LOOKING FOR LIFE BEYOND CABLE NEWS AND FINDING THAT RESISTANCE IS FUTILE
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
- Louis BrandeisTension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
- Chinese ProverbWell, look who came to dinner!
- 322,715 hits
Recent Comments
Categories
Blogroll
- A Feather Adrift
- A Frank Angle
- An Apostate's Chapel
- Arborist at Dead Wild Roses
- Beneath the Tin Foil Hat
- Bruce the Economist
- desertscope
- Don in Mass
- elyse at fifty four and a half
- eurobrat
- Gingerfightback
- Grumpy Lion
- I TRIED BEING TASTEFUL
- james at Political Dog 101
- Jim Wheeler at Still Skeptical
- Jonolan at Reflections from A Murky Pond
- Kansas Mediocrity
- Katrina at SStorm073's Blog
- Mary Lee's breath of fresh air
- Out of Central Asia Now
- Pino at Tar Heel Red
- Reflections of A Rational Republican
- Republic of Gilead
- Say It Ain't So Already!
- Shortbus Wonderkid
- Sleepygirl at The Blossoming Echo
- SOG City Oracle
- Steve at Cry & Howl
- Talk and Politics
- The Conservative Lie
- The D.I.D. Zone
- The Erstwhile Conservative
- The Fifth Column
- The Oligarch Kings
- The Rantings of Vern Kaine
- Umersultan: the keys to power
- Under the Mountain Bunker
- Vern Kain
OLD STUFF
- June 2015 (1)
- September 2014 (12)
- August 2014 (2)
- July 2014 (9)
- June 2014 (25)
- May 2014 (11)
- April 2014 (8)
- March 2014 (2)
- February 2014 (13)
- January 2014 (16)
- December 2013 (17)
- November 2013 (21)
- October 2013 (49)
- September 2013 (27)
- August 2013 (24)
- July 2013 (24)
- June 2013 (39)
- May 2013 (37)
- April 2013 (34)
- March 2013 (30)
- February 2013 (14)
- January 2013 (35)
- December 2012 (36)
- November 2012 (37)
- October 2012 (56)
- September 2012 (57)
- August 2012 (69)
- July 2012 (46)
- June 2012 (52)
- May 2012 (62)
- April 2012 (53)
- March 2012 (64)
- February 2012 (60)
- January 2012 (59)
- December 2011 (60)
- November 2011 (81)
- October 2011 (82)
- September 2011 (71)
- August 2011 (53)
- July 2011 (77)
- June 2011 (64)
- May 2011 (93)
- April 2011 (77)
- March 2011 (89)
- February 2011 (82)
- January 2011 (80)
- December 2010 (67)
- November 2010 (61)
- October 2010 (62)
- September 2010 (60)
- August 2010 (73)
- July 2010 (65)
- June 2010 (59)
- May 2010 (71)
- April 2010 (74)
- March 2010 (75)
- February 2010 (84)
- January 2010 (130)
- December 2009 (98)
- November 2009 (91)
- October 2009 (99)
- September 2009 (93)
Whatever Works
Tag Archives: health
Why we’re fat: it started a long long time ago. And never let up.
Posted in consumerism, health care
Tagged baby pictures, Coke, health, obesity epidemic, Sugary drinks
You want fries with that?
A surprising new study on diet is out from National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. It turns some dieting sacred cows out to pasture, the most sacred being that 3,500 calories = one pound, gained or lost. (This is pretty important as our children are already the fattest in the world. Something we should care about.)
The story in today’s NY Times is by Jane Brody, a health writer I’ve trusted for 30 years. The study confirms much of the usual dieting advice – most dieters regain the weight, permanent eating patterns have to change for weight to stay off and exercise combined with dieting yields the best most enduring results.
That said, these two nuggets surprised me – one very scary and one very hopeful:
According to the researchers, it is easy to gain weight unwittingly from a very small imbalance in the number of calories consumed over calories used. Just 10 extra calories a day is all it takes to raise the body weight of the average person by 20 pounds in 30 years, the authors wrote.
A more realistic result, he said, is that cutting out 250 calories a day — the amount in a small bar or chocolate or half a cup of premium ice cream — would lead to a weight loss of about 25 pounds over three years, with half that loss occurring the first year.
Hmmmmm . . .
Let’s not pretend anything else. With them it’s always about teh sex
Conservative Christians recoil at anything that touches – no matter how peripherally – on the assumption that females will someday have sex, and that’s only okay when making more little Christians. (Certainly, it’s never okay if the gals dare to enjoy teh sex.)
That, not government overreach, is at the core of the kefuffle over the HPV virus vaccine. That is what it’s really about. That is what it’s always about.
Let us note that Bachmann, who started the silly argument, is an evangelical Dominionist Christian. Those folks aren’t big on women’s rights.
Ohhh, my aching back
My back hurts. It does that sometimes, and when it does the ache plays hell with any plan to sit and/or concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. So I get up and down and press my hands against my lower back (a firmly established medical principle by the way). Any attempt to focus and thus distract does not go well.
Quite a shame since I had so much bloggy brilliance building up inside me. It was all scheduled to burst forth this very day! But my back hurts.
Emerging meme
Suddenly, I seem to be encountering a somewhat archaic idea – have heard it referenced three times in the last few days. Let’s keep an eye on the phrase ‘social cost’, expressed as a legitimate consideration in evaluating freedoms (nothing new, but the philosophical underpinning has been somewhat out of favor in recent decades).
An example today from Andrew Sullivan: Sin taxes are not the same as prohibition; they just help to finance the social costs of the sin.
The subject was a possible ‘sugar tax’ on soda, something that’s been discussed for a number of years. Probably decades – now it seems to be making its way into the media.