I don’t know anything about bodybuilding, or I didn’t until I watched Raising the Bar 2, a brand-new documentary by Mike Pulcinella (Mike wrote it, shot and edited it).  Mike often submits comments to this site, and we have corresponded by e-mail a number of times.  A couple weeks ago, Mike asked me whether I’d be interested in watching his new documentary, and I jumped at the chance.  Based upon Mike’s many comments to this site, I know him to be a thoughtful guy. I knew that he must’ve found something worthy of his time in this freakish-seeming endeavor of “bodybuilding.” 

In this documentary, Mike follows his brother Dave Pulcinella (and Dave’s significant other, Jenn Emig) as Dave trains for and competes in high-level bodybuilding competitions.  Before you jump to the conclusion that this is just some guy following his brother around with the camera, take a look at the trailer for “Raising the Bar 2,” available at Mike’s site. As you will see, Mike is a skilled filmmaker and storyteller and he is careful to make sure that this story retains real-life texture.  Mike’s edits are crisp and the soundtrack works well.  As for the storytelling, this kind of video could only have been accomplished by a filmmaker who had gained the complete trust of the participants.  In sum, this documentary is not always a glowing endorsement of Dave.

The documentary was compelling on several levels.  First of all, viewers will have an opportunity to see what is really like to compete in the sport of bodybuilding.  Full disclosure: before I saw this film, I thought that this sport was freakish.  I still think the sport is freakish, although I have now been reminded that the participants are real human beings and they are not physically or emotionally homogenous.

The sport ostensibly involves bodies, of course, bodies as machines, but as Dave Pulcinella comments, “It’s always a mind game.”  How could it not be?  After all, while the competitors are working up to the actual competitions, they must repeatedly force-feed themselves enormous amounts of food–Dave jams down 18 chicken breasts each day, to go with apparently endless numbers of eggs.  Simply hauling home the food from the grocery store would seem sufficient to build up muscles.

So why do these people participate in the sport?  Maybe the answer can be found in a joke often told by bodybuilders:

Q: How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:  Three.  One to screw it in and two to say “Dude, you’re huge!”

The documentary moves us toward Dave’s participation in the Masters National Competition in Pittsburgh.  As you can imagine, there are ups and downs along the way.  Simply watching the workouts is exhausting.  What was surprising to me is that sculpting one’s body in such extreme ways requires a tremendous amount of planning and discipline.  It’s not like you can just go to the gym a few times a week.  (more…)

Interesting article from Salon.com.  The bottom line is that you’re not going to find a lot of the kind of meat you’d buy for your own consumption at a grocery store.   Yes, there is a reason that you can get a huge bag of dog food for not a lot of money:

Traditionally, much of the protein in pet food comes from animal byproducts. The pet food industry nicely parallels the human agricultural industry, providing a convenient way for food producers to use up the spleens and bones and chicken feet that American consumers don’t have the palate for. Even diseased and dying animals are allowed in pet food, as long as they’re processed in such a way to destroy any microorganisms, Syverson says. All of those myriad pieces and parts end up as appetizing ingredients like “poultry byproduct meal,” “meat-and-bone meal,” and “animal digests.”

Pet food is also a handy way for meat processors to get rid of brains and spines from cows and sheep — the parts with a high risk of housing prions, the rogue proteins that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. While such parts are banned from human foods and from animal feed intended for cows and other ruminants, they’re A-OK for the family pet . . .

The good news for pets and owners is that animal byproducts in pet food may not be as gruesome as feared. For years the pet food industry has been, well, dogged by persistent rumors that meat from horses and from euthanized cats and dogs finds its way into pet food. “They do not use horse meat,” Ekedahl says, and “as a condition of membership, [Pet Food Institute members] affirm that none of their rendered material will contain cats and dogs. The public just wouldn’t stand for it.”

So we’re probably not feeding cats and dogs to our cats and dogs. Of course, a quick glance at the ingredient lists of that Dog Chow (and most other major brands) reveals that much of the protein doesn’t come from animals at all. “Glutens and soybeans and rice protein concentrate — those are cheap substitutes for real meat,” Hofve says.

It’s not as bad as I thought, but it reminds me of those gruesome songs some of us sang as kids.

I needed to attend a deposition in Washington D.C. today.  I brought one of my daughters (she’s 6) on the trip. She patiently drew pictures and read books during the deposition, which lasted two hours this morning.  Now that I’m done with work, we’re having fun doing tourist things. 

First, we visited the National Air and Space Museum (on the Mall).  We walked by the White House.  At the Lincoln Memorial, we gazed at the majestic statue of Lincoln and then we stood at the spot where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream speech.  We touched the Vietnam War Memorial.  We really enjoyed the National Zoo, where we saw several giant pandas up close.  Such beautiful animals!  

