In a move that could serve as the singular parable about the value of regulation, the two soft drink behemoths recently announced they "are making changes to the production of an ingredient in their namesake colas to avoid the need to label the packages with a cancer warning," according to Reuters. The shift comes in the face of a science-based decision to designate the ingredient a potential carcinogen, which then subjected it to a California regulation mandating disclosure of such compounds to consumers.

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"Wow. That's great," said one.

"Yeah, where'd you get that?" asked another.

"You'll never believe it," I told them. "This is school lunch."

Times have changed since celebrity chef Jamie Oliver broadcast startling and deliberately inflammatory—this was reality TV, after all— images of kids here dumping trays of fresh food untouched into the trash. For those of you who missed, Oliver's prime-time program, "Food Revolution," the British chef arrived in Huntington in 2009 after it was named the most unhealthy metropolitan area in America and went to work ousting greasy burgers and pizza in favor of from-scratch meals made with fresh ingredients. Two years later, on the first week of school, which began in mid-August, students in Cabell County sat down to meals of from-scratch chicken quesadillas and brown rice and, on the day I visited, creamy chicken and noodles served with freshly made coleslaw, steamed broccoli with parmesan, an orange and hot rolls, the smell of which floated enticingly through the halls.

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After everyone else began calling the story dumb and pointless and inane, the Post... ran a poll. Now the people can decide if Michelle Obama is "a hypocrite" for eating a hamburger! In order to justify the newsworthiness of "Michelle Obama eating a hamburger," the Post's Tim Carman Googled "Michelle Obama" and "hamburgers," and discovered that she has eaten at least five hamburgers in the past.

Type in “Michelle Obama and salads” into Google, and you gets tons of hits about her introducing salad bars into schools. But few hits of her ordering salads in public.

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Huck struck back with an entertaining, unedited blog post calling Beck a conspiracy theorist looking for "boogey men" that "he and only he can see." "The First Lady's approach is about personal responsibility," Huckabee wrote, "not the government literally taking candy from a baby's mouth."

On the Blaze, Beck's news website, Kevin Balfe, Beck's primary ghostwriter, has responded today by calling Huckabee a liar. Because, he argues, Michelle Obama and Mike Huckabee do want to literally take candy from babies' mouths:

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A recent report in the New York Times announced that American grocery store "shoppers are paying the same amount, but getting less," and proceeded to quote a woman whose three-box pasta dinner for her large family didn't quite satisfy. She only later realized it was because those boxes now contain 13.5 ounces of noodles, not 16.

The report goes on to catalog other shrinkages: cans of tuna going from 6 ounces to 5; buckets of ice cream going from 2 liters to 1 ½; orange juice from 64 ounces to 59, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Brown rice syrup is just one of many "natural" sweeteners that have taken off in the wake of the backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which, of course, were invented to defeat the dietary axis of evil -- refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Once confined to Berkeley communes, these not-refined-sugar, not-man-made substances pose a huge marketing opportunity, since most people who avoid sugar don't want to get cancer but also aren't ready to commit to a joyless, dessert-free existence. Natural sweeteners are the perfect answer to this conundrum. Right?

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You want more? The friendly Cleveland congressman filed suit against a number of companies that supply and run the congressional eatery, because in 2008 he bit into a "sandwich wrap" of some kind and hurt his teeth on an olive pit.

According to the suit: "Said sandwich wrap was unwholesome and unfit for human consumption, in that it was represented to contain pitted olives, yet unknown to plaintiff contained an unpitted olive or olives which plaintiff did not reasonably expect to be present in the food prepared for him, and could not visually detect prior to consumption."

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The new standards dictate that by 2016, Wal-Mart will reduce the sodium content and sugar content as well as completely eradicate transfat in food sold in its stores. All the while, Wal-Mart promises to keep the food cheap. Wal-Mart's executive vice president of corporate affairs, Leslie Dach, told the New York Times, "We’ve always said that we don’t think the Wal-Mart shopper should have to choose between a product that is healthier for them and what they can afford."

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"So what should I say?" I asked.

"Complimentary."

For the next five years of my life, I'd choose my words wisely at work. Marketing, I would realize, can be an almost poetic exercise. At least, that's what I told myself after writing literature papers on Saturday nights, when I'd wheel a cooler full of Vitaminwater from party to party on my college campus. I'd storm into dorms not as my sometimes disheveled self but as a Campus Brand Ambassador, a "complimentary" Vitaminwater dispenser versed in all the right answers to all the common questions.

Almost without fail, question No. 1 is: Are there actually vitamins in this? A close second: How many calories does it have? Which is basically the same question as: How much sugar does it have? Or: Is it supposed to be good for you? Nutritious?

Yesterday, the British Advertising Standards Authority banned a Vitaminwater ad for falsely advertising the answers to that last big question. The ad described Vitaminwater as "delicious and nutritious." The watchdog group reprimanded Vitaminwater's new-ish parent company, Coca-Cola Co., for calling a product containing as much sugar as a soft drink "nutritious." As long as the ad disappeared, the company would face no further action.

