried it there, and before I could get it to the spot we chose, it turned from square to parallelogram…

right before it turned into a heap at (on) my feet. Georgie enjoyed it a bit too much, imho…

So I went to the store and purchased both 3-inch screws and corner braces, and after rebuilding, I was able to get to down to sod removal …

Once the area was dug out, we filled it in, with dirt we’d removed from other areas of the yard last year, peat, compost, and lime …

The job isn’t quite completed here, but when we were done, we’d planted two “darling” eggplants, which we’re told are like Japanese eggplant, light colored and more tubular than domestic eggplant; two purple (tastes like green) pepper plants, and a half dozen collard greens plants…

We’re now in a growth phrase. Not so I can tell so far, but what do I know? I’m just learning.

I heard an ad last night for Pepsi Retro, or something like that (I’m not interested in getting the name right; I won’t be buying it), and it raises a couple of interesting points.

First, I generally don’t care for processed foods. I eat some of them, so it’s not a puritanical thing, but I am convinced that their use is inversely proportional to health. (Speaking just from my experience, I used to eat a lot of it, and I was enormously unhealthy (not to mention enormous), and I’ve gradually moved away from it and grown enormously more healthy. I am not, of course, the originator of this notion; nor am I alone or particularly clever about it.) So the fact that a large beverage manufacturer has shifted from one processed ingredient to another is not big big news.

And yet, it is. What this large corporation is saying (without saying it, of course), is that they’ve decided to make a product with “real” sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Many readers will already know that high fructose corn syrup is in a huge range of products, and that the explosion of its use in processed foods in the ’70s coincides with the explosion of obesity in America. Fewer readers know about Dr. Rick Johnson’s work that implicates HFCS is a range of other diseases as well.

I don’t think for a moment that Pepsi has seen the light on HFCS; I’ve no doubt they’re still one of the most prolific purchasers of HFCS on the planet. But the company must see a market opening; that’s just about the only reason a corporation makes any product decision. For me, this is proof that those who are wary, or worse, about HFCS have gone from fringe element to market segment, which is a huge leap in a consumer-driven universe.

I went looking today for details about the product, and what I found was inconclusive. In February, the website Serious Eats reported that Pepsi would sell Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback (OK, fine, that’s the name; am I the only one who hears an echo for “Pepsi Throw up”? That’s probably unkind to the good folks at Pepsi.) for a limited period, from April 20 to June 13. It observed that “around the same time, Coca-Cola usually rolls out limited-edition Kosher for Passover Coke, also made with real sugar since observant Jews cannot have corn products, hence no HFCS.” So, it may be no more than that.

But I think it is at least a market trial, to see if consumers are interested in a “real” sugar product. With caffeine-free, diet Cherry Vanilla Coke and a hundred other varieties, the soda giants have already shown they’ll sell whatever sells, so this would be just an extension of that. And by announcing it as temporary, they leave themselves an exit strategy without a down side, because if it does sell, they can just say they’ve changed their mind in the face of overwhelming popular demand.

You may have noted my use of quote marks in referring to “real” sugar, since HFCS is definitely real. Just like table sugar, it is the result of a industrial processes in which a grown substance is broken down into parts, some of the parts are removed, thereby intensifying other parts compared to the same volume.

This is what refinement is. Wheat, for example, is a plant. It has a husk, a germ, a bran, and other parts. You can buy it in different stages of refinement — wheat germ, wheat bran, whole wheat flour and white flour are some examples.

I always like to point out that heroin is derived the same way, by growing a plant, and then removing some parts and keeping others. No, I’m not saying white flour and sugar are the same as heroin, but they both originate as agricultural products and undergo very similar processes.

And yes, I do think that, for some people — including myself — refined substances can have grave effects. I eat no sugar and no flour, because my experience is that these substances are bad for me.

I don’t do heroin either.

How can it be that people don’t think it matters what they put into their bodies?

Well, one answer is hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, to make them (us) lose sight of the obvious, but that’s another post.

This post is just to make this most basic point: It’s not just throughput; what we consume affects how we live. Put in quality and you’re running on quality. Put in junk, and you’re running on junk.

If those basic truths, self-evident, were alive in people’s thinking, we would eat a lot differently.

