Posts Tagged ‘Mountain Dew’

Study Says Low-Fat Milk Isn’t The Healthy Choice It’s Cracked Up To Be For Kids

(s and j)

Milk, the stuff of childhood. Some of us drink it as adults, some might not, but it’s got a reputation for being a staple of our early years. Which is why parents have long used the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics and eventually moved from giving their kids whole milk to reduced-fat milk, for health reason. But is that really the healthier choice?

A new study questions one of the traditional ways of doing things, which makes sense  — reducing fat cuts down on cholesterol and calories — but perhaps is just an assumption of being the healthy choice.

According to NPR, a study of preschool-aged kids published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a sister publication of the British Medical Journal, finds that low-fat milk was associated with higher weight. Which, low-fat milk was doing the opposite of what it was assumed to do.

“We were quite surprised” by the findings, the coauthor told NPR. Both he and his co-author pretty much figured the opposite would happen.

Instead, the connection between skim-milk drinkers and having a higher body weight worked across the board in all racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The researchers add that low-fat milk didn’t keep preschoolers from gaining weight over time, a good thing as kids need grow.

Other studies have come up with similar results in different age groups, and involving other health quantifiers like body mass index.

So how can higher fat lead to lower weight? The two don’t seem to mix, but the researchers have a theory: whole milk makes us feel fuller and thus, content. No room for dessert!

“This is speculative,” says one author, but if you feel fuller after drinking whole-fat milk, “it may be protective if the other food options are high in calories.”

Before any kind of formal recommendation is made to change things up, the researchers think more studies should be done. To that point, critics point out things like the fact that in the study, kids on low-fat milk were already heavier in the first place.

All in all, drinking milk of any kind is going to be better for a kid than 32 ounces of Mountain Dew daily. So there’s that.

Whole Milk Or Skim? Study Links Fattier Milk To Slimmer Kids [NPR]

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Article source: http://consumerist.com/2013/03/21/study-says-low-fat-milk-isnt-the-health-choice-its-cracked-up-to-be-for-kids/

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Fat and Stupid in vogue: New ‘Here comes Honey Boo Boo’ Clips! UPDATED

By April MacIntyre
Aug 6, 2012, 17:38 GMT

Yes, it’s the shameful TLC all-American trainwreck that brings a Georgia turdblossom and her annoying parental unit back for more knee slapping guffaws for the easily amused.

Farting, triple chins, guzzling Mountain Dew and exposed muffin top midriffs on toddlers await those who seek the finer content on Telly.

Yes, it’s the shameful TLC all-American trainwreck that brings a Georgia turdblossom and her annoying parental unit back for more knee slapping guffaws for the easily amused.

But wait, there’s more! A whole family of miscreants await in the Honey Boo Boo Chile universe.

From TLC:

Does a dollar make you holler? HERE COMES HONEY BOO BOO premieres Wednesday, August 8 at 10 PM ET/PT on TLC with two back-to-back episodes. Below, please find a newly-released clip:

Article source: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/smallscreen/news/article_1701865.php/Fat-and-Stupid-in-vogue-New-Here-comes-Honey-Boo-Boo-Clips-UPDATED

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Omdahl: Weighing obesity problem – In

• 
  Lloyd Omdahl

By a scant 2 pounds, I have slipped inadvertently into the “fat” category as defined by the body mass index. That makes me partly responsible for the 80 percent increase in the number of fat and obese people in North Dakota over the past 15 years.

Some folks are fat because they don’t have the spunk to fight their ancestral genes; others are fat because they were raised on french fries and carbohydrates; still others are fat because they stopped working and kept eating. Regardless of the alibi, fat creates all kinds of public problems.

Treating obese patients is terribly expensive. I heard that an obese person with appendicitis made it necessary for the Williston hospital to call a fracking engineer from the oil field to help find the inflamed organ. Do you have any idea what a fracking engineer costs?

At the Fargo airport, an obese gentleman had to go through the body scanner twice to get total body coverage.

In a fit of mindless courage, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that New York was taking charge of the fat problem by banning soda (pop) sales of more than 16 ounces to kids. Of course, the guzzlers and their mothers protested.

“It’s nobody’s business if we let our kids get fat,” they protested.

Well, that’s not quite true.

First of all, Gallup found that a disproportionate number of less-educated, low-income folks are obese. Carbohydrates are the cheapest food around, so they eat what they can afford. Obesity makes them vulnerable to a variety of illnesses and chronic diseases. Unfortunately, these are the same folks who have no medical insurance.

That means their obesity illnesses end up as charity cases in hospitals, or on the welfare program called Medicaid, or left unpaid in emergency rooms. Since there is no obesity fairy, health care providers have to jack up the charges on all of the other paying customers to cover the losses.

So if one person’s behavior imposes a cost on another person’s wallet, it can’t be said that obesity is nobody’s business. It sure is the business of the person with the wallet.

Bloomberg may think that soda (pop) should be restricted, especially for kids, but he is not conversant with America’s experience with prohibition. Within days of the ban, blind pigs run by 12-year-olds would be operating behind Ben Franklin Elementary, pushing 32-ounce jugs of Coke, Mountain Dew, Pepsi and the like.

The first rule of economics is that people respond to incentives, so maybe we should start there.

Folks who are now fattening up on carbohydrates should be encouraged to divert their tastes to fruits and vegetables. Since North Dakota’s fruit-raising is limited, we should get back to gardening vegetables.

In World War II, everyone was encouraged to raise a “victory” garden. We ran Hitler down a hole with carrots, beets and cabbage. If victory gardens could win the war against fascism, it could win the war against fat.

