As a culture, we are drowning in calories of mostly very dubious quality, and drowning in an excess of labor-saving technology. I have compared obesity to drowning before, but want to dive more deeply today into the implications for fixing what ails us.

The world is ever smaller. Flu strains incubating in China can be in New York or LA or DC in the span of a day. This is a world in which an incurable bacterial disease, spread by a tiny insect native to Asia, decimates the citrus crop in Florida.

My onetime patient and student, Nicole Larizza, earned her MS degree in nutrition studying the effects of nutrition in childhood on breast cancer risk in adulthood. I found the information Nicole shared with me important and provocative -- and felt it deserved to be shared.

One after another of these young people talked about finding not just a community of understanding at Mindstream, but a new family. They reported finding confidence they never had, self-esteem they had lost. They found self-respect, and purpose, and passion.

Obesity bias needs to be fixed. We are most likely to fix it when standing on a solid bedrock of understanding it at its origins. We can then replace the crude and obsolete survival-related imperatives bestowed to us in our genes, with the better angels of our nature.

For now, my gut reaction to the news about TMAO is that context matters. It's not really just about meat or eggs in the diet, but about the overall dietary pattern, the kinds of meat, the feed and treatment of the egg-laying hens, and our exposures to chemicals and antibiotics.

Getting to health doesn't need to be all that complicated. And it also doesn't need to be about "should." Don't pursue health because it's an obligation, or because someone says you should. Pursue health because health is a currency you can spend on living better.

We have created a seething stew of opinion about everything to do with nutrition, including, presumably, stew. That leaves us with far too many cooks, many lacking credentials to be in the kitchen in the first place.

These are the facts. The video is a public health offering, pure and simple. No one makes money from it. And it features several tweens and teens who are themselves beneficiaries of healthy living, who donated time and effort and talent to paying it forward.

I can't say, on the basis of evidence, that NIH is misdirecting vast fortunes from where they could do the most good within our lifetimes. But I certainly do believe it. What I can say is that biomedical research dollars are subject to the same myopia that tends to dominate our personal lives.

Little rumination is required to reach this conclusion: Cows don't make aspartame. But they don't make strawberry flavoring, either. This is relevant to a debate that involves a petition by the dairy industry to the FDA to change what qualifies as milk.

Anyone living and eating in the modern world, and paying even a little attention, knows that we are a very long way from eating food, not too much, mostly plants. Not only does our food come mostly in bags, boxes, bottles, jars and cans -- but mostly, it isn't really food.

The heroes of our flavor-of-the-day news cycles are not those who prove to be right or actually know what they are talking about. The heroes on any given day are the iconoclasts, conspiracy theorists, and -- just plain wing nuts. Affliction is the plat du jour, and these -- its master chefs.

Take good care of yourself, and you will be taking good care of your GI tract. Take good care of your GI tract, and it will very probably take good care of you. But it is working hard every day, and may well suffer effects of wear and tear as a result, much like your skin.

With the help of a cameo appearance by a friend you are likely to know, a preventionist reflects on vulnerability -- and the opportunity to take arms against a sea of troubles imperiling our children, and by opposing -- end them!

Qatar is the richest country in the world. As such, it provides a vivid demonstration that money can't buy you health any more than it can buy you love. The converse, in fact, appears to be true: The wealth of Qatar is being purchased at the cost of its people's health.

I care deeply about the truth about food, because this particular truth could set us substantially free from the threat of chronic disease and premature death. Chewing and swallowing the truth about food could add years to our lives, and lives to our years.

The statement that fructose is toxic is, simply, false. Fruit contains fructose. Honey, which has been part of the human diet since the Stone Age, contains more fructose than glucose. Saying that fructose is toxic but fruit is not is like saying that democracy is evil, but the United States is fine.

I have great respect and appreciation for the Times, and a fair portion of both for the insights of foodie/journalist Mark Bittman. But I have just about none of either for the combination of the two represented in an editorial by Mr. Bittman in the Times this week declaring sugar toxic.

The food industry brings in serious muscle to bully us into eating too much of all the wrong things, while someone counts the cash. Any conversation about personal responsibility or public policy that fails to acknowledge this reality is either disingenuous, or uninformed.

Those who want today's news to be that the Mediterranean diet has been proven superior to other truly good diets will need to wait until tomorrow, or longer. We had previously lacked any good head-to-head comparisons of "best diet" candidates, and we still do.

Epidemic obesity and chronic disease is, like a perfect storm, the product of massive and protean forces. It is an emergency in slow motion, but an emergency just the same. Like any other storm, these threats call for a brisk and well-coordinated crisis response that has yet to materialize fully.