Due to the absence of any clear, specific answers, a lot of people believe that obesity comes down mostly to one thing. Of course, what that one thing is differs from person to person: too little exercise, too much food, too many carbs, too many fats, too much processed junk, and so on. And to the extent that we blame society, we are often blaming different things: junk food, soft drinks, TV, lack of fresh vegetables, chocolate milk, and so on. Most people agree that it’s more than one thing, but believe that if we fixed this one thing (or one or two), we would make serious headway.

I’m sure that longtime readers will not be surprised to hear me say (again) I am rather skeptical of this. To take one example, soft drinks, I believe pretty thoroughly that for most people, if soft drinks were banned tomorrow, they would simply switch to something else. I believe this way mostly from experience. Attempts to cut out soft drinks have always been met with greater caloric intake somewhere else. Without fail. And my recent weight loss included a diet regimen of 3-5 sugar drinks a day*.

I consider fast food to be another one of those things. On the one hand, fast food does make misbehaving very easy. And so it’s tempting to blame increasing obesity on the people making it easy. But absent fast food, you still have junk food from the stores. Also easy. Maybe if you get rid of both, but that’s hard. And ethically problematic when you consider how many people consume these things responsibly. Should they be penalized because others can’t? Increasing the taxes on these things hasn’t actually been shown to work. It’s mostly just a regressive sales tax.

But here’s one of the things that I think frequently gets overlooked: fast food establishments actually give you more control over your intake than many of the alternatives. Go to a fast food place, and chances are that they have a 99c menu. Or a cheapskate menu. This menu will typically include reasonably-sized portions for proportional pricing. When it comes to a lot of restaurants, the price incentives are ridiculously skewed towards more, more, more. A half-helping of pasta? $8.95. A full helping? $9.95. When, in fact, the half-helping is likely to be more than you need. The full is twice-as-much. Now, good people are able to eat half and take half home. The ones we need to worry about are those that lack that self-control (note: I am one of them). Fast food establishments do have combo meals, super-sizing, and the like, but their prices remains largely incremental. A buck for a burger. Two? Two bucks. It’s much harder to get anything from Applebee’s for $2, to say the least. And you’re in for a dollar, in for a pound. You get a lot of food – and better food, for that matter – for $7.95… but it’s a lot of food.

Of course, some people will argue that’s the point. When you can get a burrito from Taco Bell for a buck, people get five! The cheapness is part of the problem! But restaurants, whether fast food or family dining, have to make their money somehow. And the factor that there seems to be the most consensus on is that dieting is a matter of portions more than anything else. At least fast food places give you the option of small portions. And don’t financially penalize you for doing so. People don’t take advantage of this, but… having the option is important.

And it all reels back to one of the main things that makes weight so intractable. It’s difficult to externally change someone’s behavior. Making a point of offering healthy food can actually make matters worse. And the same goes for exercise, which people reward themselves for with calories far more than they burned. Fruits and vegetables are nice, but not convenient (even where available fresh, they do not preserve). Junk food is convenient, but not nice. So the enemy becomes convenience itself. How do you fight that?

* – A single sugar drink is a 12oz soft drink can. A 20oz coke counts as two. Fake sugary coffee typically counts as one. It’s inexact, but it’s how I keep track.

I ran across this article on how to make hard-boiled eggs. Despite loving HBEs, I was never formally taught how to make them. I’ve mostly been winging it. So I took the American Egg Board’s (I love that there is such a thing) advice:

Because eggs are hugely high in protein (which makes them an excellent source of protein in our diet), boiling them a long time toughens them. Protein fibers are very sensitive to heat, Helmer said.

The American Egg Board recommends this method for hard-cooked eggs, which Helmer said is “not only foolproof, I’m telling you — you can stake your life on it”.

1. Place eggs in saucepan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Add cold water to cover eggs by 1 inch. Heat over high heat just to boiling.
2. Remove from burner. Cover pan. Let eggs stand in hot water about 15 minutes for large eggs (12 minutes for medium eggs; 18 for extra large).
3. Cool completely under cold running water or in a bowl of ice water. Peel and eat.