As an incentive for reluctant gardeners, we should include home-grown vegetables in the next farm bill. After all, farmers are being paid to raise food, so why shouldn’t townspeople be subsidized to raise vegetables? We may have to offer larger subsidies for those vegetables with the fewest calories, e.g. kohlrabi, radishes and lettuce. Nothing for watermelon and potatoes.

We should be forewarned that there are people making big money on obesity. These powerful interest groups will oppose change. They will fight back because they think their bottom lines are more important than all other bottoms around.

Omdahl is a former North Dakota lieutenant governor and a retired University of North Dakota political science teacher. Email ndmatters@q.com

Tags:
opinion, omdahl

Article source: http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/369086/group/Opinion/

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Trimming a Fat City

The way last week played out, it was as if the first lady and the mayor had actually scripted a good-cop, bad-cop routine. She toured the friendliest of talk shows to cultivate an audience for her new vegetable-garden book (and maybe harvest a few re-election votes in the process). He dared to make enemies, announcing a coming ban on sugary soft drinks in certain measures and settings. It was a more provocative approach, but a fitting one, given how unfit so many Americans have become. With an obesity problem like ours, we can’t just say grow. We must say no, at least to some things some of the time.

The prohibition Bloomberg wants to implement, if it survives the fury he has whipped up and gets approval (which is expected) from a city health panel, is on the sale of sugary soft drinks above 16 ounces in restaurants, movie theaters and other places where a person is buying an individual serving, not an amount to be shared.

It’s in many senses an absurd and random gesture. A merchant could still peddle a 20-ounce milkshake with more calories than a Coke. A customer could still buy two 16-ounce Pepsis, using tandem vessels and two straws to do the work of one supersize abomination. There are many vendors unaffected by the proposed ban, and there’s a wide world of caloric villains untouched. Man cannot balloon on Mountain Dew alone.

The proposed ban is also an act of government control and regulation that makes no small number of people squeamish. Should we not have the liberty to ingest what we elect to ingest, and to decide whether the pleasure is worth any ill effects? Are we not capable stewards of our own welfare? In general, yes, but the government has taxed cigarettes to high heaven, as a means (successful) of steering us away from them, and made it illegal to partake of many recreational drugs. Like those substances, heavily sugared soft drinks are wholly unnecessary and are implicated in health problems that wind up affecting all of us, not just the individual suffering from them. Food ceased to be a frontier too far when the fraction of American adults who qualify as obese climbed above one in three.

We’re fat, folks. Seriously, dangerously fat. And you don’t need statistics to tell you that; you just need to look around. All three people ahead of me in line in a food shop in Des Moines last month qualified as morbidly obese; they had 900 pounds — easy — among them. One of every two people in line with me at a Coney Island concession stand last weekend were carrying at least 25 extra pounds. When this many people are this overweight, you have not only an epidemic. You have a new normal, a context in which each obese person is less likely to recognize and appreciate the magnitude of his or her health problem because it’s entirely unexceptional.

“Our eyes have adjusted over time,” said Thomas A. Farley, the city health commissioner, during a phone conversation on Thursday, when he and Mayor Bloomberg were out explaining and defending the proposed ban amid threats of lawsuits from restaurant-association lawyers and a hue and cry from the body politic unlike any I’ve heard in a while. The NY1 local news station was one nonstop vox populi of citizens baying that Bloomberg was a tyrant whose real motivation was to wield control over as much of our lives as possible.

Come on. He has targeted trans fats (how much are you really missing those?) and smoking in public places and, now, only those vessels for sugary soft drinks that aren’t so much cups as kegs. Have you seen the ones that fast-food chains sometimes market as “values”? During a TV appearance, Farley displayed an example from KFC. It was gigantic enough for a small marine mammal to do laps in, and its only value is in speeding you toward a double bypass.

In a fascinating article by Claudia Dreifus in The Times recently, a mathematician with the National Institutes of Health said that after crunching various numbers, he had concluded that the single best explanation for the obesity epidemic was the hyper-efficient overproduction of food, which has made it cheaper and encouraged its sale and consumption in portions much heftier than those of yesteryear. The Double Whopper is the new normal, and so is the 32-ounce Sprite.

Bloomberg and Farley aren’t taking anything away from us, not really. They’re just pushing back against the new normal. They’re trying to reroute our expectations and tweak our habits. “The portions that people are served have a big influence on what they consume,” Farley told me. “It doesn’t seem logical, but that’s the observation.” If given a larger measure or enticed to purchase it, many people will upsize their intake without quite recognizing it.

The proposed ban is a step too incremental and contained to be considered a serious challenge to personal freedoms. In fact its greatest potential flaw is its possible futility. And any whiff it gives off of overzealous government intervention must be seen in the context of the billions upon billions of advertising and marketing dollars spent annually by the fast-food industry on exhorting us to pig out.

The proposed ban must also be seen in the context of all the widely debated initiatives that have been rejected, at least so far: steep taxes on sugary soft drinks; prohibitions on the use of food stamps for such beverages and for other nutritionally pointless junk. And the ban isn’t being presented as a harsh, mean substitute for the sort of public education the first lady is engaged in. That education should and will continue. But it has been going on for a while now, and the obesity rate nationally hasn’t dropped.

Is Bloomberg putting us on a slippery slope? Maybe. But we have a long way to slide before there’s a cause for alarm commensurate with the urgency of the problem he’s trying to whittle away at. And the government routinely meddles in the markets and our lives when private behavior has severe public consequences. We reached that larded intersection scores of Big Gulps and dozens of pounds ago.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/bruni-trimming-a-fat-city.html

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