This blog is overrated.

Consumerist usually does an excellent job as an unapologetic advocate for consumers’ interests in increasingly tough economic times; for instance, the Gawker Media blog has a whole series on the stealth-inflation-causing “grocery shrink ray” even though it’s more or less an invitation for “lazy fat Americans DESERVE to pay the same amount for smaller packages” moralizing. But this list of “Easy Ways To Save Money At The Supermarket” is something of a disappointment. With tips like “Make a list and stick to it,” “[U]se a basket, not a cart. Empty space cries to be filled” and — seriously — “Eat a meal before shopping,” the implication is that trips to the grocery store are expensive because stupefied, stomach-led shoppers mindlessly load up their carts with impulse buys. Some of the advice is completely inaccurate, like the suggestion that the perimeter of the store is “where the healthier, cheaper items hide.” Healthier, probably, but fresh fruits and vegetables are hardly cheaper than processed food. Let me know when one of these lists is written by someone who actually cooks.

The Times’ food-nannying “Well” blog reports on an utterly perplexing study:

Half the women were sent a letter describing the survey as a study of fruit and vegetable intake. The letter included a brief statement of the benefits of fruits and vegetables, a Five-A-Day sticker and a Five-a-Day refrigerator magnet. The rest of the group received a general letter, without mention of fruits, vegetables, stickers or magnets.

Within 10 days of receiving the letters, the study subjects answered a food frequency questionnaire and were asked to recall how many fruits and vegetables they had eaten in the past 24 hours.

The group that had received the Five-a-Day propaganda reported significantly higher consumption of fruits and vegetables. The conclusion: people lie about how many fruits and vegetables they eat. “Because the two groups were randomly selected, average fruit and vegetable consumption should have been similar.” Really? Wasn’t one of the groups just told repeatedly about how important it is to eat fruits and vegetables? Why wouldn’t that make a difference in their eating patterns? This looks like some pretty incredible cynicism on the part of the nutritional establishment; the de facto admission seems to be that nutrition researchers regard the general public as a bunch of liars — and their own public health campaigns as completely ineffective.

Great post from Megan McArdle (did I just write that?) about the absurdity of the idea that one’s weight is entirely controlled by willpower. “More and more, the evidence on diet is showing just how effective your appetite is at putting your weight where your body wants it to be.”

A couple months ago, when the theory was floated that diet soda might somehow make people gain weight, the obvious consternation among conventional-wisdom-spouters was as delicious as a Boylan’s cane cola. They weren’t sure which way they wanted this to go, so as to sustain the least damage to their essentially moral view of weight. If it’s not true, that would mean that there’s no punishment for upsetting the natural balance of things and enjoying a sweet carbonated drink with no calories. But if it is true, then they might have to admit that losing weight is more complicated than “eat less, exercise more.”

Once you’ve started, it’s hard to stop following Julia Allison, Star editor-at-large, Gawker-created celebrity and Harold Ford ex. It would be one thing just to read her blog, or even Twitter, and leave it at that, but she’s a gateway drug to a whole world of New York media “fameballs.” BFFs Mary Rambin (handbag designer and sister of soap star Leven) and Meghan Asha (tech heiress.) Technohipster estranged ex Jakob Lodwick (”technohipster”: an Objectivist software developer with unfortunate views about women who wears dark blue, rather than black, jeans.)

Over the last few months, this whole culture seems to be gripped with the “cleansing” trend. A cleanse apparently involves drinking nothing but lemon juice spiked with cayenne for three days while posting about it to your Tumblr; the goal is to rid the body of unspecified impurities after a period of enjoying oneself too much. “Healthy eating from now on so I NEVER feel so gross I need to cleanse again,” Mary writes. Healthy eating itself, though, is not enough to purge the “gross” feeling; one must atone.

A lengthy exploration of this phenomenon would be superfluous. It’s pretty much the common descendant of exorcism and bulimia. But Tumblr’d.