Eat This, Not That--How To Keep Thin[ner]

As a follow-up to our recent posts on the obesity epidemic, we thought we'd point our readers to a helpful website that provides insight to proper portions and hidden calories in restaurant meals.

[We also note data released by the federal government suggesting that the rate of childhood obesity has plateaued, albeit at a Himalayan level.]

The website is sponsored by Men's Health and is called "Eat This, Not That." The editors review various chain restaurant meals, give you the gory details on how bad they are, and suggest alternatives.

What we like about this site is that they don't tell you useless things like "eat a plain turkey sandwich with no condiments in place of a double-cheeseburger." Yes, we all know that; but the plain turkey just doesn't taste that good.

Instead, they alert you to seemingly healthy dishes--such as the Cosi Signature Salad--that are in fact packed with calories, fat and sodium, and then suggest an alternative at the same restaurant that might still be tasty. (We had kind of suspected that those delicious Cosi salads weren't particularly healthy.)

They'll also send you a free weekly email newsletter with their latest tips. In today's email, we learned that the Albacore Tuna Panini Melt at Einstein's Bagels--which sounds healthy enough--has far more calories, fat, saturated fat and sodium than the Albacore Tuna Salad Sandwich on whole wheat at the same restaurant.

It's really pretty eye-opening, and sometimes shows that you'd be better off with the meal you crave than the seemingly healthier alternative.

If you're planning on a trip to a specific restaurant--say Applebee's--you can target your research to that chain's meals.

They also have some eye-popping lists of the "worst foods" in a whole lot of categories. For example, the Worst Breakfast is the Bob Evans Caramel Banana Cream Stacked and Stuffed Hotcakes (pictured here), with 1540 calories--the same as FIVE egg mcmuffins. You'd be better off with the Bob Evans Western Omelette at 654 calories.

We like the site for it's practicality--the editors know we all like food that tastes good, and realize we just need a little guidance to make better decisions, even if they aren't ideal.

Childhood Obesity: Help Parents With Portion Sizes

The Washington Post yesterday launched a five-part series on childhood obesity in America. Although the Curmudgeon kids are skinny, this is an issue of interest to us as we see so many young children whose future is already being robbed by struggles with weight and obesity, including many of the kids in our soccer programs.

The Post series is important, but like many debates about obesity and its causes, it mixes together a lot of disparate information, much of which is mere noise. A good deal of the confusion comes from advice about what constitutes good nutrition, versus what will keep kids from getting fat.

Our youngest child undoubtedly has poor nutrition in his diet. He avoids vegetables and has a huge sweet-tooth. But he is small for his age, and skinny. That may in part be due to the struggle to get enough protein in him. But his diet is not going to make him fat, because he eats very little of anything. He's also incredibly physically active.

The point is, you can have a bad diet--nutritionally--without getting fat. Conversely, you can have good nutrition and still be overweight.

The weight issue is a function of how MUCH one eats. As the Post notes today, the difference between what an average person consumes each day and what is burned off by physical activity is about 100 calories. Doesn't sound like much, but over a year that's 36,500 calories, or about 18 days worth of excess food for an adult woman! (Adult women consume approximately 2000 calories per day on average.)

For many who are obese, that calorie gap is actually a good deal higher, too.

In today's article, the Post explored the government's failure to do much about the childhood obesity epidemic. But really, most of the potential actions mentioned in the Post wouldn't accomplish any reduction in obesity. More nutritional labelling, or eliminating trans-fats, or restricting soda machines in schools--none gets at the root problem of people simply eating too much.

What would help? We don't have all the answers, but parents desperately need some easy to use, practical guides to how much food their children should be eating, and they need help getting servings of the proper portion size.

Let's take McDonald's, ubiquitously blamed (for good reason) for America's obesity epidemic. There's no reason you couldn't take your child to McDonald's and get a reasonably sized meal that the kid would like. But the way Mickie-D's is set up, it ain't easy.