Perhaps the most curious thing that happened occurred on a street near the zoo, however.  We spotted a man carrying a tray of Hostess products (Twinkies, Cupcakes, Suzy-Q’s) out of a 7-11 store toward his Hostess truck.  After we said hello to each other, he mentioned that he was removing these old Hostess products from the stores.  He explained that after the Twinkies, etc. reach their expiration date, he takes them away. 

“Where do you take them,” I asked.

“They are used as pig food,” he said. 

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” he responded.  “They feed old Hostess products to pigs. 

“Really?” I again asked?  ”For real?”  I wondered whether he was kidding us, but the man appeared to be speaking in earnest.  It wasn’t like he was just anyone making this claim.  He was wearing an official Hostess uniform and driving an official Hostess truck.

“Absolute truth,” he said.  The pig farmers come pick them up and take these to feed them to their pigs.  On several occasions I personally provided them to pig farmers”

He waved goodbye as my daughter and I walked into the 7-11 Store. 

It hadn’t been my intention before talking to the Hostess man, but . . . what the heck . . . my daughter and I emerged from the 7-11 to share one small pack of pig food.  I know it wasn’t healthy, but somehow it seemed like an opportunity to eat something exotic.

This important breaking science news was reported by the BBC:

When it comes to tongues, melting chocolate is better than a passionate kiss, scientists have found.
Couples in their 20s had their heart rates and brains monitored whilst they first melted chocolate in their mouths and then kissed. Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting “buzz” than kissing, and doubled volunteers’ heart rates.

The research was carried out by Dr David Lewis, formerly of the University of Sussex.

Dr Lewis said: “There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz. “A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss.”

To see why Twinkies are cheap and fresh produce is expensive,”you need look no farther than the farm bill,” according to this article in the New York Times:

This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

This last point regarding the poor nutrition available to students is one I’ve heard before. 

The most compelling point of this article is that un-nutritious cheap food isn’t just cheap by the machinations of a “free market.”  It’s cheap because government money is subsidizing it.   This disgraceful state of affairs points to a potential solution, however.  The government could (in a rational world) change its ways and start subsidizing healthy food.  This NYT article suggests that the way to turn things around is to enact a new type of farm bill.  With all the politically-tainted money at stake, though, that might be too much to hope for.

American culture celebrates the quick fix. Diet pills like Trimspa and Ephedra enjoyed massive popularity despite their health risks because many people want to look healthy without actually living healthfully. Take a diet pill, pop a multivitamin instead of getting nutrients through food, starve yourself- it doesn’t matter how you get trim and slim, just as long as you get there quickly, easily, and without changing your unhealthy habits.

Enter the latest race-to-effortless wellness, Enviga, the “calorie-burning” carbonated tea. Never mind that no evidence supports the beverage’s promise, and that, at best, it cuts the caloric equivalent of a piece of gum. The typical consumer doesn’t take this into consideration. Why does this happen? Probably halfway due to a sheer lack of critical thought, and halfway due to a desperate wish for the product to actually work.

But Coke has found another way to harness the lazy yet health conscious: Diet Coke Plus Minerals. Again, ignore the potential health risks associated with Diet Coke’s no-calorie sweetener, and simply enjoy the beverage for what it means! No longer do you need to seek out vegetables and fruit for nutrients, no longer do you need to take vitamins if you already skip raw foods. Hell, why even drink water? Just gulp down Diet Coke after Diet Coke and then return to your Happy Meals without a worry.

Today, an acquaintance (I’ll call her “Laura”) asked me if I would buy some Girl Scout cookies from her daughter’s troop. I told her “No thank you.” 

It’s not that I don’t enjoy eating Girl Scout cookies (I do enjoy Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies).   It’s not that I generally oppose the activities of Girl Scouts.  I approve of much of what Girl Scouts do. 

Here’s what triggered this post. Laura told me that the average box of cookies sells for three dollars and that the average profit for each box of cookies is only fifty cents.  Hmmmm. 

Therefore, I can support their Girl Scouts to the same extent by handing $5 directly to the local troop or by buying $30 worth of cookies.  Unless you think that eating cookies is an especially good thing, it makes much more sense to simply hand the local troop $5.  Then again, eating cookies, especially a lot of cookies, is not a good thing.  Cookies consist largely of refined carbohydrates and sugars.  These are exactly the kinds of ingredients that invite obesity.  Are the Girl Scouts concerned about obesity?  Very much so (so am I), yet they continue to rely on cookie sales to fund their activities.

But let’s go back to the money for a moment.  If you click here, you can see it stated that “all of the revenue” from cookie sales “stays with the local Girl Scout council that sponsors the sale.”  The official site carefully points out that individual troops receive “from 12-17% of the purchase price of each box sold.”  There are various important numbers that the site does not provide, however. For instance, is $.50 per box (the amount indicated to me by my acquaintance) the average amount of proceeds per box sold (as Laura indicated)?  If so, the 12-17% of the purchase price of each box sold amounts to $.45 per box, which means that most of the proceeds go to the local troop.  If true, it would be commendable.  But we don’t know, because the Girl Scout organization does not specify how much profit is involved in the sale of each box of cookies.

