Whole Wheat: Will it kill us all?

The Enemy?

December 29, 2013:

I got burned by the low fat diet craze. Growing up in the 80's, low fat foods were everything. Fat was the devil. Calorie counting was so 1970's. Behind the times.  Avoiding fat was everything.  Brands like "Snack Wells" flourished.

Low fat had a pretty long run. It dominated the "health news" reporting for much of the nineties. Product labels were scrutinized for fat content. We learned how to calculate fat as a percentage of calories. We choked down low-fat ice cream and low-fat peanut butter.

Then along came Atkins and South Beach, and now carbs were the devil and fat was a friend. Minds were blown. Low-fat slid lower on the labels and instead we counted "net carbs." Then Atkins ran its course, and we waited for whatever was next.

What's next appears to be wheat.

The hope is--that as part of our media analysis--we may be able to watch a new diet trend from birth to death. Americans long for the magical cure, the silver bullet that will strike down all of our dietary woes at once. This author suspects that the anti-wheat trend may go the way of low-fat and Atkins and South Beach.

To be clear, cutting wheat may be the key to good health. This author is not a doctor and this post is an exploration of health reporting, not medical advice. Millions of people (roughly 1% of Americans) do have serious gluten related issues such as Celiac. 

But for the rest of us, there's one big lingering question. If each one of these diet methods--calorie counting, low-fat, low-carb, wheat/gluten free--is the key to good health and controlling obesity, then why is there always a new method that comes along???

Love Coke? Love Security Cameras.

March 28, 2013:

Coke's "Open Happiness" ad campaign is a perfect example of "emotional branding."  It's another ad where it's almost impossible to tell what it's selling until the end.  The idea?  People feel happy when they watch funny videos.  Indeed, it's a major social thing these days--sharing funny/cute videos.  Coke hopes they can connect to that happy feeling and that it will transfer to their product (already the most recognized brand in the world).

And, in case you're wondering, no, not all of the clips are real.  Coke says they had to "recreate" some of the situations.

Misogynistic Volvo Ad from the Old Days

March 27, 2013:  

The auto website Jalopnik dug up this sexist Volvo ad from the YouTube archives.  The premise of the ad is let your wife drive a Volvo and she'll want to buy one.  The "joke" is that the woman can't drive stick and  the car keeps bucking and jerking down the road.

Ever wonder who gives politicians all that money?

February 15, 2013:

If you like numbers and if you'd like to know more about money and it's (massive) influence on the U.S. government, this is the site for you.  Run by the Center for Responsive Politics--a non-partisan, non-profit, independent group--OpenSecrets.org has a mind boggling amount of data on who spends what in politics.

Lobbyists are people who haunt Washington, D.C. seeking to influence politicians to support their organizations.  As you can see below, there have been between 12,000 and 14,000 lobbyists in D.C. from 1999 to 2012.  That's 12,000 lobbyists exerting influence (and money) on 535 elected representatives! And from 2007-2012, lobbying organizations been averaging roughly $3 billion dollars a year in spending.  I think I'm going to write a letter to complain about that.

States of the Union: Much promised, little achieved

From the New York Times, February 13, 2013:

The Times had this graphic on their web page showing how little of what presidents propose in State of the Union speeches actually gets put into action.  If you focus on the "fully successful" line (because "partly successful" seems pretty vague), it seems that the average is about 30% or a little less.  LBJ seems to be an outlier, and presidents working with a Congress of the same party are somewhat more effective, but not as much as you might think.

Obama and the Drones

February 12, 2013:

They fly at 20,000 feet, carrying laser guided bombs and missiles, and are flown by satellite by pilots who are often half a world away.  On a typical day, the pilot might be monitoring a group of people inside a small compound in Pakistan (or Yemen or Afghanistan or Somalia).  The pilot and his commanding officers determine that the people on the ground are militants training new recruits.  Authorization is given, the pilot marks the target with a targeting laser and releases the bombs.  Two, 500 pound Paveway bombs follow the laser to the target.  The people below never hear a sound (the drone is too small, too quiet, and too high to be detected) before the bomb explodes on top of them. They are there one minute and gone the next.  A successful strike is recorded, no U.S. soldiers' lives are endangered, and the drone flies on, searching for its next target.

Managing our technology dependence

"People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

In Neil Postman's book 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he expresses his fear that modern media (television) is fundamentally changing how Americans think and communicate.  But, as should be clear from the above quotation, Postman's fears are even more relevant when applied to today's media technologies like smart phones and tablets.

If you know me, you know that I'm a huge fan of technology. I have a huge Googling problem, can't stay off of Amazon, and have a serious dependency on my smart phone and all of its fancy skills. It's recognition of my own behaviors that makes me take seriously this article from Psych Central about compulsive use of mobile devices. The article cites a Baylor University study that was published in the Journal of Behavior Addictions. While there is some debate about how to classify "behavioral addictions," there is a growing consensus that people do develop obsessive behaviors around certain activities, like checking a cell phone.

But, given my own love of technology, you're not going to hear me argue for banning or completely abstaining from use of all these new mobile devices.  That said, I also believe that self-reflection is a critical component of self-improvement, and that modern technology, especially mobile devices, is a major destroyer of self-reflection time. As modern people, I think we need to be conscious of how we manage our technology use.  I think we should all try to set aside some technology-free time in our lives, and I have some suggestions . . . .