For a typical 10-year-old boy, a basic McD's single cheeseburger, with a SMALL packet of fries and a 10 oz. soda would be fine. Sure, it's nice to fantasize about having the child eat something more nutritious, with maybe fruit juice and some real vegetables, but let's start by getting the portion right and then work on the content. The government, and nutritionists, doctors, public health experts, etc., would do parents a huge favor by telling them that such a meal would be okay, instead of saying "don't eat fast food." In other words, the single cheeseburger with a few fries is MUCH better than the "value" meal with Big Mac, "medium" fries and 20 oz. drink pictured above.

Then we'd also have to get McDonald's to make that meal easily available to parents at a price competitive with their larger, calorie-packed meals. Again, if the government were in a position to identify what WOULD be appropriate for McD's (and other fast food outlets) to give a kid as a meal, then maybe they'd comply, or could be embarassed into doing the right thing.

Perhaps the government could also develop a standard system for labelling portions, with an attractive seal of approval for those approved for kids of a certain age.

It would also help to have labels that say something is NOT approved for kids of a certain age. We'd love to see labels on ALL packaged drinks--not just sodas (juice has a lot of calories too)--with more than 10 ounces saying they are inappropriate for children. Other packaged foods could earn similar labels.

You'd be surprised how many parents think they are giving their kids the right-sized portion when they aren't, just out of ignorance. (At our local Wendy's, the "small" combo meal comes with a 16 ounce drink and what used to be called a "large" fries; a lot of parents probably think that looks okay compared to the even bigger other options.)

There are probably other ways to give parents more practical advice on HOW MUCH food is appropriate for their children. We should look for opportunities to help.

Do Sugar Substitutes Make You Fat?

Today we'll take a brief break from politics to focus on an important study released earlier this week that suggested artificial sweeteners may actually contribute to obesity.

A number of newpaper articles reported on the study, conducted at Purdue University and published in the scientific journal Behavioral Neuroscience. See, for example, "Sugar Substitutes May Contribute To Weight Gain" in the Washington Post.

In the study, researchers fed rats with two types of sweetened yogurt: one with saccharin and one with natural sugar. The rats who ate the lower calorie yogurt sweetened with saccharin ate more food overall and gained more weight than those eating the higher calorie yogurt with natural sugar. From this, the researchers deduce that humans consuming foods (and diet drinks) sweetened artificially may inadvertently be making their weight situation worse, rather than better.

Of course, the folks at some artificial sweetener industry funded front group misleadingly called the Calorie Control Council immediately attacked the study, scoffing at its findings.

Now, we here at the Curmudgeon would be the first to say that you have to be very careful about a single animal study of just about any kind. Such studies can be suggestive of further research and help elaborate hypotheses, but they're hardly definitive.

Here, in particular, rats are not humans, saccharin is not the sugar substitute most people use, and the study conditions are far from those of people eating food in real life. That said, the study raises some provocative questions. It's pretty clear that the more we, as a society, have used sugar substitutes, the fatter we've gotten. It's also clear to anyone who's watched someone chug down a 50 ounce Big Gulp, or some similar oversize diet drink, that all this does is promote gluttony.

When we were kids, growing up in the '60's and 70's, no sane person would consume a soft drink larger than 12 ounces. Then, along came all kinds of diet sodas, and drink sizes started going up, up, up. Today, you'd have to beg a restaurant or fast food outlet to give you a 12-ounce drink--"please, just give me one of your little kid cups, I don't care what you charge me for it."

Likewise, sugar has been substituted for in all kinds of other foods, with no corresponding reduction in our collective waist sizes. Meanwhile, people eat more food today in an average meal than they did 30 years ago.

In short, the notion that artificial sweeteners are somehow screwing with our metabolism to make us eat more--not less--is hardly nuts.

The Curmudgeon long ago gave up artificial sweeteners, diet sodas and other reduced calorie foods. As a general rule, we drink water, and occasionally, de-caf coffee or tea, although we'll sometimes indulge ourselves in a delicious Classic Coke in the red can (or better yet, bottle).

