For those of you unfamiliar with sous vide, it is a French term meaning ‘under vacuum’ and refers to a method of cooking in which vacuum-packed foods are cooked in a water bath creating a taste and flavor that can’t be replicated any other way.  Though many of you may never have heard of the term ‘sous vide,’ it’s a good bet that you have tasted food prepared using the ‘sous vide’ method, especially if you have eaten at a fine restaurant.

Why on earth would two physicians who made their reputations caring for overweight patients and writing books about diet and nutrition veer off in the direction of manufacturing a kitchen appliance?  As is always said in situations such as this one, it’s a long story.  But not really that long, so I’ll tell it.

A couple of years ago I was trolling through the internet looking for something – I don’t remember what – and I came upon an article about the sous vide method of cooking.  I read about it and did a little more research.  Once I understood the concept, it all made perfect sense to me, so I did what I always do in cooking situations: I dragooned MD into doing all the work.  I did help a little, but she was the real technician in putting our first sous vide contraption together.

So you’ll understand how sous vide works, I’ll digress a little from the story of our development of the Sous Vide Supreme to explain.

Say, for instance, you want to cook a perfect medium rare steak.  You throw it on a very hot grill (or skillet) and try to guess the amount of time it will take for the extreme heat to penetrate the steak until it raises the temperature in middle of the steak to 134 degrees F.  Often you miss and either under cook or (more commonly) overcook the steak.  You can be more precise if you use a meat thermometer and pull the steak off the grill when the temperature reaches 134 degrees.  This meat-thermometer technique is obviously a more accurate way to ensure the perfect medium rare steak, but it has its drawbacks.  If you pull the steak off the grill when the center is at 134 F, the steak continues to cook and will end up more well done than medium rare.  If you pull it off at, say, 128 F, you are playing the guessing game again, hoping that it will cook to the 134 F on its own.

And we’re not even talking here about the problems you run into if you are cooking several steaks of differing thicknesses, a situation that multiplies the probability of having a not-quite-right outcome – at least with some of the steaks.

If you use either of the above methods precisely, you end up with a perfect medium rare steak…right in the middle.  The center of the steak is medium rare, but it gets more and more well done as it gets closer to the surface.  You have what looks kind of like a target with the perfect medium rare center being the bulls eye with the rest of the target being progressively more well done as it gets nearer the edges.

Sous vide solves this problem.  You season your steaks however you like them seasoned, then you put them in vacuum bags and seal them.  (You don’t have to have an expensive machine for this.  You can find vacuum bags and pumps for just a few dollars at most grocery stores.)  You then put the seasoned, sealed steaks into a sous vide water bath set for 134 F and walk away.  You can leave them in for an hour or eight hours – the time doesn’t really matter that much because as soon as the steaks reach 134 degrees throughout, they are perfectly medium rare and they don’t get any more well done beyond that point.  So if you’re having a dinner party and your steaks are in a sous vide cooker awaiting the meal and the pre-dinner chit chat runs a half hour (or an hour or two hours) over, it doesn’t matter.  You take the steaks out, remove them from the bag, finish them off for about 30 seconds, and you’re finished and have perfect medium rare steaks.  And it doesn’t matter if some of your guests want thick fillets while others want thinner sirloins and yet others want rib eyes – they all come out perfect at the same time.

Sous vide is the perfect method for cooking tougher cuts of meat.  Grass fed beef, though tasty, isn’t always the most tender of selections.  If, however, you put a couple of grass-fed beef steaks in a sous vide bath before you go to work, by the time you get home, they are as tender as a mother’s heart while still retaining all their taste.  MD blogged about flank steak cooked sous vide a while back.  You can cook flank steak, which is really tasty but tough, using the sous vide method and have a meat that is as tender as filet but with all the taste of the flank steak and best of all, not overcooked.

Here is a link to a full-page Wall Street Journal article from about a year and a half ago that describes the sous vide process and has a pretty good video showing how it works to cook a steak.

