May10
So here’s a study that says that Subway is just as bad for teenagers as McDonalds, based on nothing but counting calories. As though nothing matters except calories.
So here’s a study that says that Subway is just as bad for teenagers as McDonalds, based on nothing but counting calories. As though nothing matters except calories.
From a 3-D printer. Also, printed meat, though that’s actually harder, surprisingly. Could be handy on a space ship, though.
Faster, please.
That are killing you.
I hadn’t known about this:
Researchers are making headway in mapping the genes that help bees overcome these obstacles, including which genes help them safely break down pesticides. Now researchers have identified several compounds that help turn on those genes. They’re present in honey, something commercial bees don’t get to keep–their food supply is taken for human use, and bees are feed sweet substitutes like corn syrup.
Wenfu Mao and colleagues found three compounds in honey that increase the expression of a gene that helps bees metabolize pesticides. The most important chemical is something called p-coumaric acid, which is found in pollen cells. By eating honey, which contains pollen, the bees are exposed to a compound that basically boosts their ability to break down dangerous chemicals. So honey substitutes like high-fructose corn syrup may compromise their health.
You don’t say. Corn syrup isn’t good for anyone. No reason to think it would keep a bee healthy, but apparently the industry fooled themselves into thinking so.
Now that they understand this, maybe there’s something they can do about it, and still harvest honey.
The lower limit of them compatible with human life is apparently zero.
It’s not a new result, but worth pointing out. #Paleo
Asking the important questions: How and what did they eat?
Trying to make it more humane and still affordable.
Of course, some people don’t think if a worthy goal. Iowahawk, who grew up on a hog farm (to the degree that he grew up at all), says that he doesn’t eat bacon because he likes it, but just for spite.
Is it good, or bad for you?
This article is like much nutritional “science” (including the lipidophobia), but it’s much more entertaining.
…and confusion about eggs and fish at the New York Times.
I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:
It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.
I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.
The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.
Beware the high priests of the religion. This is certainly not something that the government should be involved with.
OK, here’s yet another article extolling the terrors of fat:
Also known as Eskimo Ice Cream, akutaq, (pronounced agoodik or agooduk) is a classic native dish that is still popular today. Traditionally, women made a batch of the frosty treat when the men returned with a freshly killed polar bear or seal. Today, modern versions are usually prepared with Crisco, but traditional recipes called for meat and fat from caribou, moose, bears, seals, and fish.
Ingredients: Reindeer fat, seal oil, salmonberries, blackberries
Fat content: It’s hard to estimate without a known serving size of this native treat. But consider this: An average serving of reindeer fat packs a whopping 91 grams of fat. A different version made with fish, berries, and seal oil contains 9 grams of fat.
And you know what? Those on the traditional Inuit diet have very low rates of hearth disease. So what does this do for your thesis? You know what’s wrong with most of the dishes listed? Hint: it’s not fat.
…that almost everyone should be able to agree on. I think that the degree to which whole grains are better than refined is marginal. It’s definitely bad versus worse, not good versus bad.
Some thoughts on the war on Monsanto:
Monsanto is just too perfect an issue for a certain class of urbane lefty already inclined to food snobbery and to activism. It harmonizes with his inherent mistrust of corporations, confirms him in the superiority of his lifestyle choices, and accords with the deep strain of Rousseauian anti-modernism that runs through him. Never mind that a world without GMOs would be a hungrier world, a world in which the poor would have to pay something closer to the prices he happily bears for the peace of mind that comes from the politically correct consumption of roughage. As for the rest, well, let them eat cake. Locally sourced, sustainably produced, certified organic cake.
I did note on someone’s FB page the other day that the GMO hysteria is the modern version of “Let them eat cake.” I don’t want to hear one more word about the “Republican” “war on science.” These nutjobs probably think that Norman Borlaug committed crimes against humanity.
I like me some chiles, but these people are nuts:
Mr. Bosland claims to have broken the two million Scoville mark in February 2012 with his Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. That is the same strength as police-grade pepper spray — a substance no sensible person would let travel through his digestive tract. Mr. Bosland hasn’t yet submitted paperwork to Guinness for the official record, and his claim really burns up Mr. de Wit, who insists his pepper is still the hottest. Only chemical chromatography that measures several samples for their average level of capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their bite, can establish a record claim. But Mr. Scott, one of the few people on Earth who has tasted both varieties, says the Moruga Scorpion is clearly hotter.
I used to grow habaneros on the patio (and I still have a container of dried ones, years old, to spice up a chili), but I hadn’t realized that they were now growing peppers in the mega-Scoville range.
Another blow to the mindless thermodynamic theory, and hope for a breakthrough:
Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.
They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.
Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.
I’ve always been thin, regardless of what I ate (though as I got older, I did put on a few pounds, which came back off when I went paleo), and have never felt particularly virtuous about it. I don’t have much patience for thin people who lecture fat ones about their caloric intake. People do have different metabolisms, and what you eat can affect it, but the “diet and exercise” nazis don’t want to believe it.
Wow, is this article a nutritionally ignorant mess.
I find it not at all surprising that ancient Egyptians suffered from heart disease. We already knew that they had diabetes. Both are caused by a diet heavy in grains.
The assumption that eating fatty foods is the problem is just typical lipidophobia. And I didn’t think that smoking hardened arteries — I just thought that nicotine constricted them.