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Why the sudden -- and incredibly public -- effort to slim down? As Fisher said at her press conference Wednesday, "I Googled myself recently without a lubricant and I came across a posting that someone made about me which was, 'What ever happened to Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot, now she looks like Elton John.' Yeah, that hurt." Chalk up another victory for the haters on the Internet.

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First, he'll have to get over the resistance to this counter-intuitive notion and the anger of the six or seven still-employed magazine food editors in America. I mean, isn't the whole point of food porn to make you drool in your lap and want to tear into a pot pie? Yes, Tierney explains, but there's a difference between the psychological phenomena of "sensitization," which is when picturing that hot, steamy pot pie makes you want it, and "habituation," which is when you get over that desire, satisfying it. What Carey Morewedge (I find it impossible to not say his full name) found was that people can bypass their desire and trigger habituation to food. But to do so, you can't just imagine having it in front of you; that leads to sensitization. You have to really, concertedly imagine yourself in the process of eating it. A bunch of it.

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"At a very basic level, this act is about doing what's right for our children," Obama said before signing the bill. The ceremony was moved from the White House, where most signings are held, to an elementary school in the District of Columbia to underscore the point.

Besides Obama, the bill also was a priority for his wife, Michelle, who launched a national campaign this year against childhood obesity.

"We can agree that in the wealthiest nation on earth all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow," Mrs. Obama said. "Nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children. Nothing."

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Bloomberg and Paterson planned to announce Thursday that they are seeking permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the nation's food stamp program, to add sugary drinks to the list of prohibited goods for city residents receiving assistance.

If approved, it would be the first time an item would be banned from the federal program based solely on nutritional value.

The idea has been suggested previously, including in 2008 in Maine, where it drew criticism from advocates for the poor who argued it unfairly singled out low-income people and risked scaring off potential needy recipients.

And in 2004 the USDA rejected Minnesota's plan to ban junk food, including soda and candy, from food stamp purchases, saying it would violate the Food Stamp Act's definition of what is food and could create "confusion and embarrassment" at the register.

In New York, a proposal to adopt a penny-per-ounce tax on sweetened soda failed to get out of the state Legislature earlier this year; Bloomberg backed the state proposal.

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On Tuesday, the Corn Refiners Association, acknowledging that the phrase "high fructose corn syrup" has of late become a shorthand for "deadly crap," took a break from sticking pins into its Michael Pollan-shaped voodoo dolls and applied to the federal government to change its name on food labels to something a little friendlier. Corn syrup would like you to now address it as "corn sugar." Miss Corn Sugar if you're nasty.

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The corn refining industry says it is worried about "consumer confusion." Why can't Americans understand that high fructose corn syrup is just sugar? It must be the name -- "high fructose corn syrup" sounds spooky and unnatural, a fact that lends subconscious support to the argument that HFCS is a health risk.

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For years, consumers' wariness of HFCS's ubiquity and rumors that it causes anything from obesity to late-stage syphilis have beaten it down like a bag of doorknobs -- and food manufacturers have followed suit with products made with sugar instead. Its sales dropped 9 percent in the U.S. from 2007 to 2009, and are sinking fast. You know you have a P.R. problem when sodas tout themselves as healthy because all their empty calories come from sugar, not your cheaper sugar with a funny name.

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First, the good news: The Dietary Guidelines may not mean a whole lot to the average consumer, but they deeply influence decisions made by school and institutional food services, federally funded feeding programs like Meals on Wheels, and food labeling. As our friend Dr. Ayala described in her blog, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently released its report, officially recommending a steep drop in sodium intake; a smart, realistic move toward encouraging people to rely less on abstract ideas like recommended daily allowances (put away your nutrition calculators! Wait, you don't have one either?) and to think in more big-picture diet patterns, like Mediterranean or vegetarian diets; and, most intriguingly, it actually addresses the systemic access issues behind much of our obesity problem:

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As children, one of the first safety lessons we learn is that Bad People Who Want to Hurt Kids might try to lure us in with things we love. We know we're not supposed to fall for lines like, "Hey, come here, I have some candy," or "Do you want to see my puppy? It's in my unmarked white van over there." Well, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is basically saying that McDonald's is like the guy with the white van, and they're not afraid to take action.

If McDonald's doesn't stop putting toys in Happy Meals, the group plans to sue under consumer protection laws. Lawmakers in Silicon Valley have already banned restaurants from giving away toys with unhealthy meals, a law that takes effect later this summer.

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A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health shows that two or more servings of brown rice per week is associated with a lower risk for type 2 diabetes, while five or more servings of white rice is linked to a higher risk. This is significant for Americans, since white rice consumption has increased over the past few decades and 18 million Americans suffer from type 2 diabetes. The study examined rice consumption habits and diabetes in 157,463 women and 39,765 men.

According to the Wall Street Journal, researchers pinpoint white rice's high glycemic index as a possible cause of the correlation with diabetes risk. Diets that involve foods that produce fast, high spikes in blood sugar have been previously linked to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

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