But it’s not just for steak. You can use the Sous Vide Supreme to cook any kind of meat and vegetables.  And can even use it to make ice cream base, béarnaise sauce, creme anglaise and anything that requires a precise temperature to cook properly.  Vegetables cooked sous vide are out of this world.  For instance, if you cook beets the traditional way by boiling them, you’re left with a lot of beet-colored water in the pan after you’ve removed the beets.  This beet-colored fluid contains flavonoids, carotenoids and other beneficial nutrients that you would prefer not to lose. If you vacuum seal the beets and cook them sous vide at 185 F, you end up with beets that are unlike any beets you’ve tasted before.  They look the same, but taste much more beet-y, because they have retained all the nutritious fluid that you previously threw down the drain after boiling.  The beets are tastier, have a better consistency and are more nutritious than beets cooked any other way.  It works the same with all veggies.

When MD built our first home-made sous vide contraption on our stove, she used a stock pot that she had to put up on a scaffold she built out of odds and ends she rounded up from the kitchen.  She had to get the pot above the flame because even at its lowest setting, the fire was hot enough to simmer water, which meant that the temperature was 212 F, way, way too hot for sous vide.  She had to get the bottom of the pot high enough, so that the temperature in the water in the pot was around 140 F (at that point, we thought 140 was the temperature required for a perfect medium rare steak).  It was no mean feat to do so.  She had to keep a candy thermometer in the pot and keep adding little bits of cold water and even ice to keep the water at 140 F. (I now wish that I had photographed this early contraption, but, alas, I didn’t, so you’ll just have to imagine it.) After keeping a couple of vacuum-sealed steaks submerged at roughly 140 F for a couple of hours (which required her constant attention), MD pulled them out, finished them off on the grill for a few seconds, and we cut into them.  We learned a couple of things.  First, 140 F is too hot for medium rare, and, second, finishing is an important part of the process.

MD with my invaluable technical advice fiddled with our device for another few runs of steaks before she hit on the way to cook them perfectly.  Once she did, and once we tasted them perfectly done, I was sold.  I decided that we needed to purchase a sous vide unit for our house.

I got online and searched.  What I discovered to my absolute amazement is that there was not a sous vide unit made for the home kitchen.  There were several companies making sous vide units for restaurant use, but the price of them would knock your socks off.  The least expensive one – and it was tiny – ran to over a thousand dollars.  Most costs many thousands of dollars.  I kept thinking that there had to be a home sous vide unit somewhere, but search though I did, I couldn’t find one.

The light bulb went on.

I reasoned that I couldn’t be the only one who wanted a home sous vide unit.  And of such thoughts are opportunities made.  I figured it couldn’t be that tough to make a unit, since, after all, they were nothing but sophisticated Crock Pots.  So I thought.  As it ends up, nothing is further from the truth, but I didn’t know that at the time.

During my online searches for some kind of home sous vide machine, I came across countless articles on sous vide cooking.  One of these articles contained a quote by Nathan Myhrvold – the retired Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft who has devoted his post retirement to cooking, photography* and various other endeavors – a sous vide expert who figured prominently in the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above, and who is the go-to guy whenever a writer needs a comment about sous vide.  When I read these words, I knew  there was a real opportunity.

Most dedicated home cooks purchase laboratory water baths, which are available on eBay, says Myhrvold.

“I believe someone will produce a home sous vide machine in the not-to-distant future,” says Myhrvold.  Basically, “a Crock-Pot with [a] very accurate thermostat.”

Knowing as I did Nathan Myhrvold’s status in the food world, I reckoned he would know if someone was already working on one, and since he didn’t mention it (and since I’m an eternal optimist), I figured there wasn’t anyone working on one.  So, it was full speed ahead.

