An Australian researcher has an idea:

Hard-hitting messages like ... what? "Feel bad about yourself because you have a genetic predisposition to gain weight and your parents fed you crap"?

When I was growing up, smoking was acceptable everywhere. I woke up every morning to the smell of my parents smoking at the breakfast table. (To this day, I don't drink coffee, since I associate coffee with cigarettes. That's how I became a Diet Coke addict.) I remember sitting on a bench in a shopping mall -- I was probably 14 -- and waving away the smoke of the person who'd sat down next to me. The smoker looked at me with pure contempt and said, "You could move, you know."

The problem was me, not him or his habit. Smokers ruled the known world. It was unfathomable to them that nonsmokers were repelled by the noxious fumes they emitted.

Today, as we all know, smokers are increasingly cut off from the rest of us. Not only is it forbidden in offices and restaurants, but you can't even smoke in many of the parks where our kids play sports. Smoking in public is so rare that my kids point it out with disgust every time they see it.

But how do you point out someone in the process of getting fat? A cigarette is a cigarette, and you know it when you see or smell it. But who's to say what types of food are making any individual person gain unhealthy amounts of weight? Do you outlaw eating fast food in public? Tax it until it's unaffordable? Do you go after high-fat food? High carbs? Do you tell people who're sitting down that they need to be up and moving? And if you're going to do that, how do you distinguish between people who're resting and those who haven't done anything to make them fatigued in the first place?

Really, what we're talking about here is pointing a finger at people who're already overweight. Otherwise, I can't see how you distinguish between food that's being eaten for sustenance and food that's being converted to body fat. I sometimes eat fast food when it's the only practical choice -- you probably do too. So is somebody going to tell me and my skinny kids that we can't eat the only available food when we're hungry? Or will they ignore us and pick on the overweight people at the next table or park bench?

Same with physical activity: We'd have to put the pressure on people who're overweight, and ignore sedentary people who, thanks to a lucky roll of the genetic dice, stay thin without exercise.

More to the point: When we marginalize smokers, we don't really marginalize the fact of their addiction. We don't forbid the wearing of nicotine patches or the chewing of Nicorette gum in public places. We say "no smoking," and that's it.

But if we're going to follow that same path in the fight against obesity, we eventually have to turn on obese people and marginalize them. And, really, I can't think of a worse way to achieve an otherwise admirable public-health imperative.

Wednesday blog meat

• Is it my imagination, or did Gina Kolata just write the perfect advertisement for The New Rules of Lifting for Women? Would've been nice if she'd mentioned the book, but if readers take the article as a call for action, they should be able to find it with a quick Google search.
• Unintentionally funny photo caption: "Executing a push-up like this ratchets up the difficulty level ..." Gee, ya think? (This only makes sense if you click on the link and see the photo.)
• This site will be dark for a few hours tonight, and then relaunch on Thursday with a new software platform that should make it even easier for you to contribute news, opinions, and even photos. If you want to see examples of the new platform, check out some of the SB Nation baseball blogs. (Viva El Birdos, the St. Louis Cardinals blog, is my favorite.) Posting with the new software should make things a lot easier and faster for me, which means I'll be able to write more posts than I do now. With the current software, I have to do all the HTML coding with the cut-and-paste method, which means I write everything in a Word file and then transfer it to MPF, which takes twice as much time and effort as I used to invest on the original MPF. It's been worth it to me because so many more people see what I write on the new site, and it's so much easier for readers to post replies and participate in the conversation. The new software should give me -- and us -- the best of both worlds: I'll be able to post faster and more often, and you'll still be able to jump in and tell me how stupid I am whenever the need arises.