A couple of Vermonters recently relocated to Boston have started up bostonlocalvores.org so they can share what they know about the benefits of eating locally — for you, for the local economy, and for the planet. I buy into all the benefits, and it’s a resource I want available, to me and to all of us, so I’m going to keep checking it.

I love their tagline: “eat well and subvert the corporate industrial food complex.”

If you want to shop at a farmers’ market instead of in a grocery story, you have options 6 days a week in Mass. For a full list of market sites, times, and opening dates, go to massfarmersmarkets.org. Below is a subset centered on Arlington, mostly for myself but also for my neighbors. Please note, the season opens gradually; until mid-June, you should check the list before making a trek.

MONDAY
Cambridge-Central Square, Parking Lot #5, Bishop Allen Dr. & Norfolk Street, 11:30-6
TUESDAY
Cambridge-Harvard, Intersection of Oxford and Kirkland Streets in Cambridge, 12:30-6
Lexington Center, corner of Mass. Ave. and Fletcher Ave., 2-6:30
WEDNESDAY
Arlington, Russell Common Parking Lot, Arlington Center, 1-6:30 p.m.
Somerville-Davis, Day & Herbert Streets, noon-6
THURSDAY
Belmont, Belmont Center Municipal Parking Lot, Cross St. and Channing Rd., 1:30-7
Cambridge-Kendall, 500 Kendall Street, 11-2
Malden, Heritage Apartments, 195 Pleasant Street Parking Lot, 10-6
Medford, River Street and Riverside Ave, Medford Square, noon-7
FRIDAY
Cambridge, Charles Hotel Courtyard, 1 Bennet Street in Harvard Square, noon-6
SATURDAY
Cambridgeport, Morse School Parking Lot, Magazine Street at Memorial Drive, 10-2
Somerville, Union Square Plaza, 9-1
Waltham, Sovereign Bank Parking Lot, Main & Moody Street, across from Waltham Common, 9:30-2:30
Winchester, Town Common, Laraway Road, 9:30-1:30

[Cross-posted at “Sustainably,” my other blog.]

I’ve been writing about business ideas to bring better food to your home for quite some time. The first one was Jeff Barry’s Boston Organics, years ago, when I was still at the Globe; I had a feature for a while called “A Click Away,” I think. More recently, I’ve written about Gabriel Erde-Cohen’s urban/personal CSAs.

Now we can add Laurel Friel, the “queen bean” behind The Green Bean, a start-up whose idea is to do the shopping for you at the region’s farmer’s markets and deliver your order to your door. I met her Saturday at the Somerville Climate Action Network’s event I wrote about on Thursday.

The company will deliver to Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Arlington, Lexington, and Brookline. The fee for most customers in those areas is $200 for the five-month season, up front, though Friel said some of the farther reaches may be face an added distance fee. She put the cost of her service at about $10 per week, on top of the cost of the food.

Her value proposition, she said, is that many people who might want to patronize farmers markets, to foster community, to support local farmers, and to have a stronger connection between provider and eater, can’t shop on the markets’ timetables, have family or work obligations, or can’t find parking. She said she intends to provide weekly updates on farm news and events, to try to build those connections.

Her expectation, she said, was to appeal most to young families in which both parents work, but she has found strong interest among younger people. She said her research suggests she needs about 50 households to make a go of her idea, and she has about 20 after only two weeks of promotion.

Her website is greenbeanboston.com, but when I checked, it was still under construction. You can e-mail the company here, or call 617-417-8943.

If you’ve been following my running commentary via Facebook status updates — and who hasn’t? — you know that I’d run from “never did a mile without stopping” to 3.6 miles in just under 3 months. I was bragging, but was also amazed.

Turns out the numbers were fraudulent.

My measuring stick was a shoe dongle + software in my iPod, and calibration is a bitch. The first time I calibrated it, I was on a treadmill at the gym. I have no idea if I did it well, but the readout said it took. Sometime later, I reset the entire iPod, but the device said it was still calibrated, so I didn’t redo it.

A couple of days ago, I started running on a different section of the Minuteman bike trail, and noticed that someone had painted kilometer markings on the pavement. So I matched what the iPod was saying to it, and found that what should have been .6 miles was .8. That is no small change!

Now, it could be the kilometer painter is wrong, but I was able to compare against two different marked stretches, and they appeared the same distance, which is not to say they’re accurate, but at least they’re consistent.

