In any event, the Men of Fall soon will be seizing the sports spotlight. Football once again will claim preeminence over sprightlier baseball. We are talking here not of European-style football (a/k/a "Soccer" in the US), a, fast-paced yet graceful game with hints of ballet, but of the peculiarly American variety of the sport, where participants routinely weigh in at 250 lbs or more avoirdupois and must wear elaborate protective gear complete with helmets and face guards or risk serious injury in the struggle for touchdowns and field goals.

To call their movements lumbering, despite all that weight to carry, would be pejorative and misplaced. Ample waistlines and the restrictions imposed by a standard football uniform still leave a surprising number of players quite fleet of foot. A sumo wrestler should be half so agile.

Impressed by the size of these ball players, The New York Times sports writer Selena Roberts reported the other day that some American football pros subsist on a daily diet of 12,000 calories. One massive performer is not nicknamed The Refrigerator for nothing. The sturdiest professional footballer recently checked in at 400lbs and others are proud to be in the 300lb range. Of course, these guys do tend also to be lofty, so all that fat and muscle is at least distributed throughout a large frame and powerful limbs. A mere six-footer would be considered almost a runt by comparison.

Roberts was concerned in her article for the potential health consequences of so much weight. In fact, more than one young, apparently healthy but still overweight and probably artery-clogged professional footballer has keeled over and died unexpectedly. Roberts faulted some team coaches for encouraging their players to bulk up, believing this to be an advantage. One hefty quarterback is reported to eat his breakfast corn flakes from a kitchen mixing bowl, the kind that chefs use to prepare food for a dozen or more people.

The above notes are of more than marginal interest in a UN context because they illustrate yet another example of the huge differences that exist between affluent America and much of the rest of the world whose problems now are being addressed at the Johannesburg summit. While many Americans and Canadians are gluttons without ever realizing it -- and are encouraged in gluttony by fast-food merchants who push sales of bulging cheeseburgers and overstuffed sandwiches -- hundreds of millions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans never quite know where their next meal may come from. Or if there will even be one. Factoids: Canadians love to snack between regular meals and are reported to consume seven times as many doughnuts per head as their US neighbors; 26 percent of Americans are obese and 35 percent are overweight.

In the runup to the national and international commemoration of the tragedy of Sept. 11 -- for which President Bush will be in New York and the UN will hold a parallel event in its General Assembly hall -- it's not easy to find a popular subject that is not somehow related to the war on terrorism. Currently, at least one popular US alternate is the battle of the bulge and how best to fight it.

For years, the pendulum for portly Americans eager to slim down has swung from one fad diet to its successor, and on and on. An especially bizarre example was the Drinking Man's Diet popular a few decades ago. This program sanctioned the famous three-Martini lunch, so long as the main part of the meal was lettuce unadorned and cardboard-tasting fat-free cheese. What this may have done to the dieter's liver was left unmentioned.

The latest contest -- actually, it has been going on a long time but has become sharper recently thanks to the entry of federal agencies into the debate -- is between dietary fats on the one hand and carbohydrates like bread ("the staff of life" no more?) and cereals on the other.

A regimen developed 30 years ago by the Manhattan physician Robert Atkins and widely ridiculed by other "experts" ever since -- mainly for his advice on the judicious consumption of tasteful fat meat, other proteins and butter, but few carbohydrates, as a means to lose weight and lower cholesterol levels -- now is gaining acceptance amid signs that the National Institutes of Health may be willing to modify its earlier cautions. For persons interested there is a Web site: www.atkinscenter.com).

Squaring off against Atkins is the leader of the anti-fat brigade Dean Ornish, author of "Eat More, Weigh Less." He also is a physician. Ornish claims that a diet heavy on complex carbohydrates but very, very light on fats will shed weight and keep it off, help reverse heart disease and has even obviated in many of his patients their previous need for bypass surgery. Also, cholesterol dramatically decreased.

Here the problem is all about how not to eat too much, and too much of the wrong food. But in many developing countries a steady daily diet of 2,000 calories is unattainable nirvana. The UN Millennium Summit set nutrition goals which are very far from being met and the current conference may have results no better, without big changes in priorities and in political will.

It goes without saying that in Africa and parts of Asia, the vagaries of climate have been largely responsible for poor harvests and consequent millions of empty bellies. But misguided government policies and out and out corruption also are to blame, the evidence suggests.

The International Crisis Group headed by former President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland just issued a new report on Zimbabwe, where it says the ruling party headed by President Robert Mugabe has not been averse to the use of food supplies (or the lack thereof) as a weapon against its political opposition. The situation has worsened as the country heads into local elections scheduled for Sept. 28-29, which Mugabe's ZANU-PF party aims to win by fair means or foul.

Mugabe is down to address the Johannesburg summit on Tuesday. No doubt, he will be accorded the customary honors just as if he were a democratically-elected leader, which many believe he is not.

The ICG report mentions that while the recent focus of news dispatches from Harare has been on the forcible seizure of farms that had been owned by white Zimbabwean families for generations, an estimated 1.5 black farm workers are suffering even more from this land grab policy, with many of them facing acute hunger. Meanwhile, says John Prendergast, an ICG official recently in Zimbabwe, deaths from AIDS in the country are accelerating because of poor nutrition due to the denial of food.

"The distribution of food aid has been politicized, but the commercial food sector is also increasingly monopolized and corrupted by ZANU-PF," says Prendergast. "The Zimbabwe govenment's strategy of using food as a political weapon is working. People are beginning to die because of their perceived support of the opposition party Movement for Demoocratic Change."

Ahtisaari's group, of which former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans is president, mentioned in its report US "rhetoric" that greeted Mugabe's latest return to power in elections widely considered fraudulent. Rhetoric is not enough; ICG wants more "assertive" diplomacy and "real international cooperation" to promote democratic change in tortured Zimbabwe.