What I didn’t realize was that Nathan Myhrvold was wrong.  Not about the no-one working on one, but about the technology required.  He made it sound easy.  But, as it turns out, a sous vide cooker is much, much more than a Crock-Pot with a very accurate thermometer.  To be able to cook sous vide, the temperature can’t fluctuate more than a half a degree in either direction.  For example, eggs cooked at 63 degrees C (you can set the Sous Vide Supreme for either C or F) are totally different from eggs cooked at 62 or 64 degrees.  Try to cook perfect eggs by setting a Crock-Pot at low, medium or hot, the temperature selections available for most.  You can’t do it.  The maintenance of a specific temperature for hours (and even days) is an absolute necessity in cooking sous vide, and that was what we set out to do in developing our machine.  This kind of temperature control can’t be maintained with a simple thermostat mechanism.

Once we decided to make the leap and try to develop a home sous vide unit, it dawned on us that neither of us knew anything about the appliance business.  So we hadn’t a clue as to how to launch such a venture.  But we allowed as how there were bound to be people who did.  So I set about finding them.

Through a business acquaintance, I got introduced to an entrepreneur and businessman who had some experience in the small appliance development business. (A pedigree in small appliance development would be more correct.  He took The Juiceman and The Breadman from concept to success and was also an executive VP at Salton with the George Foreman Grill.)

Bob Lamson, who is now a partner in the business and a great friend, is just the kind of guy I enjoy being around.  I, of course, don’t think he is nearly as smart as I am, but he may disagree.  He is trained in philosophy, has a undergraduate degree from Yale, has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington, ran for US Congress as a Democrat (and almost won), is the author of a book on the economics of the defense industry, and was in a small high school philosophy study group with Barrack Obama’s mother.  As you might imagine, Bob and I have many spirited conversations about many, many topics, which keep all our get togethers stimulating. He is a Seattle resident of long standing, thus our many trips to Seattle where a branch of the Sous Vide Supreme offices are located.

MD and I (MD mainly) came up with the specs for a home sous vide unit, and Bob, who knows everyone involved in the appliance business the world over, after gathering bids, recommended an engineering and design firm in London that got started on the design work.  After much back and forth, and many prototypes, we finally got the design we wanted and a prototype that worked like a charm.

After a lot of consultation, we concluded that if we had any hope of bringing our product to market at a reasonable price for the home consumer, we were going to have to have it made in China, a situation about which I had considerable angst.  We were confronted with the reality that if we made it somewhere else, our appliance would be too costly, and if we made it in China, it would, well, be made in China.  Bob assured us that many Chinese factories were state of the art, and that it was just a matter of selecting the right one.  Bob had had many products made in China (just about everything, I discovered, including the Macbook Pro I’m typing these words on is made in China) and had had no problems.  He told us he would go to China himself and check out any factory we might end up using.  MD and I decided to go as well.

I was in for a huge surprise.  During my years as an engineer I visited many factories, so I have a pretty good feel for what US factories look like.  The factory we decided to work with in China was a marvel of high technology.  In their showroom were many of the products we’re all familiar with here in the US, and as we were shown through the huge work spaces, there were all these same familiar products rolling off the assembly lines.  The testing facilities were beyond compare, and the engineers were terrific.  In fact, the engineers there solved many of the temperature-control and cooling problems that had been plaguing us.  Whenever we found anything problematic, the folks at this factory were immediately responsive in getting it fixed.  After spending a couple of days at the facility, meeting the engineers, and watching the testing processes, we felt more than comfortable using this factory for our product.

What we didn’t realize when we started this venture was that the difficulty in achieving the precise temperature control necessary to sous vide cooking meant that each and every machine had to be calibrated by hand after it came off the line.  The engineers at the factory developed a system to do this that required filling each machine with water and testing multiple temp settings without the process adding huge amounts to the cost of the system.  I found the Chinese engineers easy to work with and incredibly understanding of all the hassle required to bring a product to market in the US.

After designing, building and working all the kinks out of our Sous Vide Supreme, one hurdle remained for us.  We had to get it approved by Underwriters Laboratories (UL).  No UL approval, no US sales.  It was as simple as that.  No retail stores will touch an appliance that isn’t UL approved, and let me tell you, UL approval isn’t easy to come by.  The UL people visited the factory in China, worked with the engineers, made suggestions as to how we could improve our machine, and finally granted us the coveted UL Approved moniker just a couple of weeks ago.  It was this approval I was waiting for before I wrote this post.  I didn’t want to alert the world as to what we were doing until we had this final and most important process firmly in hand.

