"It's only natural to combine them ...."

Food and sex. Those are my two passions.
It's only natural to combine them.

-- George Costanza
Seinfeld, "The Blood"

The Hardee's/Carl's Jr. commercial featuring Padma Lakshmi was just bound to get some "sensitive" folks all worked up. Like Los Angeles Times columnist Dan Neil:

The sexualization of fast food takes us down the same path of old cigarette advertising that showed doctors, athletes and cowboys smoking like crazy and living active, aerobically challenging lives; or beer commercials, in which everybody is as sleek as ferrets. These products have definite, measurable health consequences, and it's the job of the advertising's imagery to push these consequences as far offstage as possible.

Neil closes his column with this:

And so you have the impossibly lean and beautiful Lakshmi wolfing down a 1,000-calorie burger. Now that's hard to swallow.

I have a good friend whose wife is a personal trainer. She'll flat-out tell you that she heads to Krystal two or three times a month for a ten-bagger -- that's a sack of 10 "small, square" Krystal burgers for those who've never heard of such. She's 5'7" and, like, 120 lbs and she'd probably have a few bones to pick with Mr. Neil vis-à-vis his "hard to swallow" quip.

So there.