Excess insulin causes a range of maladies. People have the choice of managing their insulin or not.

Paula Deen has diabetes — for three years. Just as in the movie “Casablanca,” people are shocked! Shocked! But before demonizing Ms. Deen and her butter-filled southern recipes, let’s look at what the public should gain from this overhyped, simplified media story:

The most logic approach when starting a weight-loss program is to go on a diet and increase your “calories out” versus your “calories in.” Consequently Jan. 1 all gyms are full and everyone tries to tighten their belt by eating less. Statistics show that 85 percent of people who go on a diet will gain their weight back within two years. Those are lousy odds! So what does really work? Here are some weight-friendly eating habits you can adopt for successful permanent weight loss:

Historians often view wars as ending with winners and losers. We “won” World War II — and the Germans and Japanese lost. In most human conflicts results are less clear-cut. People don’t tend to think of the “War on Cancer,” started by President Nixon, and the “War on Terror,” begun by the second President Bush, as operating in the same mental realms.

Food changes gene expression — directly. Eat a bowl of rice and you can turn off genes controlling cholesterol synthesis. Right out of the pot. You’ve been eating genetic information — probably all your life. The data comes from China, from Lin Zhang and his group at the University of Nanjing.

America’s health care budget is $2.6 trillion. On its own it would rank as the fifth largest economy in the world. We’re 49th in overall mortality. How much of this vast spending goes to health prevention? A pittance. Not enough people make money on preventing illness, though plenty make money treating it. What is most cost-effective for our national health does not yet gain entrance to the health care debate.

Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare survey, where Gallup asks Americans to say how much they weigh and has every year since 2001, reported Nov. 29 that Americans are an average of 20 pounds heavier than they were 20 years ago. The average weight for an adult man is now 196 pounds and for a woman it is 160 pounds, 20 pounds more than in 1990. Each of them would prefer to weigh between 16 and 22 pounds less.

As was clear in Part I, many factors can help revive the American economy. They also hold many lessons for individuals. A lot of what has kept the United States competitive since the 1970s has been successes in technology like those from Silicon Valley, where at least 35 percent of the engineers are foreign born; a long list of our major entrepreneurs and innovators were born outside the United States.

Is America’s economy failing? Why are 45 percent of families barely making it? Is a nation with stalled growth, a corrupt and over powerful financial sector, staggering debt, political dysfunction and fighting two wars overseas while its infrastructure crumbles, able to come back?

“Beer and valium, that’s how I sleep. Works every time, a perfect night’s sleep.” So said an actor friend of mine, who often had trouble “coming down” after a play and used this cocktail three or four times a week. Yet often alcohol plus sleeping pills do not “work.” Thirty percent of American women use some kind of sleeping pill each week, but combinations are rarely remarked upon — though clinically common. Studies of them are relatively sparse, as researchers tend to look at one drug at a time.