What is puzzling, though, is the Aleutian hunters. I wonder what their diet was? I’d have thought it similar to Inuit, who despite their high intake of blubber, didn’t have any significant diabetes or coronary disease until they started eating imported flour and sugar.
[Update a while later]
Living to be a sesquicentennarian through super resveratrol. That would be great. It would put my mid-life crisis about a decade and a half ahead of me, instead of behind.
Example 1,876,342 of why there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats:
So, as usual, what has Republican leaders grumbling is not the principle that free people ought to be at liberty to conduct routine business without federal mandates. What irks them is that Obama bureaucrats are marginally more domineering than, say, Bush-era light bulb bureaucrats. (By the way, Daniel Horowitz of RedState reminds us that Rep. Upton’s light bulb ban “made its way into the 2007 energy bill [signed by President Bush], which turned out to be the Obamacare of the energy industry.”) Upton and Rodgers object to what they call FDA’s inflexible “‘my way or the highway’ approach” to the imposition of government standards. That the imposition itself, quite apart from its obnoxious manner, is offensive never dawns on them. And speaking of offensive, how’d you like this Upton-Rodgers line: “In fact, Congress has previously partnered with the restaurant industry to improve consumers’ access to information.” Michael Bloomberg and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz wouldn’t have written it any differently.
As he notes, this is why Obama managed to win again with four million fewer votes than the last time.
Charlie Martin, who is making good progress on his goal toward healthier lifestyle, notes that the focus on weight is misguided:
In the first 13 weeks I lost two inches on my neck and two inches around my waist. In the following four weeks, I’ve lost another 3 inches (a total of FIVE inches) around my waist.
Obviously, I like the Army’s numbers better, so let’s use them — according to the Army, I’ve lost 5 percentage points of my body fat over the last four weeks, with my weight remaining stable. (Other methods give me somwhere around 29 percent, which is the most common value from the Withing body impedance too.) My weight is around 273, and 5 percent of 273 is 14 pounds close enough.
To have lost that much body fat, and still gained roughly 2 pounds over that four weeks means I’ve exchanged some amount of body fat for muscle, while also being around 32,000 kcals in arrears for that whole four weeks.
I’d remind Charlie that a lot of linebackers weigh more than him. I don’t think they’re necessarily fat.
Seven reasons it’s good for your health.
Every time I read something like this, I wonder if I should start drinking it. As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t want to become one of those people who can’t function (or at least think they can’t) without it.
…is not a calorie:
“Our current system for assessing calories is surely wrong,” said evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, the co-organizer of the panel.
In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don’t take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the intestines, such as whether they are cooked or resistant to digestion.
Of course, in addition to that, the thermodynamic theory of nutrition doesn’t take into account how your metabolism responds to different kinds of calories. In a just world, much of the lipophobic nutrition industry would be sued into oblivion, or in prison, bearing responsibility for millions of premature deaths, and sufferers of ill health. Instead, they still seem to be in charge of the FDA.
Prices are skyrocketing partly due to ethanol mandates. If I were the Koch brothers, I’d buy a Superbowl ad to make that point.
[Update a couple minutes later]
One of the commenters points out that we need to get rid of the sugar tariffs, too. Good point.
Why you should probably stop eating it.
OK, so a weight-loss surgeon says that Chipotle is the healthiest fast food?
Weiner said that he eats at the Chipotle if he must have fast food. He cited the chain’s vegetable ingredients and vegetarian and vegan options.
Two questions: 1) what does vegetarian, and particularly vegan food have to do with weight loss and 2) Why would we expect someone who makes a living reducing weight via surgery to have any idea of what good nutrition for weight loss is?
On a related topic, the search “Dr. Oz quack” yields a couple hundred thousand results. A theory that is reinforced by the large amount of email spam I get featuring his name in the subject.
It’s time to end it.
I continue to try to limit my own sodium intake, because it does seem to affect my blood pressure, but trying to extrapolate from individuals with salt sensitivity to the general population is a fool’s errand based on junk science. Of course, a lot of the power mongers out there, like Mike Bloomberg, are unfortunately fools as well.
If you want to be mentally sharp, lay off the sugar. It’s bad for you in lots of other ways, too.
This is a step in the right direction, though they persist in the myth that the problem with potato chips is fat. I’d love to try a collard- or cabbage- or kale-based chip.
D’oh!
Australian scientists have created a pineapple that tastes like a coconut. It took them ten years to develop, but the fruit dubbed as the “piña colada pineapple” wasn’t exactly what they were trying to create.
Scientists, from a government agency in Queensland, were initially trying to develop a new variety of a sweeter, juicier pineapple but instead, created a coconut flavored one and now call it the AusFestival.
I just noticed that both words in the title are combinations of two types of vegetation. Sort of like Palmolive™.
But no hope:
I think that if “wilderness advocates” quoted in the story valued empty ocean more than an oyster farm, they should have paid him to stop, instead of getting the government to make him stop. But hey, that’s just me. The new way to get what you want is to have the state take it for you. It’s different from theft because there are uniforms and everything involved.
Tar and feathers.
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Tragedy Of The Commons
by Rand Simberg on May 15, 2013 at 8:36 amHow do we best maintain the fish population?
I’m hoping that we can soon come up with palatable and healthy substitutes in the lab. Fish is a very healthy source of omega 3s.