We're not saying you should do likewise--you can wait for some additional research to be done. But we are saying that you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking that those artificial sweeteners are going to save the day.

All things in moderation remains eminently good advice.

Viral Obesity: Your Friends Could Make You Fat

Hanging out with fat people could make you fat concludes a study just released in the New England Journal of Medicine. (See Obesity Spreads In Social Circles As Trends Do, Study Indicates.)

Apparently, obesity is like a fad, spreading socially. Actually, this research makes a lot of sense, and goes a long way to explaining the obesity epidemic in America.

Part of what has happened is that obesity has become socially acceptable, at least among friends. In the study, your likelihood of becoming obese rises 171% if you are mutual friends with someone else who is obese (i.e., both you and that other person described each other as friends).

The relationship also works among relatives, but is not nearly as strong. Intuitively, we all know why that is: we have plenty of relatives we don't really like. But friends, hey, you choose them because you like them, and you often emulate them, apparently to the point of getting fat.

Evidently, it doesn't work the other way around--obese people don't decide to get thin by hanging around with thin friends. That's no surprise: hanging out with a friend and eating whatever and however much you want is FUN! (The same relationship probably works in terms of alcoholism; if your friend drinks, so do you.) It's just too bad that it leads to serious health problems.

If only life could be like that Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life, where Meryl Streep informs him that in heaven (or the world in between heaven and hell) you can eat whatever you want without gaining weight. Alas, real life isn't like that. So, if you want to stay thin, avoid making friends with someone on the large side.

Diet Soda Obesity Link?

We've long had our suspicions about so-called "diet soda." Put aside the issue of whether massive amounts of some kind of artificial sweetener are really good for you. It just seems that the more diet soda Americans drink, the fatter they get.

When the Curmudgeon was a kid, the only diet sodas out there were specialty drinks like Tab and Fresca. Back then, folks were still reasonably thin. Then, along came Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi and diet everything else. In larger, and larger, and larger sizes.

Now comes a new report from the widely respected Framingham Study, finding that diet soda drinkers are more likely than non-soda drinkers to have "metabolic sydrome," be obese, have high blood sugar and have high blood pressure.

Now, we'd be the first to tell you that association does not mean causation. Indeed, the authors of the report were not willing to say that their data supports a claim that drinking diet soda causes obesity. Some critics of the study--many funded by the soft drink industry--are quick to point out that it may well be that people who are more unhealthy to begin with are more likely to have switched to diet soda.

Perhaps. But maybe diet soda isn't so benign after all. We can say this for sure: water would be better. (And no, we don't endorse substituting "all natural" juice, or some kind of organic drink as "more healthy"--those have tons of empty calories.)

One problem with diet drinks is that their sweet taste encourages simply drinking too much liquid. You'll see folks--often quite large ones--downing 24 oz., 36 oz., and, gracious me, 64 oz. "diet" drinks at your local fast food joint or "convenience" store, but you won't see anyone drinking that much water in a similar setting. Some scientists theorize that while the diet soda has no calories, drinking all that sweet tasting carbonated beverage leads one to crave more of other sweet foods. We think there could be merit to that.

Of course, drinking the occasional 12 oz. diet soda--everything in moderation we say--isn't going to hurt you. (Nor will drinking sugared soda in moderation hurt you, either.) But we would counsel against drinking anything--whether "diet" or not--in massive quantities. We'd sure like to see the return of the 12 oz. soda as the norm--a "regular" drink--at fast food restaurants.

Stress = Obesity?

Perhaps you saw the articles earlier this week on studies that purport to show that stress combined with a junk food diet may be the "cause" of obesity. For example, the Washington Post had a front page story headlined "Way to Shrink, Grow Fat Is Found."

