It's a war out there, and if you're trying to lose weight, you know exactly what I mean.

The average kid is exposed to 90,000 television commercials a year, most of them for exactly the stuff you don't want her to eat. In fact, as many observers have noticed, there's an inverse relationship between how good for you a food product is and the advertising dollars spent on getting you to want to buy it. If you doubt that, just think about the last time that you saw a major ad for broccoli. Quickly now: When's the last time that you saw Michael Jordan endorsing apples?

It gets worse. We live in a world where the biggest premiums are on time-saving conveniences that let us scoot through our ridiculously busy lives faster, doing more things in less time and spending less time on the things that don't "matter" such as preparing food that could just as easily be grabbed at the mini-mart and eaten on the run. Further, the economics of the food industry are such that profits are made by mass-producing stuff with the longest possible shelf life. That in turn lets the food manufacturers make larger quantities of junk that they can sell at lower and more attractive prices because it costs less to make and takes forever to spoil. A bonanza for them, but a disaster for you.

Remember that in the food industry "longer life" refers to shelf life, not to your life.

So, whether you realize it or not, it is a war out there. For too long we've been the victims, buying every heavily advertised piece of sweetened junk that lines the supermarket shelves, either because our kids clamor for it or because it saves us time, or because it tastes good to our blunted, overstimulated taste buds. Most insidious of all is the food industry's ability to convince us that some of this stuff is actually good for us. It accomplishes this with the completely dishonest (or at least misleading) slogans "low fat," "no sugar added" and "no cholesterol" or by naming some god-awful chemical mess of a frozen dinner a "healthy" something or other.