I can’t begin to tell you what an enormous project this has been.  You don’t really know (I certainly didn’t) what’s involved when you go down to buy a small appliance at your local department store.  We’ve had to hire designers to create logos, do artwork for the box; we’ve had to come up with how-to-use manuals (which are a part of getting a product through UL) and cooking instructions. We’ve had to test multiple iterations of the machine and tweak each one until we got it right.  We’ve had our units tested in major test kitchens here and in Europe, and worked with famous chefs to get it right.  We’ve had to deal with trans-oceanic freight companies and packing and shipping facilities in the US and China.  We ourselves have cooked a zillion different foods in our own test kitchen. It’s been a seemingly never-ending process as you can tell by how long I’ve been putting off the great revelation.  But now it’s done and ready to go.

Our PR firm, Duo PR, is sending us out on a cooking/demo tour that should start on October 18 if all goes well.  Most of the gigs we’ll be going on will be private affairs for potential retailers, but if any are public, I’ll post them so that any of you who have the opportunity and so desire may come to one of the events.

If you want more information about the Sous Vide Supreme, here is the website of our company, Eades Appliance Technology, aka EAT.  Sign up where indicated and we’ll email you information as it becomes available.  And, BTW, the ‘Eades’ in Eades Appliance Technology means a bunch of Eadeses, not just MD and me.  We’ve tapped our family for legal advice, financing, food tasting and creative assistance.  So it is truly a family enterprise plus Bob, Mo and the rest of the staff at the Sous Vide Supreme office in Seattle.

Since this blog isn’t really a blog to sell stuff – other than an occasional recommendation here and there – I’m not going to be writing much on the Sous Vide Supreme.  I’ll have links to the website on the links, and I’ve started a Twitter account so I can put up links on sous vide cooking.  But other than those, this is pretty much it. (I may have one other major announcement, if we can get the legal-contractual issues worked out, but that should be it.) Many people have wanted to know what we’ve been working on so mysteriously, so this is it.  In fact, this is the very first piece to go out into the world about the Sous Vide Supreme. Other than the team working on it, you are the first in the world to be learning about this product.

Next post I’ll be back to the nutritional stuff.

Here are a few photos of MD cooking steaks in one of the sous vide machines in our kitchen.

Here you see a couple of units on our counter so you can get the feel for the size. To the right are cooked, vacuum-sealed steaks pulled from the water bath ready to be finished. The steaks are lying in the inverted top of the Sous Vide Supreme. This top as tray was one of MD’s innovative brainstorms.

In this close up of the perfectly medium rare steaks, you can see that they have been seasoned before being put in the vacuum bags. They are now ready for the skillet. But first, you’ve got to put some butter in the skillet and heat it until the butter is foaming. Then you put the steak in and leave it for just about 20-30 seconds on one side, then flip and sear on the other side for only a few seconds.

One steak in the pan searing on one side and about ready to be flipped.

Two steaks cooked perfectly. I wish the photo were as perfect as the steaks. I intended to take a picture of the steak after it was cut, but my hunger got the best of me and I forgot.

* Nathan Myhrvold took the photos I displayed in a previous blog post.

As most of you also know, I am a man-made global warming/climate change denier. I’m not as much a denier as I am a pragmatist who realizes that even if there is something to the phenomenon (which in my view is far from certain), it’s way, way too expensive to fix in the ways we’re trying to fix it.  And if all of us in the US and the UK (the two centers of GW hysteria) spend the fortune required to keep our respective countries green, we don’t have any control over the people in China and India.  These countries are going to continue to release CO2 in enormous amounts (as will any other populous country that enters its own industrial age) irrespective of whether or not we all recycle, drive electric cars and shut down all our factories.  But, that’s just my view.

