Coca Cola and obesity

Coca Cola has been forced to reckon with the elephant in the room. Healthy people do not guzzle Coca Cola, as discussed by this article in Bloomberg.

Americans may not have figured out the answer to the obesity epidemic, but for years they’ve pointed to Coca-Cola and other soda as one of the causes. Coke has tried fighting against this. It’s tried ignoring it. Now it accepts this as a reality. This is the problem Douglas has to confront. He has to persuade people to drink Coca-Cola again, even if they don’t guzzle it like water the way they did before. Cultural shifts don’t happen overnight. They build slowly—a sip of coconut water here, a quinoa purchase there, and suddenly the American diet looks drastically different than it did 10 years ago. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the $75 billion soda industry. For decades, soft-drink companies saw consumption rise. During the 1970s, the average person doubled the amount of soda they drank; by the 1980s it had overtaken tap water. In 1998, Americans were downing 56 gallons of the stuff every year—that’s 1.3 oil barrels’ worth of soda for every person in the country.

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How to make things

I really enjoyed these mesmerizing videos demonstrating how many types of things are manufactured. Fascinating. Life would be so very different without our factories. Some would say for the better, but I don't agree at all. I don't want to spend the time to make my own food from scratch or create clothes. That would take immense amounts of time away from things I prefer to do. This topic reminds me of Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns and Steel, in which he describes a culture that spends most of every live long day harvesting, mashing and cooking their basic food substance. They can never get to libraries or any sort of technology because every day is a battle to gather enough food. Here's a description from Wikipedia:

The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: 1) access to high protein vegetation that endures storage; 2) a climate dry enough to allow storage; 3) access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surplus frees people up to specialize in activities other than sustenance and supports population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation states and empires.

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10 facts about dairy milk

We are hit with so much propaganda about the "need" to drink cow milk that many Americans uncritically believe it. To follow up on an article I once wrote about all the dairy hype ("The Land of Milk and Money"), I offer this more recent article listing "10 Fascinating Facts About Cow Milk." And yes, most of the world's adults are lactose intolerant. It is not even possible for them to drank milk. We milk-drinkers are the unusual ones. Actually, I'm mostly there. I put soy milk on my cereal, but I still do enjoy ice cream. But I don't consume milk products for the calcium. I know that there are other ways to get calcium.

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