All of this makes me wonder, because the Girl Scout organization is based in the middle of one of the highest rent districts in the world, 420 5th Ave in Manhattan.  That’s where 400 employees work for the Girl Scout organization.  But nowhere on the site will you find anything about the sales information I just mentioned, or other things I wonder, such as the salaries and perks of these 400 employees. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much money it takes to run that fancy headquarters?  How about a pie chart showing the sources of that money? Nowhere will you find the amount of that annual cookie profit money that flows back to the Girl Scout headquarters from determined efforts of little girls. Wouldn’t that be interesting to know?  (more…)

Three weeks ago I noticed that I was overweight again, but I’m doing something about it again.

I’m not quite sure what did it.  Maybe it was the almost-nightly bowl of ice cream or maybe those french fries weren’t really counteracted by those side dishes of broccoli.  Whatever it was, three weeks ago I noticed that bad eating habits had kicked my weight more than 15 pounds over my usual weight.  Those 15 extra pounds I was carrying around weighed as much as a bowling ball.

I’ve had to lose weight before. Five years ago, I decided that I was tired of carrying around lots of extra weight.  Back then, I noticed how bad things had gotten after a friend showed me a photo of that 194 pound version of myself at the beach.  Back then, I decided to see if I could lose 10 or 15 pounds.  After doing a bit of research, I implemented a series of the eating and exercise strategies that worked well for me.  They worked extremely well.  I’m going to share them in this post.  I dropped more than 4 pounds per week, week after week, until my 194 pound carcass melted into 159 pounds, a swing of 35 pounds. After I got going with my program, it was almost painless.   I found myself feeling better and I looked better.  Based upon well-established statistics, I knew that I had substantially decreased my chance of being afflicted with heart disease, stroke and various kinds of cancer.  I was comfortable wearing my clothes again and I was no longer obsessed with food.  What was not to like?

I’m 5’ 11”.  For most of the past five years, I have carried about 163 pounds. When I recently noticed my scale rise to 178 three weeks ago, then, I declared war.  I’m fighting that war right now.  I calculated that my approach will take me back at my normal weight in about 5 more weeks, a steady weight loss of about 2 pounds per week. It’s working like clockwork. In three weeks, I’ve lost 6 pounds.  To give myself even more incentive, I’m making my weight loss ambitions public here!

This weight loss story is the sort of thing that has been told many times, of course.  But I’ll continue.

Over the past year, I fell into some bad habits about eating well and working out.  And to accelerate my weight gain, I haven’t exercised much.  I normally commute 10 miles/day by bicycle, but extremely cold winter has hindered that.  Also, I haven’t been getting enough sleep, a factor that is associated with weight gain.  During the day, I work at desk job and I’ve been hovering over my computer several hours each night (much of it writing this blog).  Further, I take care of my two young children quite often; it is hard to work out vigorously when one is with them.  They just can’t keep up (although that is changing rapidly). 

Now that we’ve had our winter thaw, I’m back on the bicycle almost every day.  I don’t belong to any health club.  My exercise program is virtually free. In addition to riding a bike to work (which saves 1/3 gallon of gas every day), I do floor exercises several times a week.  I do these floor exercises for only 10 minutes, in accordance with many of the suggestions of a pretty decent book, Eight Minutes in the Morning, by Jorge Cruise.

Here’s a short version of my “secrets” for losing weight: eat reasonable amounts of good food and exercise.  There’s no substitute.  Don’t tolerate excuses out of your own mouth.  Excuses are a dime a dozen and all of us have thought of all of them ready.  Here are a few of my favorites.   We live in a toxic society, nutritionally speaking.  It’s really tempting to eat all those sugary fatty salty foods.  It does take more effort to chop up some zucchini and stir fry at then to eat a big bowl of potato chips.  I could go on and on.  Tell your excuses to get lost.

When I try to determine a workable series of rules five years ago, I focused on several things.  My number one rule was that my approach to eating could not require any daily menus.  I wasn’t going to buy expensive concoctions or prepared foods.  My approach had to be an approach that I could use anywhere, whether at someone’s house or a restaurant. 

Substituting nutritious food for bad food at home was a terrific jump start for dropping pounds.  In my case, I became sold that eating lots of whole grains (carbohydrates loaded with fiber) was a critically important basis for eating well.  I work whole grains into my breakfast, lunch and dinner (here’s why).  It’s really easy to swap out crappy cereal for cereal loaded with fiber.  There are many delicious whole grain breads available for purchase (look for bread that has at least 3 grams of fiber per slice).  I learned much about whole grains by reading Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, by Walter Willett, of the Harvard School of Public Health.