My rough calculations tell me that that 3.6 was actually only 2.7. And, what I thought were 10:30 paces are actually in the 12s! These more modest numbers makes sense for a 51-year-old of decent-at-best conditioning with no background of running, but they are disappointing nevertheless.

One of the features of the software is that when you set a new “best,” Joan Benoit Samuelson, Lance Armstrong, or Tiger Woods congratulates you, and I’ve been hearing from them with practically every run. Now, of course, it will be some time before I hear from these new best friends — who knows how long it will be before I run an actual 3.7.

I’m going to feel the effects of this inflation in other ways, too. My last time out, on Friday, I ran longer than I ever had. I don’t know the numbers, but I had run the same route previously and started walking at an earlier point on the return. But I still felt like a wimp when I heard/saw the number, since it was so much less than I’d “done” before.

Meanwhile, though it’s a marvelous consumer trifle, the pedometer doesn’t measure at all what it’s like to be a middle-aged runner — or person who runs, anyway — after being imprisoned by fat and food addiction for my first 30-plus years. That feels pretty good.

My sister Judy is very keen-eyed, and she sends this link via Yahoo, which not only quantifies the extent to which portions of some items have expanded, but portrays them in photos as well.

I spent the week at a conference of overeaters, and our group of about 200 was treated very well by the conference hotel. One of the ways that showed was in the breakfast buffet.

At home, I have oatmeal, fruit, and yogurt, pretty much every day, and all three were on the buffet. No prob. The yogurt was sugar free, of course, and the day it wasn’t out, they went and got some. No prob. The price was $11, not great, but not unexpected for the circumstances.

Sunday morning, the conference was over, and so was the honeymoon. No buffet. And the fruit and yogurt plate that substituted for two-thirds of my needs was $11 by itself. Additionally, the shredded wheat I substituted for the missing oatmeal cost $5 — for a bowl, not a box. Add in the $3 coffee, and it was officially expensive — but price wasn’t nearly the most notable part.

The fruit I needed was 6 ounces, and not surprisingly in supersized America, they brought more. But even in supersized America, what I got was outrageous. I decided to take the excess with me, since I’d be traveling all day and there was no point in letting it go to waste.

Upstairs, I pulled out my scale and put together another 6 ounces for midmorning. Then I put another 6 aside for mid-afternoon. That’s all I’d need, but a mound still remained, so I kept weighing out of curiousity. Including an estimate of what I had at breakfast, they had served me about two pounds of fruit for breakfast. Plus yogurt.

No one — no. one. — needs 2 pounds of fruit for breakfast. So why do they serve it?

I called the hotel and asked Isaac Nellums, the hotel’s restaurant manager, and he said, quite proudly, that “our portions in the restaurant are generous, and that coincides with the pricing.” (I wasn’t sure if he thought the price was generous, or if he was acknowledging that it was expensive, but at least you got a lot. His answer: fair pricing for the portions.)

But don’t most people throw a big part of it away? He said some people did as I did, taking it along in a to-go container. But I did it only because I couldn’t bear the waste, not because that’s what I wanted — in effect, the restaurant imposed two unwanted burdens on me — the cost, and the choice of carrying or wasting.

On large portions in general, Nellums said, “It depends on the individual. We have a pulled pork sandwich that’s pretty generous, and I’ve had several customers start on it and finish, and say, “Wow, I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish it, but then I did!”

Is this what passes for achievement in the modern age?

In the vast majority of instances, there are only two outcomes — beyond the supposed boost to the bottom line: obesity (if it’s eaten) and food and resource waste (if it isn’t). True, I took most of it, but hey, you don’t want to make out menus with me as the paradigm — who else travels with a scale and unfilled Tupperware?

If they offered small and large, they’d clearly be serving their customer better — “supersize me” is still at least a clear expression of fast-food preference. But this is far nuttier: How many trenchermen do they think are ordering fruit for breakfast?

From experience, I can say that people do develop over time, and that what they present today isn’t necessarily how it has always been for them. Even so, it’s easy to imagine that Mark Gold, distinguished professor (that’s a title, not just a description) at the University of Florida, has always been able to light up a room. He led off the half-day Sunday program with a presentation that was at once entertaining, enlightening, humorous, far-reaching, charismatic, and teasingly arrogant, at least when he talked about Florida’s football team.