The end result a complicated eating procedure wherein I ended up just sucking the yolk out of mostly-raw eggs. It wasn’t bad, but I’m sure Dr Wife will inform me that I did, in fact, “stake my life” on their recipe given the potential health hazards of raw eggs.

The whole discussion about Taco Bell’s 36% beef made me hungry for Taco Bell, so I stopped by one on my way back from Redstone yesterday. It was yummy.

But was it also… beef?!

According to Taco Bell, it mostly was:

Our beef is 100% USDA inspected, just like the quality beef you would buy in a supermarket and prepare in your home. It then is slow-cooked and simmered with proprietary seasonings and spices to provide Taco Bell’s signature taste and texture. Our seasoned beef recipe contains 88% quality USDA-inspected beef and 12% seasonings, spices, water and other ingredients that provide taste, texture and moisture. The lawyers got their facts wrong. We take this attack on our quality very seriously and plan to take legal action against them for making false statements about our products. There is no basis in fact or reality for this suit and we will vigorously defend the quality of our products from frivolous and misleading claims such as this.

Now I feel kinda cheated.

As anyone who follows food will doubtless be aware, the nightly news is a terrible thing. Scares over “this food”, “that food”, “that other food”… you name it, there’s probably been a scare over it at some point or another.

And yet, for some reason, an oddity persists in that people – or should I say, Americans – have been taught over the years to treat the word “fat” as if it were the devil incarnate, something to be driven away with pitchforks and torches. Now, certainly, there are definitely some things that if eaten every day can cause you problems.

But then again, the second link I just posted is a combination of HFCS and water… no fat at all. Tricky, aren’t I? Of course, sugar is something that it’s been argued Americans eat (or drink) way too much of, and the argument over sugar is nothing new.

To his credit, Mr. LaLanne doesn’t tell people they “can’t” eat sugar, just that hey, they should watch how much of it they eat. And his selling of a juicer in his later years (fruit juices are mostly sugar) may seem slightly hypocritical, but I’d still rather see people having fresh grapefruit juice than HFCS-laden sodas, and he himself was in dang good shape right until his final days.

The joke of the graph above is rather obvious. If you – as a “scientist” (I use quotes for a reason, since cherry-picking data isn’t science) – were to take a large number of data points and throw out anything that disagrees with a foregone conclusion, you’d be laughed at. Yet somehow, Encel Keys, the guy who is also the father of the Meal Rejected by Everyone (then called “K-rations”), and who along with his wife was relentless in pushing the “Mediterranean Diet” later in life, got away with this. The graph at the top of this blogpost is important for a reason; on the left side is Keys’ “research” graph, while on the right is a graph putting back in all the data Keys just threw out.

Notice the difference. If you plot “Japan vs USA” on the “Fat vs Heart Disease” curve, you get this wonderful, sky-is-falling, “correlation” between fat intake and heart disease. But if you start putting other nations in… the French, despite eating an “alarming” amount of fat, have no greater heart disease risk than the Japanese. The Swedes eat as much fat as the US, yet have 1/3 the risk of heart disease. Plot the data another way, cherry-picking a different 7 countries, and you could easily come up with the Atkins Diet.

Go further and widen the study, and you wind up with other studies… the most credible of which, the Framingham Study, concluded after 22 years of observation of a wide variety of subjects: “There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and the subsequent development of CHD in the study group.” The World Health Organization in 1983 came to the same conclusion in the European Coronary Prevention Study.

So why the deal with food in the US? Fishy and/or stupid health claims on the label of a “food” seem to draw people in. Candies that are essentially 100% refined sugar label themselves as fat free in order to sucker people in. A rush of shoddy studies regarding fish oil led to everyone labeling their products as “enhanced with omega-3”, “high in omega-3 oils”… you get the idea.

Chasing a particular nutrient, avoiding a particular nutrient or food, is the result of fads. Eating according to fad isn’t going to help you.