Most of this GW hysteria has been fomented by Al Gore, who, as we all know, is not a scientist, but instead a person with no technical training who has profited mightily from the discord he has sown.  Discord he has sown, I might add, while living in his energy-gobbling, CO2-emitting mansion in Tennessee and flying around in private jets to hobnob with others living the same basic lifestyle. But, to give him his due, he could be correct about it all; I just don’t think so.  I guess time will tell.  But if his predictions are like all the other impending-catastrophe predictions of the past, from Malthus to Ehrlich, they will come to naught.

So, what does all this have to do with Park Lane in Montecito?

Well, imagine my surprise when I read the little squib below in the Montecito Journal (our local paper) a couple of days ago.  Go ahead and laugh.

If it does all come to pass, I guess I’ll just have to do the Southern, have him down (or up) for coffee, and we’ll hash it out.

After meetings all day long Monday and Tuesday, we left with our partner to head for his place on Orcas Island.  We drove for an hour and a half then took a ferry for an hour to get there where his wife, who had gone up the day before, was patiently waiting.  We went to dinner and headed to the house.  We got there long after dark and crashed.  I always love to wake up in the morning in a place that I haven’t yet really seen because I arrived under the cover of darkness the night before.

Our partner’s house has a phenomenal view overlooking the sound and is nestled in among the Douglas firs, many of which are at least four feet in diameter.  It is really a forest primeval and a great place to vacation. Unfortunately, we had come to work.

After a breakfast of eggs and bacon, we set to.  MD was working inside on our traveling laptop while I sat outside on the deck and made calls.  In the photo below, our partner is on the phone to London and I’m on the phone to God only knows, since I had about a dozen calls I made while he made only the one.

As you can see, it’s not too shabby a place to work.  And work we did.  We got a lot accomplished before we took a break to set out the crab traps to get our dinner for that night.

We rowed out to the boat, unhooked from the mooring ball and headed out to our partner’s secret crabbing spot a couple of miles away.  It was so secret that we could locate it only by the dozens of other crab traps there.

After setting out the trap, we came back, worked a little more, then broke for lunch.  We went into the tiny town of Eastsound and ate at Roses, a lovely little restaurant, serving all natural or organic food.  Our friends needed to run by the hardware store, where I found the item pictured below.  It is a testament to America today (and the whole world, I fear,) when manufacturers can make money producing products like this one.  Thirty years ago there would not have been enough demand to justify mass producing these chairs.  But today I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t one of their biggest sellers (no pun intended).  As you can see from the photo, it is named The Big Boy, which implies a large, football-lineman-like physique, but which is really a euphemism for The Obese Boy (or girl).  As I’ve written before, these things make my blood boil, because so many people have been victimized by doing what the ‘authorities’ recommended they do.

We went back to the house, worked for the rest of the afternoon until it was Jameson time.  We walked to the beach (about 50 yards from the house) and sat in the sun waiting for the tide to get right so we could head for our crab trap. In due course, we rowed back to the boat, MD unhooked us again, and we were off to the traps.  On the way there we saw a commotion ahead in the water.  At first I thought it was dolphins, but as we got closer we realized it was two seals (not sea lions) fighting.  They were going at it hammer and tongs.  They would surface with one latched on to the other’s neck with its teeth, then both would submerge.  I thought they might just be playing until I noticed the blood everywhere.  The fight continued as we circled around watching.  I had my camera, but couldn’t get a decent photo because every time I clicked the shutter, the seals went back under during the lag between clicking and the shutter opening.  At last one seal gave up and swam away.  So we went on our way to the crabbing spot.

Once there I got the joy of pulling up the trap from about 80 feet of depth.  As it neared the surface, we could see a few Dungeness crabs within, so we knew we had dinner.

When we got back to shore, we set about cleaning the crabs, an activity fraught with a little peril.  The crabs are not particularly happy about being dragged from their briny lairs and are especially not happy to be handled.  They are extremely quick and have large, strong pincer claws in the front; they should be dealt with with care if you value your fingers.  I’ve never been pinched, but others who have say it hurts like the devil, and that they’re hard to dislodge once they’ve got a grip.