He doesn’t research only on obesity; one of his slides listed 26 items on his list of current research. He described research, for example, that showed that anesthesiologists have a very high rate of addiction because they are around anesthetic agents all the time, that patients given Propofol and Fentanyl intraveneously exhale active fumes, and that the fumes arise from the trash after an operation. He also said that to talk of “nicotine dependence” is inaccurate, since there are 400 other chemicals in cigarette smoke as well. He said they have to pay people to wear a nicotine patch for studies.

Gold described how he came to link obesity and addiction in his thinking, beginning with Woodstock. Because of all the mud and poor provisioning, little food was available during the festival, but no one noticed. Why? Because they had sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to keep them busy. Another clue was how drugs of abuse, including cocaine and amphetamine, have been used to suppress appetite; he added that on campus, low doses of Ecstasy have been used for weight loss. He also observed that drug intoxication reduces eating, while drug withdrawal increases eating.

“Drugs of abuse compete with eating for some sort of common reinforcement sites, and if drugs of abuse are on, really on, then food is really off.” But if you remove the drugs, he added, then people develop a large appetite for food and become heavy.

He made the point, perhaps obvious, that what we eat does matter. “We’re not just eating anything. We like good food,” he said. “If you served them cardboard, they wouldn’t go back.” Gold was not the only speaker to pick up on one of Jack LaLanne’s aphorisms of the night before: “If it tastes good, spit it out,” which Gold called a “good motto.” (’Course, you have to take that in context, because my experience, for example, has been that after I removed processed foods from my diet, I came to really enjoy vegetables, especially those roasted in a little oil — parsnips, turnips, peppers, green beans … I won’t be spitting any of them out.)

Gold also illuminated the phenomenon of early onset, which he said explains why so much of advertising is pointed at young people. For example, a 13-year-old who smokes for the first time has been shown to become addicted in as little as two days, but that won’t happen to a 30-year-old. He said the same “critical periods” exist for language, music, alcohol, and food. “If you want to change people, change them early.”

Gold concluded by urging more long-term study on obesity and addiction. He said the focus should be on “things that matter, like portion control, like exercise, like not going out to dinner, like not switching foods like sexual positions — basically, all the novelty only serves to increase the reinforcement.” He said if long-term studies can be done, “I think we’ll find a subset of people who are obese, who meet these criteria, who will benefit from similar interventions [to drug treatment], and … maybe we can develop novel treatments that no one has ever heard of.”

Kelly Brownell was the lead speaker on the first day of the conference (“Food Addiction: The Obesity Epidemic Connection”) and billed the keynote speaker, but each day’s lead speaker was a keynote for the day, clearly chosen for his prominence in the field. Bart Hoebel of Princeton led off Saturday, and Mark Gold was the opening speaking on Sunday.

Hoebel is a striking figure, tall and rail-thin with a full head of white hair, and he imparts — or I inferred — an air of patrician authority. But then he speaks, and whatever slight stiffness that suggested itself melts into a good-humored, approachable, grandfatherly guy, a description that arises not only because his daughter brought two of his grandkids to visit for part of the weekend, and he clearly relished his time with them.

Hoebel has been studying obesity for 50 years, since he was an undergraduate, and has been studying the science of sugar addiction for eight years. In December, he reported that he and his team had demonstrated craving, the third and final criterion for substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; he had previously done the same for bingeing and withdrawal.

He said the fourth edition of the DSM declined to use the word “addiction,” but he said he thinks, “the DSM V [due out in 2012] is going to call it addiction. I’ve talked to the people who are writing it.” If that happens, that’s big news, indeed.

In his research, the rats go without sugar for 12 hours — while they’re sleeping. But then they don’t get it for the first four hours they’re awake, either. He drew the analogy of a teenager who skips breakfast, and then has a soda and a candy bar at 10 a.m.

Among the findings he shared:
* The rats like the sugar on day one, but they take progressively more as days lapse, beginning with a large dose as soon as they get access. “There’s something about deprivation, then a binge.”
* Sugar appears to have a gateway effect: If rats can’t get sugar, they’ll drink alcohol. At least once, Hoebel spoke of what happens in humans, but then studiously stepped back, since humans haven’t been studied. “I can’t help making these little translational leaps,” he said.
* Even after sugar is no longer administered, the brain stays changed. The craving never goes away. “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,” he said.
* A paradox: Palatable foods release dopamine, but that effect fades over time, while with a drug, it happens every time. But if sugar is combined with a schedule — if food is deprived early in the day — the dopamine response happens every time.