In the end it comes down to… well… the same old story. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

I don’t know what it says about me that…

Alabama law firm Beasley Allen has filed a class action lawsuit against Taco Bell that claims the chain is falsely calling its taco filling “seasoned beef” and “seasoned ground beef” when allegedly the mixture, which would be more properly called “Taco Meat Filling,” only contains 36% beef. The firm is not asking for money, but is instead asking the chain to make changes to their menu to reflect the food they are serving.

… makes me hanker for some processed taco beef product.

Kelsey: Here is the cookie dough Bill ordered from Sadie’s cookie sales.

Mom: Bill ordered cookie dough?

Mom: Bill, Kelsey dropped off the cookie dough you ordered for Sadie’s preschool. I didn’t know you ordered cookie dough. You want me to make cookies?

Dad: {shrug} I thought I was ordering cookies. But mostly, I was just ordering what Sadie was supposed to be selling.

Me: I think I am going to get myself some of that cookie dough.

Mom: You can’t. It’s in the freezer and I don’t make cookies on demand.

Me: I was just going to have some dough.

Mom: You can’t eat dough without the cookies.

Me: Why not?

Mom: You’re not supposed to. It’s bad for you.

Me: I don’t think it’s any worse for you than cookies. And it tastes good. Ice cream companies spent lots of money replicating the taste for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Mom: Yeah, but that’s not actual cookie dough. Besides, I have plans for that dough.

Me: Plans? You didn’t even know you were getting it until fifteen minutes ago!

Mom: Yeah, but I’m going to make cookies. Besides, we’re eating dinner shortly.

Me: You really just don’t want me to eat any of that cookie dough, do you?

Mom: Cookie dough was meant to be cooked.

Bloomberg is getting some approval for his desire to prevent people on food stamps from buying soft drinks:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought federal permission on Wednesday to bar New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks.

The request, made to the United States Department of Agriculture, which finances and sets the rules for the food-stamp program, is part of an aggressive anti-obesity push by the mayor that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax on the sugared drinks.

Public health experts greeted Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal cautiously. George Hacker, senior policy adviser for the health promotion project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said a more equitable approach might be to use educational campaigns to dissuade food-stamp users from buying sugared drinks.

“The world would be better, I think, if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages,” Mr. Hacker said. “However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not want to stigmatize people on food stamps.”

The mayor requested a ban for two years to study whether it would have a positive impact on health and whether a permanent ban would be merited.

I cannot say that I share Mr. Hacker’s concern about stigmatizing food stamp beneficiaries on two fronts. First of all, I don’t see how preventing them from getting any particular type of product “stigmatizes” them, unless “stigmatize” should be redefined to “not get whatever they want.” Second, if it does stigmatize people on food stamps, I really don’t care. If they need it, they won’t care. If they care, they probably don’t need it. Of all of the things I am worried about, someone feeling put upon because they can’t use somebody else’s money to buy a product they want but do not need is not something that really concerns me.

That being said… seriously? I have no philosophical objection to this idea, but do you really expect it to do much of anything? Either they want coke specifically or they want something sweet. If they want coke, they’ll buy it with whatever money they have. The thing about coke is that it is cheap. If they want sweet, they can get something else sweet and will be consuming the sugar through other means and they’ll still probably be doing it on the taxpayer’s dime. And how do you define soft drinks, anyway? Ban coke, okay, but what about Sunkist? Sunny Delight? Cranberry juice? Do you base it on sugar grams per mililiter? Carbonation? What? And if you’re penalizing soft drinks for being too sugary, what about candy?

Which I guess means in a way that I agree with Hacker. Except that I think that the only thing this law actually accomplishes is to register your disgust with poor people drinking bad things on your dime. It’s one of those things that allows us to feel superior to those poor dopes. A way of saying “Take that!”

So, in short, I can’t say that I object, but it strikes me mostly as muscle-flexing and ineffectual finger-wagging.

Arapaho is Mountain Dew country. You go to any convenience store and you see more real estate given the Mountain Dew than you see to Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Unfortunately, Arapaho is also partial to homogeneity. They like things plain. Nearly every restaurant in Callie is a burger place. Even the Mexican restaurants here eschew spicy. I could go on and on, but this has repercussions when it comes to Mountain Dew. Namely, they have rows of the stuff but they only have one flavor. Sometimes they don’t even have diet available, much less Code Red, Voltage or (dare to even hope) Livewire. Oh, well they do have the Throwback stuff, so maybe that’s taking up the slots they’d otherwise be giving Diet or Code Red.