When I decided that I needed to lose weight three weeks ago, I didn’t realize how many bad habits I had gotten into over the past year.  It’s really easy to overlook all of one’s own bad habits.  I started noticing that I was grabbing food for numerous reasons having nothing to do with hunger: anxiety, nervousness, stress and boredom.  Many times, I was eating food when I was really thirsty and I should have been drinking water instead of eating.  (more…)

How should you take care of them?  According to one book I’m reading, you need to give them lots of exercise and they need to eat good food.  You need to buy a good leash and collar.  No, I’m not referring to a childcare book–I’m talking about a book on dog care: The Complete Dog Care Manual, by Bruce Fogel, president of ASPCA.

To use a dog book to raise a child, you’ve got to pick and choose the advice, of course.  You don’t put your children on leashes or toss them bones (except when they misbehave!).  It is interesting, though, that dog-raising books are full of good ideas that also apply to raising children.  And it’s especially interesting to compare the way we are supposed to raise dogs with the way many people actually raise children. 

My family has a dog (“Holly”) and two human children, aged 6 and 8.  I am thus an expert on this topic.

My dog-training book stresses that taking care of a dog requires a lot of work.  We need to invest a lot of time in order to have a healthy animal.  The dog book places a premium on early training?  “Your dog relies on you to train it from an early age to be trusting, even-tempered and sociable…” (page 48).  Compare this advice with the way many people actually raise children, ignoring them for long stretches and often abandoning them to the commercial wasteland of television.

Feeding is critically important, according to my dog book.  Dogs need

[A] nutritious, well-balanced diet [which produces] a strong boned well-muscled healthy coated canine.  Dog owners should avoid giving their dogs excessive treats or feeding them more often than they should eat, even if a bag.   This combination of facts explains why obesity is a rampant among dog owners. 

(Page 51)  Compare this advice to the donuts, sugary cereal, and bags and bags of salty oily over-processed snacks that so many people feed their children.  Just walk down the aisles of a grocery store to see the extent of this harmful practice.  According to the experts, we shouldn’t feed such garbage to dogs, but many of us actually feed such foods to children.

There is a lot of information on training in Fogel’s book.  The author emphasizes that animals need to be trained well when young in order to be sociable as adults.  Otherwise, all kinds of bad behaviors arise.  The same thing goes for children, too, but this advice is far too often ignored. 

If this comparison between dogs and humans appears unseemly, keep in mind that humans are animals.  “Human animals” I call them (instead of “human beings”), whenever I want to have some fun with fundamentalists.  There’s no defense to my characterization, of course, since we human animals eat, poop, breathe and procreate very much like other animals, very much like dogs.

What about exercise?  “If a dog is denied mental and physical activity, its energy may be released in destructive and unacceptable behavior.”  (Page 42).  To get real exercise, does a dog need to be driven across town every weekend to participate in organized sports?  No. Does a dog need to join an expensive health club?  Absolutely not.  To get exercise, all dogs need are brisk walks combined with a few very simple toys.  We excel at breaking these rules for human children, however. (more…)

This is one of the continuing series of reports from the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee.  The conference is sponsored by Free Press.

This post concerns a presentation entitled “Children and Media Policy.”  Unfortunately, I was not able to hear this entire presentation.  When I arrived, however, Susan Linn (of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood) was beginning her presentation.  Linn is a psychologist, producer, writing and puppeteer.  She is a co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.  Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s marketplace.

Linn stated that commercialism is an assault on children and that we are now raising a generation of children controlled by media rather than controlling it. Corporations are aiming to take over childhood, and it’s not simply by throwing an endless stream of commercials at them.  “Commercials are so–20th century.”

Babies and toddlers are covered with brand licensing.  These are characters that have been sold by the creators in order to sell products.  For instance, SpongeBob makes $1.5 billion annually for its owner.  Dora, Sesame Street, Arthur and Winnie the Pooh all make huge amounts of money for their owners.  SpongeBob is now a tool to sell children things such as cereal, burgers, brownies and Pop tarts.  There is even SpongeBob fish food.

Linn advocates a child’s right to grow up without being undermined by corporate interests.

In 1980, Congress limited the power of the FTC to limit marketing to children.  At that point, it became easier to market to children and to adults.  The danger in advertising to children is that children “cannot understand persuasive intent.”

It is hard to find baby products that are not plastered with media characters.  There is one exception-you can find products devoid of marketing characters at high end shops.  In other words, the poor and working poor much more likely to have children who are walking billboards.  According to Linn, babies fall in love with these media characters.  Therefore, the media is creating cradle-to-grave brand loyalties.

Linn displayed an image from her grocery store: several rows of cereal boxes.  It is really hard to find a cereal that is not decorated with a media character.  She invited members of the audience to notice this next time they look in the cereal aisle.

Linn provided some statistics.  19% of babies less than one year old have a TV in the room.  37% of one-year olds watch television one to two hours per day.  76% of parents believe that TV can be educational for their children. Linn does not agree with this.  Hence, her organization: Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood.  Linn is unhappy that there is almost no commercial free programming for children, including PBS.  She asked, “What are our children learning about Sesame Street when they partner with McDonald’s?”