Hoebel made a plea that “we need to do this research on people. Sooner or later, we’ll convince them.” He added that he has no doubt that if caffeine were added to the sugar, “we’d get all these effects and probably more. … You think I ought to ask Coca Cola for a grant?”

One of the summit’s very impressive presentations was given by Dr. Rick Johnson of the University of Colorado at Denver. He’s a friendly, very passionate guy who has studied the liver and has now found himself a growing authority on a cause of obesity.

First, let’s get this straight: He isn’t talking (only) about high fructose corn syrup, which is a particular target of many obesity foes — because the obesity epidemic seemed to hit just as soft drink manufacturers were switching from sucrose (table sugar) to HFCS, because of its ubiquity in the US food industry, and because it benefits from government corn subsidies and promotes corn monoculture, among other reasons. Though his research is wicked bad news for the HFCS peddlers — and you can expect them to fight it ferociously — he’s talking about all fructose.

Second, let’s get this straight: As its name implies, fructose is the sugar derived from fruit. Fructose is a 50-50 contributor, along with glucose, in sucrose, the white sugar you put in your coffee.

Fructose, Johnson said, is not only a contributor to obesity, but elevates uric acid in the body, which can have several ill effects. He said uric acid induces metabolic syndrome in rats, and is found to deplete energy stores. It also heightens the risk of high blood pressure. And, he added, fructose is implicated in arterial inflammation, which is strongly linked to heart attacks. Johnson said that even if you starve a rat but give it fructose, it doesn’t gain weight but does gain fat.

What this all could mean is that if the amount of fructose in the human diet could be broadly reduced, it might reduce obesity, reduce hypertension, and reduce heart attacks. That’s quite a nice trifecta.

Dr. Johnson’s book, “The Sugar Fix,” is just coming out in paperback.

I’ve mentioned other times about preferring to have one blog instead of two, for all sorts of quotidian reasons, but foremostly in a symbolic way: I want to find a way to make my two issues — saving the planet and escaping the misery of obesity — be one. (It’s the Buddhist’s hot dog order: Make me one with everything.)

When the subjects are, say, solar energy and food addiction, it’s not readily apparent where the Venn overlap is. But I saw a couple more glimpses of the intersection last weekend at the obesity conference, aided in part by one of my “other” passions, biomimicry.

The best connection I got was an addition to the sustainability issues that come up around food.
* Previously, I’ve noted that a “diet,” which is the most common way people try to lose weight, has unsustainability in its DNA: “As soon as I’m done reducing, I’m going to go back to how I was doing it before.”
* The same post discussed the unsustainability of bariatric surgery, which somehow reasons that making stomachs smaller will solve the problem of people who got too big. This is not a way to live for the rest of one’s life, even those who don’t die in surgery or relapse after the operation.

But I heard “sustainability” in its simplest sense at the obesity conference: We cannot sustain without food. Frickin’ obvious, but still, sustainability at its most basic. Most of the linkages I’ve read and heard in this area come from the Michael Pollan sector:
* Monoculture as most of the world practices it is not sustainable, for example, because it relies heavily on petrochemicals, and because it will eventually become vulnerable to pests.
* The way we eat isn’t sustainable because of how the methane produced by industrial agriculture messes with the atmosphere.
* The growth of food is so reliant on depleting watersheds that our population levels may soon be unsustainable.

But more basic than all of that is, what we put into our bodies to sustain our lives makes a difference. It’s not just throughput. Just like we can’t plant hedgerow to hedgerow with corn and then make it a constituent of every meal we eat without ill consequence, we can’t repeatedly eat meals composed of corn-fed beef, corn-sweetened soda, and corn-oil-fried fries without ill consequence.

The biomimicry angle I see — or take guidance from, anyway — is the interconnectedness on the planet. It’s not humans and nature as two — we’re all natural. We are best equipped to tackle a problem when we examine a whole system, rather than just a symptom of it. That’s another way of expressing the flaw I find with bariatric surgery: A knife cannot fix why someone got so grotesquely fat that they resorted to surgery to fix it.