The cleaning is a grisly process.  You grab the crabs with both hands with one had holding all the claws on one side and the other hand holding all the claws on the other.  Grabbing them thusly is the difficult part, because they are strong and quick.  Once you’ve got them, you bang them down on their middles on some kind of an edge.  In this case, the edge of the aluminum row boat worked fine.  As the shells break, you pull hard on the handfuls of legs on both sides, which separate, and you end up with all the edible crab in either hand.

After you’ve got the legs apart, you then have to pick the gills out of the meat, which doesn’t take long, and then you’re ready to cook.

To cook, you simply put the legs into boiling salt water (water that we took from the ocean) for 8 to 10 minutes.  When you’re finished and plate them up, here’s what you have.  And they are delicious…if you like fresh Dungeness crab dipped in butter.

After dinner and cleaning up, we watched the gorgeous sunset over the sound.  We stayed up talking until about midnight, then hit the sack, got up and started a new day that was a repeat of the first.  Same people, same work, different clothes and different crabs, but basically the same day.  We repeated it a couple of times, then reversed our trek via the ferry and the drive to Seattle where we caught our plane home.

Good news!  Just as I was putting the finishing touches on this post, I received an email from our publisher informing me that they had actual printed books in hand and would be sending a couple our way.  This really does mean that they will be available before the publication date of September 8.  They will probably be in stores within a couple of weeks and, I would imagine, be available on Amazon and other online retailers soon.

If you plan to purchase the book it would really help if you pre-ordered it from Amazon.  The name of the game in book writing is to get on the NY Times list, and that involves selling a lot of books within a given week.  So, if we have a ton of pre-orders, they will all go out at once, and be recorded by those who set up the Times list.  Thanks in advance.

I will speak to the publisher tomorrow to see if I can post a lengthy excerpt soon.

MD and I just spent a couple of days with the grandkids at Disneyland.  They’re here visiting for a couple of weeks, so we decided to bite the bullet and take them on the front end and get it over with instead of waiting until the end, as we usually do, and dreading it the entire time.  It was brutal but it is now over.

I loathe Disneyland and refer to it as the biggest people trap ever built by a mouse.  Which isn’t an original, but I’ve been saying it for so long that I’ve forgotten where I heard it years ago.

This year I at least was able to avoid the Small World ride.  Our 7-year-old grandson informed us that it was ‘lame.’  I couldn’t have agreed more.  I wasn’t so lucky a couple of years ago, however.  We took the kids then and did end up going on the Small World ride, which experience the grandkid remembered when he referred to the ride as being lame.

For those of you lucky enough to have escaped the Disneyland experience, the Small World ride is easily the most inane amusement park ride ever conceived by the mind of man.  You get in these little fiberglass flat-bottomed boats and cruise through this serpentine canal that wends its way around  tableaus of little dolls of various nationalities (as in photo above) doing their mechanical dances to what is easily the most nauseating piece of music ever written. Unlike most Disneyland rides that you wait an hour to get on and are then over in about 45 seconds, the Small World ride is interminable.  It goes on and on and on.  Which is, I suppose, its only virtue because at least it is dark and air conditioned, a welcome change from the heat radiating up from the vast concrete underpinnings of the park. (The downside is that you’ve been exposed to the nauseating song for so long that it has wedged itself into your brain and you can’t get it out for the rest of the day.)

When I last rode the ride,  it had just reopened after having been closed for almost a year for renovations.  I asked one of the attendants what had changed, hoping for an de-inane-ation of the ride.  The guy told me it hadn’t changed at all; they had just made the boats a little bigger and deepened the channel.  Then he told me it was because the guests of the park had become so much larger than when the ride went in in the 60s and were causing the boats to bottom out.

The park was so crowded and hot when we went two years ago that I kind of went brain dead.  All I wanted to do was slog through and get it behind me.  This time the weather was better and, thanks to the recession, the park wasn’t as crowded.  And I wasn’t so miserable, so I had a chance to look around a little more.