Linn also is concerned that commercialized toys undermine creative play.  It was the dawning of a new era in 1998, when Teletubbies were promoted as educational and picked up by PBS.  Ditto for Baby Einstein, which earns Disney $250 million each year.  Part of the problem, according to Linn, is that advertising bypasses cognition.  It goes right through the amygdala.  Therefore, skepticism is of limited use, whether to a child or to an adult.

Advertising is infiltrating schools too.  As many as 40 of Scholastics products are now linked to media characters.

One of the questioners asked what parents can do.  Linn answered that “educational” programming is often misleading.  Parents should write or call to the television stations to complain.  This assumes, however, that the parents know what to look for, but that ability to notice a problem often takes parent education. 

Other issues discussed by the panel included video game violence, which many public health officials have expressed concern over.  Modern video games can affect a child’s attitude toward violence.  The panel dared the members of the audience to actually sit down and watch some of these violent games.  One can find violence, racism and gender problems in a wide variety of video games, even in the “E-rated” games.

Linn discusses many of these issues in her book, Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising (2004).  Here’s an excerpt:

Today’s children are assaulted by advertising everywhere-at home, in school, on sports fields, and playgrounds, and on the street.  They spent almost 40 hours a week and gauged with the media-radio, television, movies, magazines, the Internet-most of which are commercially driven.  The average child sees almost 40,000 commercials a year on television alone.  Many, if not most, children’s television programs, including those produced by the public broadcast system (PBS), are funded through licensing, a practice that allows companies to market toys, clothing, and accessories raised on characters or logos associated with the program.

(Page 5). 

Linn mentioned that in the United Kingdom, all ads for junk food that were aimed at children are now banned.

Several websites related to the same issues were offered at the session.  These include Children Now (run by Patti Miller, a panelist whose talk I missed) and Susan Linn’s own Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

I have a confession. 

If the general consensus is that I should never do this again, I will seriously consider stopping (not that I had ever done this before–see below). I know that the story I am about to relate will disgust and confound some readers. Beware that I am thin-skinned, but don’t hold back.

Here’s the short version.  While in Chicago, my family and I (my wife and I have two daughters, aged six and eight) went to a trendy chocolatier (a store that sells high-priced chocolate).  While at said store, I ate some of the high-priced chocolate left by a customer who had left the store just as we were sitting down.

As I relate this, I am haunted by the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza is caught rummaging through the trash can in the kitchen of a house eating a pastry that someone had thrown away.  My adventure also brings to mind an idea put forth by “Tim,” a friend of mine, who has long argued that all morality starts with what one puts into one’s mouth.

Here’s what happened.  We went to a chocolatier, where my wife ordered a high-priced cup of hot chocolate.  The chocolatier was located on the first floor of an upscale mall that sells lots and lots of things that nobody really needs.  It just so happened that the Lego store was on the second floor of that mall.  That was our true destination when we were distracted by chocolatier’s prominent location.

(more…)

Not after reading this article about pig-farming in Rolling Stone. This is the teaser at the top of the article:

America’s top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

The pollution is only half of the problem.  The other half is the treatment of the pigs.  Here’s the bottom line:  pigs are at least as smart as dogs.  Would you eat dogs?  Would you treat dogs like this?

Smithfield’s [a large pig-farming enterprise] pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

But I can’t ignore the pollution either.  It’s a huge problem:

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. . . . Major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit.

Like I said.  I love eating pork, but I wish I didn’t.  Not that I eat it very often–I eat pork about once per month.  But I think it’s time for me to stop.

Dangerous idea, that.

If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?

The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.

Pity the world doesn’t work that way.

The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.

The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.

It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.

If only.

It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.

The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, prejudices, and predilections. We’re not the same in precisely those areas that make such blue sky hopes for the self-responsible, self-actualized, self-controlling individual a reality. Government ends up becoming a default necessity to keep us from each others’ throats as much as keeping the whole thing working in something resembling order.

Do governments go too far? Sure, often. Government is an imprecise tool, a blunt instrument. It’s reactive more than proactive. It makes huge blunders, overlooks details, stumbles along an ill-perceived path. In frustration–or under the same illusion that people are all basically the same (or should be)–many governments become autocratic, despotic, fascistic, tyrannical, brutal. They squeeze tighter on the reins in the futile attempt to force a population to conform to certain standards. Combined with a fervent belief that only They know what’s best for their country, you have all the ingredients for classic botched jobs.

Then there are those times and places where someone–a Hussein, a Khaddafy, a Stalin, a Hitler–does end up In Charge and sets about actually remaking the country according to their ideas. From the outside, occasionally, things look like they’re working quite well. There is Order.

Misery doesn’t have to be loud to be real.

But the hypothetical I put as the title applies to us all to some degree, because it is true that rulers rule by the consent of the ruled. Ultimately, when people–the euphemistic, legendary, all -but-mythical The People–have had enough, a ruler or ruling class just can’t keep them on the farm no more. France boasted one of the most autocratic, absolute despotism in modern history and look what happened to poor Louis XVI. Bad haircut day, one where the barber missed by several inches.

