Under heavy fire from its own newsroom, as well as from without, the Washington Post is canceling plans to charge lobbyists and trade groups $25,000 or more to sponsor off-the-record dinner parties at the home of its publisher, Richard Pérez-Peña reports.

Privacy advocates are giving lukewarm support to a set of self-regulatory principles to govern the use of behavioral targeting by advertisers. Four trade groups issued the regulations yesterday following a warning from the Federal Trade Commission that it would act if the industry did not attempt to control how websites and advertisers collect and use personal data, Richard Water reports. The guidelines call for Internet companies to draw users' attention to how their data are being collected, and offer them a chance to opt out. They also state that Internet service providers should not be able to collect information …

Obesity rates went up in 23 states and decreased in none over the last year, according to "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America 2009." In 1980, the average U.S. obesity rate was 15%; now the average is 34.3%, and another 32.7% are overweight, Caroline Scott-Thomas reports. The report was issued by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The report suggests that the federal government should "work with industry to eliminate junk food advertising to children" and that states should "evaluate current snack taxes," among other recommendations. More than 30% …

Consumers are not always getting what they expect when they buy foods that carry the U.S. Department of Agriculture's green-and-white "USDA Organic" seal, write Kimberly Kindy and Lyndsey Layton-Washington. The implied promise is that the food was produced without the use of pesticides or other chemicals in a way that is gentle to the environment. Food and ag industry lobbyists have been successful in convincing the USDA to loosen its interpretation of what "organic" means and to include products that contain trace elements of non-organic substances. The Organic Trade Association, which represents corporations such as Kraft, Dole and Dean …

Men and women shoppers alike are facing a "cacophony of price-cutting promotions" from supermarket chains competing against Wal-Mart supercenters and other discounters, reports Jonathan Birchall. In fact, AMR Research analyst Mike Griswold says that supermarkets are "fighting fully fledged price wars" with each other in some markets. Food price deflation driven by lower commodity costs for staples such as milk and chicken is also putting pressure on supermarkets to cut prices, as are consumer expectations. And Griswold says that evidence suggests that shoppers are increasingly "cherry-picking" the low-priced promotions. Kroger, the largest supermarket group by sales, has been …

Almost one-third of men are now the principal shoppers in the household, and marketers need to better understand how to reach them, writes Peter Leimbach, who, as vp of multimedia sales research at ESPN, might have a vested interest in the testosteronization of the shopping aisles. The channels with the greatest relative importance to men include convenience/gas outlets, warehouse clubs and grocery stores, according to Nielsen data, and men are substantially increasing their average dollar basket size across all of them. Spending in grocery alone has increased a whopping 56% over five years. Furthermore, more than half of …