I am a big fan of Mountain Dew Livewire. Unfortunately, during my tenure in Deseret it was nowhere to be found. Coworkers at Falstaff would let each other know when we were crossing state lines to get some. Whomever is in charge of Deseret distribution apparently really doesn’t like the stuff. Arapaho seems to be in the same orbit, except that because of the above it’s also missing Code Red and Voltage.

Mountain Dew has recently begun its second Dewmocracy, where they introduce three flavors and allow people to vote on which one to keep. The last time they did this gave us Voltage, though I liked all three options. Unfortunately, Arapaho is undewmocratic because the three flavors are nowhere in sight at convenient stores. Absent some sort of sale, the prices at Safeway are extremely high and the sale they were running was only if you stock up on the same product (no “mix and match” between Pepsi products). So I had an itch to try some of these new Mountain Dew flavors but no means with which to do so.

While driving my route for the Bureau, I stopped at a convenience store in Bass. Much to my shock and amazement, they had Mountain Dew Game Fuel. I never cared all that much for Game Fuel, but it was still at least something different. So I got it and it was my prized possession. I held on to it a couple days for an opportunity that I knew I would be able to completely enjoy it. And… it was flat. It had a sell-by date from last November.

Fortunately, last night I stopped by Safeway and they had a mix and match special going. So I bought all three. Here are my thoughts, for anyone interested:

• Whiteout – It’s billed as smooth citrus. The smooth (which is really just sweetness) kind of overwhelms the citrus, though. I think it’s too sweet, honestly. Kind of cool that it was actually white rather than clear as I had expected.
• Distortion – My ex-roommate Dennis called it. It’s like Mountain Dew Baja Blast that they sell exclusively at Taco Bell. I didn’t like Baja Blast when it first came out but it grew on me. Distortion, possibly by virtue of it following the too-sweet Whiteout, I liked coming right out of the can.
• Typhoon – Very fruity. My least favorite of the three. Whiteout grew on me after a little while but Typhoon really hasn’t. It honestly reminds me of the cheap sugarwater juice that Mom used to pack in my lunch when I was younger.

Right now the vote is tilting in favor of Whiteout. Typhoon follows closely behind. Distortion is toast. Oklahoma and Arkansas are apparently Distortion’s base. Whiteout is carrying few states, but they are dominating California and running up a serious total there. Of course. Now I’m thinking that I might start need to voting strategically. Since Distortion can’t win and Whiteout is the more preferable of the two, do I pick the lesser of evils? Or do I say “I don’t need another flavor of Mountain Dew” and vote my conscience?

Back in the early days of Hit Coffee, there was a vote at my former employer. Winning that vote probably ended up gaining me 10 or 15 pounds. Free soft drink fountains are bad for you. Especially when they have Mountain Dew.

In a discussion about fast food, the In-N-Out Burger chain in California came up. I hear Californians sing its praises all the time. But I also hear people say that Californians only like it because it’s the home team, so to speak. I’ve never eaten there, so I don’t know how good their food is. But the whole discussion reminded me of something I have sort of noticed as I’ve moved around from place to place. Local establishments sometimes get a real pass on quality. I really noticed this when we moved to Estacado. There are a few places in Santomas that everybody says we must eat there. When I do, I find that it’s… pretty typical. Clancy and I were constantly disappointed with the food selection in Cascadia when we lived there and no place disappointed us more than the ones that were billed as local institutions. None of them were really bad (okay, one was), but there was really nothing remarkable about them. Sometimes it’s just the same food with a $2 markup.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first is a matter of acquired taste, which requires no real explanation. Second, the positive associations with the place that are not culinary in nature become transferred to the food. You go somewhere that is convenient, you have a good time, you think of the place positively, and you forget that the food is no better there than at the local IHOP. The last possibility that comes to mind is simply hometown pride. You like the food because it’s local.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these. I’m sure if I look back at some of the places that I thought of as institutionally great, it has more to do with the associations and disassociations. I associate it with a good time. I disassociate it with the formulaic makings of chains. And of course it gets some advantage of being different but also some of the advantage of being familiar. I have really grown to appreciate this as I have moved around. I spent my last several weeks in Cascadia eating at various non-chains specifically because they were non-chains (we’re going to put regional chains under the same category as “non-chains” for the purposes of this post). Was there food any better than a national chain I could have been eating at instead? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But they were definitely places that I knew I would not be able to eat at anymore once I got to Callie. Places that made me appreciate Cascadia.

