2. Update: Fat men falling down still considered humorous

This side-by-side comparison of the pratfalls of Chris Farley and Kevin James may look suspiciously similar, until you realize both guys are just ripping off “The Three Stooges.“

3. Beyoncé’s “Best”

Ever wanted to see what the singer’s wedding would look like? She gives you a hypothetical glimpse in the new video for her breakup ballad, “Best Thing I Never Had.”

4. Octomom on “Today”

Wait… NBC isn’t paying Nadya Suleman for interviews now? Not like I’m any great defender of the Octomom, but “Good Morning America” allegedly offered that Botox mommy $10K to go on the show, and she only had one kid’s mouth to feed.

5. Not Safe Furs Work

The Handsome Fur’s awesome (but graphic and NSFW) music video for “What About Us?”

“Diabetes may well become the defining issue of global health for the next decade,” said Majid Ezzati, chair of global environmental health at Imperial College London, one of the study authors.

He noted the figures don’t reflect the generations of overweight children and young adults who have yet to reach middle age. That could create a massive burden on health systems.

“We are not at the peak of this wave yet,” he said. “And unlike high blood pressure and cholesterol, we still don’t have great treatments for diabetes.”

Still, in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, despite growing waistlines, there was only a slight rise in diabetes. Experts weren’t sure why and said there could be several reasons, including worse detection of the disease, genetic differences, or perhaps the Europeans were better at getting heavy people to reduce their chances of developing diabetes.

Women in Singapore, France, Italy and Switzerland remained relatively slim and had virtually no change in their diabetes rates. Numbers also stayed flat in sub-Saharan Africa, central Latin America and rich Asian countries.

Type 2 is the most common type of diabetes and is often tied to obesity. It develops when the body doesn’t produce enough insulin to break down glucose, inflating blood sugar levels. The disease can be managed with diet, exercise and medication but chronically high blood sugar levels causes nerve damage, which can result in kidney disease, blindness and amputation.

For their estimate, Ezzati and colleagues examined more than 150 national health surveys and studies that tracked Type 2 diabetes in adults older than 25 in 199 countries and territories. They used modeling to estimate cases for another 92 countries.

They calculated there were 347 million people worldwide with diabetes. In 1980, there were 153 million. Their figures come with a big margin of error, ranging from 314 million to 382 million. A previous study using different methods estimated there were 285 million people with diabetes in 2010.

The new study was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization. It was published Saturday in the journal Lancet.

Doctors warned the higher susceptibility of certain groups like Asians, blacks and Hispanics to diabetes could dramatically boost future rates. “Other ethnicities don’t have to be as obese as people of European descent to get diabetes,” said Dr. Aaron Cypess, a staff physician at Joslin Diabetes Center. He was not linked to the Lancet study.

“It may be, for example, that Indians and Chinese store their fat in more dangerous places, like a pot belly,” he said, theorizing that kind of abdominal fat can send out hormones to speed up diabetes.

But Cypess was optimistic the trend might be reversed, citing first lady Michelle Obama’s fight against childhood obesity in the U.S. as an encouraging sign.

Iain Frame, director of research at Diabetes U.K., said the bigger challenge was simply to persuade people to adopt healthier lifestyles. “We have a fair idea of how to prevent Type 2 diabetes — you have to move more and eat less,” he said. “But putting it into practice across a wide population is another question altogether.”

Now, two weeks after my column was published, a new Arizona State University study tells us just how successful that advertising and social stigmatization have been in making many women psychologically obsessed with weight — even to the detriment of other health priorities. As the study documented:

[Women] were asked to choose whether they would rather be obese or have one of 12 socially stigmatized conditions, such as alcoholism or herpes. In many cases, the women would rather have more of the other conditions, with 25.4 percent preferring severe depression and 14.5 percent preferring total blindness over obesity.

You read that right — one in four women would prefer to be severely depressed rather than overweight, and nearly one in six would prefer to lose their sight rather than face the same fate. These are truly stunning numbers — but, then, they come as responses to hypotheticals. So the key question this study raises is: Do the results mean anything in real-world practice?

In a word, yes.

Whether from ubiquitous waifs on highway billboards or from the tabloid fetishization of celebrities’ emaciated bodies, women are pressured by a chauvinist culture to prioritize the thin aesthetic over genuine wellness — and that pressure has consequences. It is, for example, one of the roots of eating disorders. It also fuels a market for weight-loss drugs that can have toxic side effects. And it can also be a major factor in smoking — and specifically, the decision by women not to quit for fear that doing so will make them fat.

The ASU study, then, confirms just how powerful this pressure really is — and how it’s become so intense that women may now be willing to endure far more than eating disorders and smoking in the pursuit of thin.

Obesity, of course, is a serious national health crisis and it should be treated as such, regardless of the powerful food conglomerates that have a stake (or steak) in continuing the culture of fat, and irrespective of whom such an aggressive health-focused posture might offend. But that’s the thing: Addressing weight as a health issue is different from addressing it as an aesthetic — and mostly female — concern. The former really shouldn’t offend anyone. It’s the latter that should outrage everyone — especially because that perspective remains today’s regrettable norm, and with increasingly horrific consequences.