Stories like this belong in a little box in the Style section, somewhere close to the latest "news" on Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole. The key passage in the story is this: "The researchers have applied for a patent and have begun negotiating with drug companies to license the technology." In other words, this is from a group of folks who are hoping to get rich quick.

Haven't we heard this all before--some new magic bullet cure for obesity?

This time, the researchers--using mice, not humans--say they've found a biochemical pathway that creates obesity in stressed out animals fed a high fat diet of "junk food." The key is supposedly a substance called "neuropeptide Y" and a receptor for it, the "neuropeptide Y2R receptor." (From the Y2K scare to the Y2R hope!). The theory is that people with too much neuropeptide Y get fat when also subjected to "stress"; block the neuropeptide Y and they won't.

As one scientist explained it in a commentary that accompanied publication of the research: "There is a lot of uncontrollable stress right now in our societies. There's also a lot of inexpensive high-fat food. This could help explain the obesity epidemic."

The problem with such blather is that humans have ALWAYS been subjected to uncontrollable stress. Indeed, for the first six million years of human existence--until about 40 years ago--much of that stress centered around "where's my next meal going to come from?" All in all, one can hardly say that life today is MORE stressful for most humans than it was at any other time in history. The difference may only be that the stress has shifted from worrying about survival to being concerned about trivial things such as what television channel will get Paris's first post-jail interview.

Since stress is nothing new, then that leaves "a lot of inexpensive high-fat food" as the possible culprit in the obesity epidemic. Bingo. But did we need scientists to figure that one out? Not really--all they're saying is that fat people are eating too much junk food. Duh. Perhaps the easier solution--rather than blocking a neuropeptide that probably does some useful things in the body--would simply be to eat less crappy food.

Do we really need a pill that will allow people to go into the Cheesecake Factory and stuff their faces with impunity? Will we have to double our output of food--and the attendant drain on world resources--just to keep feeding those people?

Fat People To The Rescue: Energy Crisis Solved

We love the moment in the movie "Soylent Green" when Charlton Heston makes the awful realization that the government is turning people into food: "Soylent green is people!" he wails as the film ends.

We thought of this today after reading a Wall Street Journal article with the subheadline: "Scientists Are Turning To Fat As Renewable Energy Source."

Could it be, we thrilled, that fat people are the solution to our impending energy crisis? Such sweet irony--the same folks who need monster SUV's to transport their bodies; who consume the world's food resources at an alarming rate; who demand that the air conditioning be set at 65 degrees so they won't be hot--those same people could be put to use as fuel?

Perhaps. Scientists are working to turn animal fat into a form of bio-diesel fuel for automobiles. In one project, Tysons Foods is working with Conoco Phillips to take fat from chicken processing plants and render it into bio-diesel, all with the hoped for help of a generous federal subsidy.

So why not people? Set up massive liposuction centers next to these bio-diesel refineries and kill two birds with one stone: wipe out obesity while ending the energy crisis.

Problem solved. Next.

Cheesecake Factory Offers Smaller Portions

Some long while back we pilloried the Cheesecake Factory--giving it one of our "Gluttony" awards for purveyors of obesity.

We're not ready to take it back, but we have noticed that the CF, along with other mega-portion size chains such as Ruby Tuesday and Friday's, are now offering smaller portion sizes as an option, with CF even cutting the price on the smaller meals (unlike some of the others).

It's a small--really, tiny--step in the right direction. As we've said before, much of the obesity epidemic can be traced to Americans' infatuation with enormous portion sizes for meals, snacks, drinks, etc., much of which is driven by the food industry. (A restaurant can essentially double your portion of food for a few pennies, reaping a larger profit by charging a few extra dollars. The soon to be fat diner thinks he's getting a bargain--twice the food for just 20-30% the extra cost.)

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is no standard for what constitutes a "normal" sized serving. Believe it or not, when I was young, most people were perfectly satisfied with a meal consisting of a single patty cheeseburger, a small bag of fries and a 12 ounce soda. Today, that would barely pass muster as a kids meal.