I have trouble getting through to my father on this point. He and I have the tradition of Saturday Morning Breakfast. We uphold it whenever I am in town, though we don’t limit it to Saturdays. It used to be that we would go to McDonald’s one week and then Happy Burger – a regional chain – the next. Back and forth, back and forth. However, when I go back now, I don’t want to eat at McDonald’s. I have McDonald’s everywhere else I go. Nor do I want to eat at Denny’s, where Dad likes to go for variety and a good deal. I want to eat at Happy Burger. Now, Happy Burger actually is better than McDonald’s, regional pride aside, but it’s not nearly as much better as I tend to think it be. It’s something that makes me appreciate being in Delosa.

UPDATE: Added entries for FiberOne 80 Honey Squares and FiberPlus Cinnamon Oat Crunch. There’s one other brand I’ve tried. I’ll see if I can track it down to add it.

As most of you know, I have become an evangelist of high-fiber cereal. I believe that this cereal has had an enormous effect on my weight loss (30 pounds in six months and nearly 15 in the ten months since). But all fiber breakfast cereal is not created equal. So below is a list of your options in the order in which I prefer them. They’re not organized by taste as the best tasting option (FiberOne Caramel Delights) is below the worst tasting one (Rat Turds). It’s a combination of health content versus taste. If you don’t like one, try others.

FiberOne Honey Clusters – This has become a staple of my diet. It has just a little bit of sugar (6g per serving), but it’s enough that you don’t have to add sweetener for it to be edible. I often do anyway, though. The texture is flakes. There are 13g of fiber per serving, which amounts to 51% of your daily alotment. I typically eat 2-3 servings per meal, so that comes to well over 100% of my daily alotment of fiber and about 15g or so of sugar. Not ideal, but really not bad. If you’re on a low-carb diet or if you have serious blood-sugar spikes, though, it may have too many carbs for you. Clancy found herself falling back to sleep after eating them, though nothing like that ever happened to me. To me, the Honey Clusters are the best balance of fibery health and minimal sugar. {Score: 46, Taste: 8, Health: 7, Consistency: 8}

FiberOne Honey Squares – It bills itself as being 80 calories and only lists 3 grams of sugar, but that’s largely attributable to (a) smaller serving sizes and (b) lighter texture. The serving is 30g instead of 50g or so, and 3/4 a cup rather than a full cup. Bring those numbers in line and it’s health content is nearly identical to the Honey Clusters. However, the light texture actually means that you are likely to eat less. Taste-wise, these are competitive with the Honey Squares. There is a little bit of a weird aftertaste with these. I’m not sure what that’s all about. Perhaps due in part to the novelty of this new selection, but I find myself gravitating towards these and away from the Honey Clusters. Both are really good, though. The Honey Squares are lower in fiber (10g/40%), but that becomes less of an issue when you account for serving sizes.