If Disneyland is any indication, there is no question we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic.  I tried to make some kind of semi-accurate estimate by doing little statistical analyses when  was waiting around for rides.  It looked to me that about 40 percent of adults were out and out obese, some morbidly so.  And I would estimate that of the folks who weren’t actually obese, at least 85 percent of them were overweight. A normal weight adult at Disneyland was a rarity.

What really surprised me was the state of obesity of the Disneyland staff.  When I was in college I got a job at Disneyland (which in part accounts for my loathing of the place).  I was a conductor on the train that circumnavigates the park.  It was one of the worst jobs I ever had.  But it did have its perks.  At that time, all the employees were college students or college dropouts who were the full time workers.  In keeping with the Disney image at the time, just about all the young employees selected were clean cut and nice looking.  As a consequence, the place was kind of a meat market.  Employee parties were legendary.  That part I enjoyed, but my enjoyment was somewhat tempered by the fact that I had a steady girlfriend at the time who also worked at Disneyland.

Now, the young employees are a reflection of the population in general.  At least half of them are obese, some almost morbidly so.  I don’t know if this represents the student body of the local college or what, but it certainly has changed over the past few decades.

Despite my kind of flippant tone in this post, I don’t find the large numbers of obese guests (as the Disneyland staff refers to the people paying to go there) and staff amusing in the slightest.  I think it is tragic.  As I’ve said many times before, we have all been the unwitting subjects of a long experiment, the hypothesis of which is that since fat is bad and carbs are good, we should all eat low-fat, high-carb diets.  If so, says this hypothesis, obesity will go away.  Well, it hasn’t.  It has gotten much, much worse.  And the sad, sad thing is that this hypothesis was never validated scientifically before we were all enrolled in the experiment.  When I see dozens and dozens of young people looking like the one pictured above, it makes my blood boil.  Most of the people who inflicted this nonsense on us are still around and still pushing the carbs and still blaming the fat in the diet. Tar and feathers spring to mind.

When I thought I was going to have to subject myself to the Small World again before my grandson got me out of it by not wanting to go himself, I remembered what the attendant had told me previously about the ride being renovated because of the increase in obesity.  I wondered if it were an urban legend or if it were really true.  When I got back to a computer, I checked it out.

There are a number of investigative reports on the idea, and the consensus seems to be that the renovation was due to the boats bottoming out due to the increased weight of the passengers.  Based on what I saw, I suspect that’s the case because just taking the average weight gain over the last 40 years means the boats are carrying 200 extra pounds more than they were designed for..  Disney officials are staying mum, however.

During my own investigation on the issue, I ran across an interesting article on Snopes.com.  A new twist has been added to many of the rides at Disneyland, especially the ones that hurtle you along in the dark.  Cameras are placed in strategic locations and take photos as the ride comes through.  After you get off, you can go see a photo of yourself and your entire boat or log or train car or whatever conveyance dropping over a precipice projected on a screen near the exit.  Most people are pictured screaming and holding on for dear life.

One of the rides – Splash Mountain – has achieved some notoriety because it has become common for female riders to pull up (or down) their tops as they approach the cameras.  This flashing has become so common that the ride has become known as Flash Mountain.  All of the photos are looked at by park officials before being put up on the screens for all to see.  Here is the Snopes link to the article – a little (very little, actually) navigating will get those with a prurient bent to a page of these photos.  I, of course, had to look as part of my investigation for this blog post.

The Disney officials are good at weeding out these bawdy photos and they are very good at feeding the hordes of overweight people exactly what they want.  Disneyland is carb heaven.  That’s just about all you can find.  There are sweetened cold drinks, a variety of ice cream products, cotton candy, gummy sweets, funnel cakes and other high-carb junk of every stripe.  It is almost impossible to avoid carbs there.  It can be done, but it is difficult and requires a lot of effort.  The vast majority of the people I saw weren’t making the effort.

If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to avoid the Magic Kingdom for at least another couple of years. When I do get dragged there again, I’ll stumble along as I normally do, putting one tired foot in front of the other counting the hours until it’s over. But, admittedly, I will approach Splash Mountain with a little more exuberance than I have in the past.