We need some standards. Perhaps a threat of such from government would encourage food industry groups to come up with something on their own. Then, we might be in the position where, instead of offering a "smaller" portion--which is really a right-sized portion for most people--you might have a regular portion, with the option to pay more if you really need something outsized.

Sadly, even the small portions at many places are still far too large. Wendy's, for example, simply relabelled it's 20 ounce drink and medium fries with any combo meal as a "small", while making its "medium" into a gargantuan obesity-inducing calorie fest.

For now, the best thing you can do, especially with kids, is encourage leaving some food behind, or sharing some of those huge portions (kids don't like to share food with their siblings, but they will share with their parents).

Webb Iran Bill; Surge Kills U.S. Soldiers; What Does NRLC Have To Hide; Cold Coulter Shoulder; Obesity Surgery For Kids; Callahan Retirement

Today we cover a potpourri of Curmudgeonly short subjects:

Webb Bill Would Limit Authority To Start A War With Iran

Jim Webb has introduced a bill in the Senate that would prevent Bush from using funds to start a war with Iran without Congressional authorization. See here for details.

Bombs Kill U.S. Soldiers In Baghdad

The risks of a troop surge in Iraq were obvious: sending in more U.S. soldiers and placing them in the streets of Baghdad makes them more vulnerable to attack. Today, those risks hit home as bombs killed at least nine U.S. soldiers in Baghdad and maimed many more. Why are we fighting in this civil war?

What Does The National Right To Life Committee Have To Hide?

The National Right To Life Committee has "vowed" to kill legislation that would require executive branch officials to disclose who has been lobbying them. (See story here.) This is pretty reasonable legislation in the wake of the Abramoff scandals and other related examples of insidious political lobbying of the Bush administration. The legislation would obviously apply to future administrations as well, whether Democratic or Republican.

We wonder what the NRLC has to hide.

Let Coulter Run Her Mouth

We really hate to even mention the lady's name in any way because it only gives her the attention she obviously craves. However, we're happy to have AC make public appearances in front of conservative audiences to call people she disagrees with "faggots" and "traitors" because it lets the independent middle of the road citizens see what Brown Shirts these "conservatives" really are.

Obesity Surgery For Children

We haven't said much about obesity for some time--evidently the issue has dropped off the media screen. We did see a report today that the number of children having radical surgery to treat obesity tripled between 2000-2003, and presumably has increased more since then.

That's pretty sad news. While many food marketers have become more responsible in their advertising, we still see plenty of promotions that do little more than encourage overeating. Burger King is a particularly big offender in this category, evidently because it is desperate for business. Wendy's may be worse, because unlike Burger King it pretends to be concerned about obesity and children's diets, yet continues to promote massive triple sized bacon cheese whatever burgers, while also retaining its misleading 20 ounce "small" drinks.

Worse is Quiznos Subs, which has been going after Subway by comparing its meat-filled overstuffed sandwiches with Subway's leaner offering. Maybe the Quiznos person in the ads should weigh 300 pounds, compared to Subway's Jared. (In any event, a regular Subway sandwich costs about half that of a regular Quiznos; for some extra $ you can make your Subway just as fattening.)

At bottom, public health officials have made little headway against obesity in recent years, with most initiatives, such as banning sodas in schools, being minor band-aids.

It's truly sad to see children so large they need life-threatening radical surgery to save themselves.

Fairfax GOP Delegate Vincent Callahan To Retire

The Washington Post reports that Fairfax Republican Delegate Vincent Callahan, who has served a remarkable 40 years in the Virginia House, is retiring at age 75. This presents an excellent opportunity for a Democratic pick-up in the fall election--Callahan was the sole remaining Republican inside the beltway.

Still, it comes at a high cost to Northern Virginia. Callahan was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, a perch from which he could steer money to NoVa (from whence the money came, we might add).

It's too bad Democratic gains often come at the cost of more moderate Republicans, but that's the way it will be, both at the state and national levels, in our current political environment.