Kashi GoLean Original – This may well be the all-around healthiest cereal, though my scoring system places more emphasis on fiber and sugar rather than protein. It has about the same sugar content as F1 Honey Clusters and a little less fiber (10g/srvg), but it also packs in 13g of protein whereas the protein content of Fiber One cereal is minimal. GoLean also tastes the best without sweetener of any of these options. It also has more a variety of shapes and texture than the others. However, it does get soggy quicker than the rest. I personally find that the missing fiber content makes a difference, so it’s not my first choice. Another plus of GoLean is that it is that you don’t even need milk to eat it. On our road trips, I try to make sure to bring GoLean simply because it makes for good, high-fiber snack food. {Score: 46, Taste: 8, Health: 8, Consistency: 6}

FinerOne Caramel Delight – It’s a fibery knock-off of Cinnamon Toast Cruch. Or at least that’s what it tastes like to me. Bar none, this is the tastiest cereal of the group. Like GoLean, it can be eaten independently of milk. Unfortunately, it tasted a little too good and I found that I had difficulty stopping eating it the same way that I have problem with Kids’ breakfast cereal. So it was on the basis of it tasting too good that I had to stop eating it. It has a higher sugar content than the others, as well, with 10g per serving. The missing fiber (9g/35% per serving) also made it overall less satisfying for my digestive system than most of the other options. But seriously, if I had to choose between this stuff and the really sugary breakfast cereal, I’d take this stuff. If you have kids that need a little sweetness, I recommend trying this on them. {Score: 37, Taste: 10, Health: 3, Consistency: 8}

Kellogg’s FiberPlus Cinnamon Oat Crunch – A solid replacement for the FiberOne Caramel delight, if you want some variety. They compare to cheerios in the secular cereal world. The sugar-per-serving content is pretty low (7g), though partially accounted for by defining a “serving” as 3/4 a cup instead of a full cup. On the other hand, the fiber-per-serving (9g/35%) is higher if you eat more of it. There’s a better balance of soluble and insoluble fibers here than in most of the cereals mentioned.

FiberOne Original (aka “The Rat Turds”) – This was the cereal that I tried first and I’m glad that I did. It substantially lowered my expectations of what fiber cereal should taste like. They don’t taste terrible. In fact, with enough sweetener on them, I liked them for the first couple weeks. But day in and day out, I got tired of them pretty quickly. I guess the novelty wore off. The great part of this cereal is that it has no sugar! Chances are, though, that you’re going to want to add some. But even there, you can add as much or as little as you want. What I noticed was that I started having to put more and more sweetener in it to get it to taste okay and then I started adding genuine sugar and then a little more eventually I was losing ground compared to the competitors. However one thing I found this good for was at work. Mindstorm offered free milk and free chocolate milk. Add just a little bit of chocolate milk into the milk and it actually tastes pretty good. Each serving has 14g of fiber, or 57% of your daily alotment. Two servings typically constitutes a meal, so once you eat this, you’re good on fiber for the day. Notably, one serving of this is half the size of a serving of any of the other options. So you don’t have to eat as much and that leaves more servings so you get twice as many meals out of it. Helpfully, F1 separates the content into two bags to keep it from going stale. The “Rat Turds” moniker actually comes from their appearance. They don’t taste like I would imagine actual rat turds to taste. {Score: 42, Taste: 3, Health: 10, Consistency: 8}

Kashi GoLean Crunch – There are actually two variations of this, the main difference being the inclusion of almond slices in one. What’s particularly notable about this line is that the cereal is abnormally chunky. They’re the only ones I’ve tasted that can work as finger food. They also taste good in milk, though, and require no additional sweetener. They taste a little granola-ey. They have about 13g of sugar, which isn’t great, and only 8g of fiber (32%/serving). But like the Caramel Delights, they’re more kid-friendly than the alternatives. Not quite as addictive, though. {Score: 33, Taste: 9, Health: 3, Consistency: 8}

FiberOne Shredded Wheat – If you like shredded wheat, give this a try. I don’t care for SW myself but once it was all that was available at Safeway so I gave it a shot. No surprise, it didn’t do much for me. It has similar health content to the Caramel Delight (12g of sugar instead of 10, same fiber content) but without the great taste. Additional sweetener is optional. {Score: 22, Taste: 6, Health: 2, Consistency: 4}

FiberOne Raisin Bran – I don’t do raisin bran, so I have no idea how it tastes. 11g of fiber (43%) and 13g of sugar per serving.

FiberOne Grape Nuts – Inexplicably, this does not exist. I can’t imagine that adding fiber to grape nuts would affect the taste at all. Come on FiberOne, get to it!