So. If I were in charge, what would I do differently?

First off, being an American, I would declare one day a year in which all classified documents would be declassified. (more…)

See them floundering after their cherished possessions, like fish flopping in a river starved of water. 

Sutta Nipata 777 (From What Would Buddha Do? (1999)).

A friend of mine recently returned from an extended trip to Egypt.  He found it striking that the 18 million residents of Cairo lived in tightly packed conditions and that they owned so very few possessions.  Based on his own observations, the average resident of Cairo owned about 10% of the property owned by the average American family.  My friend’s estimate was about on the mark.  Most Americans would certainly describe most residents of Cairo to be “poor.” 

Amidst this material “poverty,” though, my friend noticed numerous signs of family togetherness and harmony that he doesn’t often see in the U.S.  Parents and children were spending time with each other, smiling at each other, playing together and apparently enjoying each others’ company.  How could this be, that people appeared to be so happy when they owned so little?  As my friend described what he saw, I couldn’t imagine Americans getting along that well if someone took away 90% of our possessions.  In fact, we’d become embittered and we’d be at each other’s throats.

My friend’s comments caused me to think of the enormous amount of material possessions that Americans have and crave.  We have shameful amounts of material possessions.  We have many times more stuff than we need.  Yet we work very hard to have ever more.

We are afflicted with the all-consuming epidemic “affluenza,” according to authors of the 2002 book of that title.  What is affluenza? “A painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” The authors quote T.S. Eliot: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men.” 

Here’s an excerpt from a review of Affluenza from Amazon.com:

Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. “To live, we buy,” explain the authors–everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation–all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity.

Do our leaders warn us of our materialistic excesses?  They used to.  Consider Jimmy Carter’s televised “Crisis of Confidence” Speech delivered on July 15, 1979.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

We don’t hear speeches like that anymore.  Not from politicians or even from most religious leaders.  Most politicians and preachers who might dare to suggest that Americans were shallow-minded materialists would get the boot. 

In fact, everything was so amazingly peachy within a couple months after 9/11, that George W. Bush commended us for our shopping:

In the face of this great tragedy, Americans are refusing to give terrorists the power. Our people have responded with courage and compassion, calm and reason, resolve and fierce determination. We have refused to live in a state of panic or a state of denial. There is a difference between being alert and being intimidated, and this great nation will never be intimidated. People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing . . .

That’s how bad it’s gotten.  (more…)

What kinds of voters are we?  It’s hard to tell by looking what kind of candidates we elect.  After all, we usually only have two viable choices; we often hold our noses and vote for the “lesser of two evils.”   Many potential candidates never appear on the ballot, thanks to our horrifically corrupt political system, a system that requires a candidate to have corporate money in order to seen as viable by the corporate-owned media. It is a ludicrous and vicious circle. 

Even acknowledging the severely limited choices we have at the polls, how well do we vote? Do we prepare ourselves carefully before entering the voting booth?  Do we work hard to expose ourselves to a wide range of perspectives before voting or do we fall prey to the availability heuristic, voting on the basis of highly suspect political ads and intellectually vapid local “news”? Do most voters take time to carefully deliberate on the long-term risks and benefits of the political positions touted by the candidates?  Apparently not, based upon the ubiquity misleading attack ads that invite unreflective scorn rather than a deliberate consideration of the issues.

Another bit of evidence suggesting that many of us vote without enough preparation occurs whenever citizens vote for lesser known candidates and issues.  On numerous occasions, people have admitted to me that they voted for or against a particular candidate (or issue) about whom (which) they knew nothing at all.  In Missouri, this happens all the time when circuit judges seeking retention appear on the ballot.  People tell me that they voted for or against judges based simply on their names (which, admittedly, suggest gender and, very tenuously, ancestry). 

How else suggests the sorts of voters we are? 

I suspect that people make voting decision in about the same way they make the other important decisions in their lives.  People who are generally nonchalant or reckless in their ignorance probably tend to vote that way.  People who are well-informed in other aspects of their lives tend to be well-informed when voting.  I suspect, then, that we might get a reading about how we take care of our country as voters with about the same amount of care we exercise when we make decisions—often life and death decisions—in other important areas of our lives. 

I realize that I am treading in dangerous psychological territory. Perhaps I am violating the fundamental attribution error—the “inflated belief people have in the importance of personality traits and dispositions” (see The Person and the Situation, by Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett (1991).   I am also a firm believer in the multiple intelligences, as eloquently expressed by Howard Gardner. Perhaps people showing little care in one area of their lives are nonetheless careful voters.  Despite these concerns, based on my many years of observing and listening to people, I suspect that I’m on to something. At the very least, it seems that people who are generally conscientious prepare conscientiously to vote.   People who are generally dysfunctional (I would include many well-to-do people in this category) continue to be dysfunctional when they vote. 