But interconnectedness came up in another way, too: Probably the conference’s biggest accomplishment was bringing scientists into contact with clinicians and, more importantly, compulsive eaters. I was surprised by how many of the scientists hadn’t really interviewed, never mind interacted with, compulsive eaters before. How can one hope to solve a problem without assaying its particulars, beginning with how it affects those who have it?

In addition to my Nobel tossing, I had other sensations while at the obesity conference at Bainbridge Island last weekend that I was participating in a world-changing event. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if people point back to this even as a turning point, even 20 years on.

Part of my wonderment owes to my being within the circle for the first time, but it’s true that many of those who attended in Washington also attended the Brownell/Gold-hosted obesity meeting in New Haven in 2007, so perhaps it wasn’t as thrilling to them.

But often, of course, what is actually world-changing isn’t visible on the front end, and doesn’t arise from a scheduled event, no matter how special it is. That was clarified for me even before I stepped onto the plane on the way back, when I saw smatterings of face masks in Seattle, and still in Minneapolis, where I changed planes. The swine flu outbreak continues to widen, and who knows whether it will be world-changing, but it may be.

In that case, of course, the conference will end up being a footnote to what really broke that dark weekend, oh those many years ago.

In my first crack at this topic, I wrote that Elissa Epel of the University of California at San Francisco doesn’t study obesity, because that’s what my notes said, but it’s “food addiction” that she doesn’t study, which is a substantial difference and a substantial mistake. Of course she studies obesity — that’s why she was qualified to present during a gathering of the world’s most prominent researchers on the topic. Duh.

That said, here’s what she said — at least, what my notes say she said: Her points included that stress induces eating, stress eating appears to be reward-based, and that stress eating impairs health.

She showed data, for example, that says that some people who eat junk food when stressed out end — those who react strongly to cortisol — up eating far more than if they just eat under stress, or if they just eat junk food. That’s just interesting, no?

And, she said that the excess weight that results from that combination leads especially to abdominal obesity, which she said is a more significant predictor of health than poundage landing just anywhere.

Given the central role that stress plays in her research, it’s no surprise that Epel, an associate professor psychology, is collaborating with Jean Kristeller on interventions that combine mindfulness, stress reduction, and nutrition.

Epel said she was very moved by the stories of the five compulsive eaters who shared their stories on Saturday afternoon, and that “it will change my research.” A founder of the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment and Treatment, Epel worked with Kelly Brownell as a grad student.

One of the uncomfortable yet useful facets of the weekend was meeting and hearing from people who believe in approaches to overcoming obesity other than the one that works for me.

I heard about one of them from Jean Kristeller, a psychology professor at Indiana State University and president of the Center for Mindful Eating. As you can tell by the name (its, not hers), her efforts are pointed toward getting problem eaters simply to slow down and pay attention to what they’re eating.

My reaction was that I wasn’t going to write about it, because, well, it’s not the solution I use. Yes, that’s childish. So here we are.

Kristeller described the case of one guy in one of her groups, who’s practice was to eat a whole Snickers bar every afternoon. So she had him bring one in and they sliced it up. She said he had one piece, eaten slowly, and his ritual was gone. Once he’d paid attention to what he was eating, he found he didn’t like the chocolate, thought the caramel was too sweet, and found the peanuts stale. She described a similar case in which someone brought a Ho-Ho into the circle, and it was sliced into rounds and eaten slowly, allowing the group to recognize how gross Ho-Hos really are.

Hearing her led me to wonder if, when I was at the same point of weakness that allowed me to get so much out of rehab and support groups, etc., I had come under her guidance, if that could have become the cornerstone of my recovery instead. It’s an interesting thought, but after mulling it for a couple of days, I’ve concluded that for me, it was more than desperation that helped me start to get better. I needed that, but I also needed something more structured.

Nevertheless, I do admire the emphasis on mindfulness. I have learned — oddly, it was only via rehab and support groups, etc. —  how important being in the moment is. And I have observed not only how hard it is to practice it consistently, but how few people do. I would say it is not an American value, though my loving father-in-law (currently pasting me in Scrabble) does not agree.

Applied to poor eating habits, I think it could help many, many people, potentially tens of millions of the 145 million Americans who are overweight or obese. I think it could help just as many people, or more, if it could be brought into their consciousnesses (?) on any grounds. But for those of us who are addicts, I think we would still need more.