Last week was huge for overweight people in the US, with fat-related stories spilling out of the headlines, spreading like mayonnaise over the front pages of newspapers and jiggling like some maniacal creme brulée across the screens of the evening news.
The biggest of the big news was that the US federal government, motivated as always by the deepest humanitarian impulses, is going to redouble efforts to help the country's fat people.
This can mean only one thing: they should run for their lives.
In one of those panzer-like public relations attacks at which government flacks excel, the office of the secretary of health and human services, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration colluded in a carefully timed release of information designed to grab maximum publicity for their saintly deeds.
The flurry of activity was touched off on Tuesday, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study done by the CDC.
Students of this art form know that government agencies seldom assemble data into a publication to announce that everything's cool.
Government studies spell bad news, almost always. And so it was with the gloomily titled Actual Causes of Death in the US, 2000, which found that obesity was leading to 400 000 deaths a year.
"Deaths due to poor diet and physical inactivity rose by 33 percent over the past decade," read the news release, "and may soon overtake tobacco as the leading preventable cause of death."
"This is a tragedy," said CDC director Julie Gerberding. It is also, she said, deploying the inevitable cliche, "a wake-up call".
But it was not so tragic a wake-up call that the government could resist putting together what it called a "tongue-in-cheek" advertising campaign to call attention to it.
The new television ads, said the press release, "show typical Americans finding 'love handles', double chins, and other unwanted body parts in public places". You just can't stop those health bureaucrats from having fun.
The ads were introduced on Tuesday by health and human services secretary Tommy Thompson on the heels of the CDC study, which he also used to announce a "strategic plan for NIH obesity research".
The NIH's research funding will rise to $440 million (R2.917 billion) next year from $378 million in fiscal 2003.
Of course, the strategic plan is not to be confused with the Food and Drug Administration's "action plan".
There is one other element to a well-orchestrated government campaign: activist groups must denounce the government efforts as insufficient.
Such a claim not only pleases government employees, who are thus inspired to find ever more ways to keep busy, but also underscores the continuing need for activist groups.
"The administration is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," said Michael Jacobsen, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, deploying a cliche of his own.
Jacobsen's group calls for a "fat tax" on unhealthy foods, government subsidies for healthy foods, tighter restrictions on food advertising and more.
It's likely that Jacobsen was just being a sourpuss. Much in the campaign last week should encourage him.
Consider Thompson's remark: "We need to tackle America's weight issues as aggressively as we're addressing smoking and tobacco."
Given that the campaign against tobacco has grown to include restrictions on private behaviour unimaginable even a decade ago, Jacobsen might rightfully conclude that the anti-obesity movement is going in his direction.
Of course, there will be occasional defeats along the way. Last year Jacobsen penned a little essay, A Time to Sue? It called for lawyers to sue food companies and restaurants on behalf of people whom "Big Food" has made fat.
The widely noted essay may have inadvertently led to the only bit of good news for fat people last week. The house of representatives passed a bill supported by Big Food, the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, which would bar lawsuits that seek compensation for obesity from restaurants where the plaintiff has eaten.
A similar bill, with the equally gimmicky title Common Sense Consumption Act, awaits action in the senate.
Why is the bill's passage good news for overweight people? Because it treats them as adults - autonomous individuals responsible for what they eat.
There used to be a word for such people: citizens. And they didn't like being nagged. - Bloomberg