Let’s consider some examples.  (more…)

With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: “I don’t have time” and “I can’t afford it.” These justifications seem to work wonders, trimming responsibility and slimming guilt- we all have more important things to spend our money and time on than something as fleeting and vain as health, right?

I’ll cut the sarcasm for a second. In all fairness, the perception that healthy living comes at a high price has some root in reality. Take this study by Northern Ireland charity NCH, which demonstrated that poor families frequently cannot afford balanced diets, based on the higher pricing for healthful food. And with the steep price on gym memberships and exercise equipment, many also get the impression that an active lifestyle must come at a paltry sum. Or at least the excuse sounds plausible.

But some recent economic analysis tears this web of self deception apart. Healthy lifestyles in fact save a sizeable amount of money in the longrun. Smartmoney Magazine puts an estimate on the total payoff: $84,000. Prescription medications, quadruple bypasses, and other such health care expenses cost more than fresh produce and a workout routine, as it turns out:

“According to a [RAND Corporation] study, overweight people pay 10 to 36% more a year on hospital stays and ambulances, depending on the severity of their weight problem. Smokers pay 20% more. Fitness counts too. Aging couch potatoes who started exercising at least three times a week saved an average of $2,200 a year on medical expenses, according to a recent study by Bloomington, a Minn.-based HealthPartners Research Foundation.”

USA Today also recently wrote about the financial impact of health. A few more interesting tidbits:

• People with Diabetes pay 240% more per capita on health care costs.
• A walk a day can save a middle-aged adult $50-$100 per month by avoiding the cost of blood pressure and cholesterol medications.
• The average healthy 35-40 year old American doubles his wealth in ten years; those in poor health typically see a decline over the same period of time.

It doesn’t stop there. With retirement getting financially rockier by the second, physical wellbeing has become even more crucial (and its inverse more expensive). Fidelity Investments gives a couple’s retirement a $200,000 health care price tag, not including dental care, long-term treatments, over-the-counter medications, and assisted living (which costs around $70,000/year in its own right). Fortunately, exercise and healthful eating can greatly diminish rates of dementia and other taxing age-related conditions as well as its other myriad benefits.

I believe that settles the cost-of-healthy-living dispute, to what extent the conflict even existed. As for the “I don’t have time” excuse, I have yet to find a water-tight response. I suppose one could argue that if you take the time to live well now, you’ll have more time alive to enjoy it, of course. It all comes down to what you’ll willingly invest.

Worms are fascinating critters.  There’s no getting around it.  Or maybe they’ve just seemed fascinating, ever since I first read Gary Larson’s hilarious 1999 book, There’s a hair in my dirt!  A Worm’s Story. 

Now, though, worms have made it to the big screen.  Last week I took my two young children to a movie called “How to Eat Fried Worms.”  We all enjoyed the movie, which provided some lessons on eating earthworms, as well as a lesson or two on getting along.  Click here for more information on the movie, which features a large cast of youngsters, along with Tom Cavanagh and Kimberly Williams.

There’s an interesting side story here. I was surprised that the book on which the movie is based has been the target of censors: 

Because of the novel’s content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some, it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six.

Amazing, eh?  But back to the main topic of my post. I’d like to tell you the story about how I ate worms . . . but I can’t.  I didn’t even come close. 

Watching “How to Eat Fried Worms” reminded me of the time I was visiting Guangzhou, China in 2001 with my wife and our newly adopted daughter.  We were traveling with a large group of adoptive parents, accompanied also by a translator who recommended that we eat at a very nice restaurant in town.  I don’t recall the name of the restaurant, but I do remember that you could choose from a wide variety of dishes, including some specialties involving worms and bugs.  In fact, the live worms and bugs were on display at the front of the restaurant.  You could pick out the worms and bugs (or snakes or lobsters or other critters) and the chefs would then prepare them. 

Here’s a photo I took at the time.

As you can see, customers could select worms, beetle-looking bugs and other types of bugs.  I really wanted to try out some of these exotic foods, but there was absolutely no one in my group that was encouraging me. In fact, the suggestion that I might eat anything out of the ordinary was met with horror and gasps.  I remember looking at my wife for encouragement.  She didn’t try to dissuade me, but she gave me a look I interpreted as “do you expect me to ever kiss you again if I have to watch you eating worms?”   Bottom line:  I wimped out.  We did order a deep-fried pidgeon, which was presented with its head still on.  Yes, it tasted like chicken. 

While sitting in that restaurant that night, I remembered something a friend named Tim once told me: Morality starts with what one puts in one’s mouth. (more…)

I don’t usually go around discussing poop.

That might have changed forever, though, once I stumbled upon smellypoop.com, a site dedicated to disseminating information about . . . well, poop.  Smellypoop.com is a refreshingly frank site presenting “solid” information on a subject that simultaneously compels and repels. 

For example, smellypoop.com addresses each of the following topics (as well as others):

• What is poop made of?
• Why does poop stink?
• Why is bird poop white?
• Are there people who eat poop?
• Why does some poop float?
• What Happens When I’m At WORK and I have to Poop? 

