Here is an executive summary of the messages put out by the AFL this week.

Supplements are the root of all evil, except if they are made by the sponsor of the Brownlow Medal red carpet, in which case they must be - wink, wink - good for your body, even if that sponsor itself has had a run-in with a regulatory authority this year over claims of producing an everlasting glow of good health.

Alcohol abuse is a serious and ongoing problem in football - most acutely obvious in this season of mad Mondays - but please indulge this Brownlow night segment in which four medallists sit around a table, ostensibly to talk about the good old days, in fact to feature in lots of soft-focus shots of them pouring drinks, sipping drinks and pouring more drinks, also dreamy cutaways of idle drinking vessels.

Oh, yes, and two shots of them picking at a meal, the same mouthful twice, the way drinkers do.

Betting, if not massively policed, stands to destroy professional sport, including the AFL, whose integrity department will monitor the movement of every last cent, but in the meantime, here in the middle of the Brownlow Medal coverage are a handful of gratuitous updates by our corporate bookmaker, which can't be for information's sake - since they blare out only the bleeding obvious - and so can only be to habituate viewers to the idea of turning everything into a bet, and when that loses, into another, just the way the fixers like it.