FATWORLD is a video game using cute characters and bright colors to teach players the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.

As explained on FATWORLD.org: The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It’s one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You’ll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community.

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Chloe Marshall, a 16-year-old beautician in training, is the first size 16 girl to make it to the final round of the Miss England contest. This story caught my eye for mixed reasons.

Katie’s post about the tragic death of a teenage girl who went under the knife for cosmetic breast surgery, and that beastly Miss Bimbo game rewarding tween girls for aspiring to the depths of Paris Hilton, made me kinda sad. When I read about Chloe Marshall, I did like the fact that she’d broken through the stereotype of thin=pretty by defying the ’size negative 1′ beauty pageant standard.

At the same time, would Ms. Marshall still feel as beautiful as she does now if she hadn’t made it through the first round? Beauty pageants, after all, don’t exactly have a reputation for encouraging healthy female values.

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Our flabby vocabulary’s just added a new word: mirdle, as in, man-girdle. Is there any problem so big that it can’t be solved with a little lycra or spandex? Where some of us just see an unattractive roll of flab fighting to liberate itself from the constraints of buttons and waistbands, Madison Avenue sees a marketing opportunity. The Guardian asks whether Brits will embrace the latest innovation in “body shapewear” :

The question is: will mirdles be a hit here? Probably. “Not everyone has time to go to the gym, so body-shaping pants are great,” says Mithun Ramanandi, accessories buyer at Selfridges in London. Not only has the men’s grooming market traditionally taken its cues from America - warming to hair dye, teeth-whitening kits and tinted moisturisers - sales of men’s underwear are growing faster than women’s (David Beckham’s eye-watering Emporio Armani ads upped their briefs sales by 50%).

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We throw everything but the kitchen sink down the kitchen sink”at least, those of us with garbage disposal units in our drains do. But no matter how fine you grind it, all that artery-clogging grease that goes down the drain has a way of gumming up our waterways, so the city of Raleigh in North Carolina has declared a ban on garbage disposal systems, according to the Charlotte Observer:

Starting March 17, any new home or business tying into the Raleigh sewer system will be forbidden from installing the device, part of an effort to keep sewer pipes clear. Violators could be fined $25,000 a day and have the water turned off. The city is also taking aim at existing garbage disposals, advising residents to avoid the temptation to grind scraps and stray rinds — because they won’t be able to replace the gadgets when they stop working after their 10- to 12-year life span.

“They should place their garbage in the garbage can, not in the sanitary sewer system,” said Dale Crisp, the city’s public utilities director.

The ban has angered some Raleigh residents, who note that plenty of people pour fats and oils down their drains regardless of whether they’ve got a food disposal unit. One contractor who opposes the Raleigh ban told the Charlotte Observer that “high-end clients expect the luxury of in-sink vegetable waste destruction.”

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An increasing number of women bloggers who self-identify as “fat,” and who pride themselves on their larger figures, are taking the internet “fatosphere” by storm. These bloggers are challenging conventional medical knowledge about the relationship between obesity and poor health, stating that the American “obesity epidemic” is really just hysteria, and that not only are Americans the same size they’ve always been in the past, but that being overweight can actually be good for you. Want to know more? Check out some of their blogs at kateharding.net and therotund.com.