But there’s more.  Smellypoop.com provides comprehensive research on the topic of farts. You can order fake poop and poop-themed greeting cards at the site (click on “Order Fake Poop and Other Great Gifts”).  There is a poop forum and a poop photo gallery.   You’ll find poop poems, poop riddles, and poop sayings, including “Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day” (attributed to Harry S Truman).

What especially interests me, though, is the comprehensive list of poop synonyms at smellypoop.com.  There are hundreds of them.  Though I was already aware of dozens of poop terms (including the classic four-letter reference and oldie-but-goodie “number two”), I was woefully unaware of the vast number of poop synonyms.  Thanks to stinkypoop.com, my repertoire now includes terms like “blind eels,” “bootycakes,” “colon cobras,” “dookie-doop-droop” “mooky-stinks,” and the quaint but useful “pooplets.”

Why so many synonyms for a basic bodily function, I wondered?  Then it hit me: poop is one of those topics that A) we must regularly deal with and B) cannot easily be construed in non-animal terms.  This combination, it turns out, is the perfect storm for the frenzied generation of synonyms.  Just think of other functions that cause us to scramble for synonyms, e.g., peeing, copulating and dying.  In each of these cases, we constantly run from our own words by creating new words’ we keep generating synonyms because we can’t entirely escape the concepts themselves.  In the case of poop, it’s especially difficult to pretend that we’re not animals when we have deal with poop every day (if we’re lucky, that is).  Every time we poop, we are reminded that we’ve got butts that (no matter how hard we try to construe it otherwise) remind us of the butts of animals!  Arrrggghhhh!

For those who already think of themselves as animals rather as special, uniquely design semi-ethereal beings right off of God’s blackboard, none of this presents a problem.  For those who think of humans as special acts of creation, though, poop presents a big problem.  For them, it’s like we’ve all been jury-rigged with out-of-date off-the-shelf technology.  How disappointing for us heaven-bound “special” beings to be short-changed by the Designer. It’s bad enough that we are saddled with these cumbersome and failure-prone wingless bodies.  But what really frustrates fundamentalists is that the icky stinky substance that comes out of our bottoms is just like the icky stinky substance that comes from the bottoms of the lowly animals. Ergo . . .  “Wait!” they say.  ”Can’t go there because Darwin is EVIL!!!”

The failure of fundamentalists to recognize that we are truly and undeniably animals (exquisite and wonderful animals, I should add) is a deep and pervasive failure from which, in my opinion, many societal conflicts stem.  I’ve previously dealt with this issue (humans refusing to think of themselves as animals).   To summarize that earlier post, to the extent that we go around thinking of ourselves as “above” nature we lose the ability to function as part of nature.  Intellectually, we become bulls in the china shop of life. (more…)

Humans are creatures with limited attentional capacity.  We don’t have the time or brainpower to personally investigate every claim that comes our way.  We don’t like questioning ideas to which we’ve become accustomed.  Evil-minded people only need to get those lies into our heads.  Once in there, those false ideas rattle around for a long time.

How to best get false information into people’s heads?  Employ a Trojan horse maneuver, i.e., plant credible-seeming information into our brains when we are young using credible intermediaries (such as our parents) through the use of the mass media.  And it always helps if the proponents of deceit are well-financed while the proponents of the truth are not. Once false information is safely in their heads, humans are willing to carry it around for decades, disseminating it to yet others and even fighting for it. 

No, I’m not writing about Iraq. Today’s case study is cow milk. Yeah, the kind of milk you probably drink.  Why drink milk?  You’ve probably seen lots of those slick ad campaigns.  You’ll hear claims like this: “Milk’s role in a nutritious diet has long been established.” 

Before I go further, here are my disclaimers.  For my first 4 ½ decades on this planet, I poured milk on my cereal.  About five years ago, my wife and I began to suspect that our youngest daughter was lactose intolerant.  People who are lactose intolerant can’t properly digest milk. We thus switched over to soy milk for her.  I also switched over to soy milk.  It tastes a bit different than cow milk, but I truly enjoy the flavor, with no growth hormones to worry about.  Here’s the brand I use, but there are many other good brands.  I don’t completely avoid dairy products.  For instance, I can’t imagine life without ice cream.  Enough disclaimers . . .

But back to the ads of those milk producers. If you’ve been paying attention to the ad campaign, you know that humans need cow milk to maintain strong bones. You can check out the current Got Milk campaign here.

The beauty of this misinformation is that the dairy industry has thrown enough money at our government that the government willingly does much of the dirty work through the use of its own “food pyramids.”  (more…)

As reported by The Birmingham Post (UK),  insufficient sleep can make you fat:

The Warwick Medical School study,  led by Professor Francesco Cappuccio, found that adults who slept for less than seven hours and children who regularly got less than ten hours’ rest faced an increased risk of obesity . . .

He said: “The epidemic of obesity is paralleled by a