This is a significant question in a country whose debilitating weight problem is more male than female — and “more” means a heckuva lot more. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, almost 70 percent of men are overweight, compared with 52 percent of women. Yet, somehow, 90 percent of the commercial weight-loss industry’s clients are female, and somehow, this industry hasn’t seen males as a viable business. How can that be?

Market researchers typically explain the situation away in trite “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” platitudes, insisting that it’s only “because men tend to want to lose weight on their own by working out in a health club or designing their own exercise program, and they are less likely to join groups or seek counseling,” as one told Advertising Age. But such generalizations are, at best, truthy, and more likely, completely apocryphal. The real explanation for the gender disparity is found in a chauvinist culture whose double standards demand physical perfection from women while simultaneously celebrating male corpulence.

Though this double standard is rarely discussed, you can see it everywhere.

In comedy, fat guys from Chris Farley to Kevin James haven’t been venerated in spite of their huskiness — their humor has been seen as more valuable because of their size. Same thing in the drama genre: From John Goodman to James Gandolfini, male girth is seen as either innocuous or beneficial. But how many major comediennes or actresses get the same treatment? Very few.

Similarly, in big-time sports, our male superheroes are often super-fat. Harvard University, for instance, found that 55 percent of Major League Baseball players are overweight, while the University of North Carolina found that 56 percent of National Football League players are obese. These whales, of course, are interposed on TV between beer commercials featuring super-thin female models and are often playing in front of impossibly dimensioned female cheerleaders.

In politics, it may be the worst of all: Overweight icons like Rush Limbaugh, Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie regularly dominate the headlines as serious leaders, but no woman even vaguely approaching their body mass index would be taken seriously in a similar role. In fact, so powerful is this double standard that America barely flinched when the morbidly obese Limbaugh criticized the svelte Michelle Obama for “not project(ing) the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.”

In light of all this, Weight Watchers’ move can be seen as a welcome, if belated, step toward addressing a deeper gender disparity in how we portray weight. It is a disparity at the heart of everything from male obesity epidemics to female eating disorders — and it will end not when the fat lady sings, but when the fat guy finally loses his privilege.

The public service-spirited campaign, part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, is certainly a decent two-step in the right direction. Childhood obesity has tripled in America in the last three decades. And with no turnaround in sight, it’s a deepening crisis with significant long-range consequences – and one that is disproportionately affecting low-income and minority children. The health problems associated with being overweight and obese in childhood range from increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure to the immediate and very real threats of eating disorders, self-esteem issues and bullying.

So for Beyoncé to give some of her time and considerable energy to encouraging activity – and doing both an English and Spanish version of the song and dance tutorial — is an acknowledgment of both the problem and the way it specifically affects different communities. But in the midst of the Let’s Move! campaign to raise “a healthier generation of kids,” there is an awful lot of backward shuffling going on. Because if Mrs. Obama really wants to champion better health for America’s kids, maybe she should start lobbying against her husband’s misguided Race to the Top and its overemphasis on “standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.”

As the author and education expert Diane Ravitch wrote last year, a test-scores-based curriculum – and the slash-and-burn tactic decimating the staffs at “underperforming” schools – is rapidly creating a culture of “teaching to the test” and meaning “less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education.” The Race to the Top fund pushes physical activity to the realm of “after-school opportunity” rather than a meaningful part of the school day.

My children’s school, in a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood, does not have a physical education class. Activity is limited to 15 minutes of recess a day – a luxury many public and charter schools don’t provide at all. Our parents and teachers fought for and won, for one half of last year, an after-school basketball program for the upper grades, and for one half of this year, an after-school dance program for the lower grades – time that has been valuable but vastly inadequate and inconsistent. We are lucky to live in an area abundant in parks and playgrounds, in a community obsessive about baseball and softball, with multiple leagues to choose from. The children in my neighborhood at least have options outside the school day (though they have a 40 percent obesity rate anyway).

It’s always, ultimately, the responsibility of parents to raise children who don’t think football or tennis are just games you play on the Nintendo DS. But either the health of America’s children is a real priority for this administration or it isn’t. And it’s hypocritical for Team Obama to say it’s committed to fighting obesity as it encourages an educational system of overtesting, excessive homework and profound stress on children while it simultaneously decimates their chances for giving real time, energy, and discipline, on a regular basis, to physical activity. And it’s also plain stupid – kids who do sports get better grades anyway.

The obesity-related health mess we’re in won’t go away overnight. But it won’t go away at all if we don’t agree that education and testing are not the same, and that you don’t need to be sitting at a desk to learn the things that will help you for the rest of your life. As Beyoncé sings, “A little sweat never hurt nobody.” And if you want to get kids to move, it’s got to be for more than the length of a song.