H/T to Roy Williams

I figure it’s about time for another grab bag of a post updating everyone on what’s going on at Casa Eades and throwing up a few interesting articles and websites.

The Verdi Requiem

The Santa Barbara Choral Society’s Verdi Requiem was a triumph last weekend.  As you can see from the photo above, MD was pretty whipped when it was over.  Apparently, it’s pretty demanding on soloists, orchestra and chorus.  And, as you can see from the photo above, the listeners don’t have the same burden.  Other photos here.  A recent review of the concert here.

The concert was pretty well attended, although not as well attended as it would have been had the entire city not been consumed with worry about the fire from the week before.  Santa Barbara is just now returning to normalcy.  The receipts from the door covered a little over 40 percent of what it cost to put on the production.  When I heard that figure, I thought the whole thing was a financial disaster, but I learned that that figure is typical for non-profit arts productions.  Around 40 percent of the cost comes from the people who buy tickets – the other 60 percent comes from patrons who sponsor the event.  In other words, the ticket prices are subsidized by the nobless oblige of the wealthy, a large number of whom consider it their obligation to support the arts.  So, next time you go to a great performance that costs you $25 to see, thank a rich person that you didn’t have to pay $60.

Twitter adventures

As anyone who has followed me on Twitter knows, I spend a lot of time reading and posting to Twitter since I first posted about it.  It’s a great way to do mini posts because users of Twitter are limited to 140 characters, so it’s tough to get too verbose.

I was pretty clueless about Twitter until I started using it, so I assume others are clueless as well.  If you are not in the know about this social networking tool and would like to keep up with these mini posts, there are a couple of ways you can do it.  You can sign up for Twitter and follow me (and anyone else you would like to follow).  It takes maybe one minute to sign up for Twitter.  All you need is a working email address and a username and you’re in.  Once you are a Twitteree (or whatever they’re called), and sign up to follow me, you can read these mini posts as I put them up.  If you want to sign up, click here and get started.  If you do start, you will probably find that a bunch of your own friends are using Twitter, so you can keep up with them as well.

The other way you can access these mini posts is by clicking on the little blue bird logo that says FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER.  If you click there, you will go to a page that gives you all the latest mini posts, but you’ll have to keep going back to get the updates as they come in.  Here is a link to the page you will find.

I occasionally Tweet (a Twitter mini post is called a Tweet, a loathsome word if there ever was one, at least when applied to activities of grown humans) on personal stuff, but mainly the Tweets are mini posts on medical articles or other news articles that I think are of interest along with anything else I find that strikes my fancy.

For those of you who do follow me on Twitter, I apologize for any Twitter faux paux I may have committed.  One of the things that most appealed to me about Twitter was the notion that I could put up these mini posts without anyone responding.  But, alas, I was wrong.  I discovered a few days ago that people can respond and several hundred have.  I was taking time from feverishly mini posting by looking around my Twitter home page when I found a highlighted link that said: @DrEades.  When I clicked there, I was appalled to find several hundred responses to Tweets I had made.  I learned that when people respond to Tweets, it ends up in that section.  So, I wasn’t off the hook.  But I couldn’t possibly respond to several hundred people – even at 140 characters a response.  So, if you replied to something I wrote and I didn’t respond, you now know what happened.

I did have a couple of interesting experiences in responding however.  When I discovered the @DrEades section and found the zillion responses to my Tweets waiting there, the most recent one was from a lady who took me to task for one (or several) of my political Tweets.  She wrote that she had always liked my nutritional writing but that my political postings had alienated her.  I decided to reply to her just to see how the whole reply thing worked.  I sent her one of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quotes:

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Then I watched her site and found that she had deleted the Tweet to me, which is how I learned that one could delete these things once they are up.  They can’t be changed, so if you make a grammatical error (which, sadly, I have done a few times) it can’t be fixed, only deleted.  Then she deleted me from her list of people she follows.  I guess the Thomas Jefferson quote alienated her even more.

People are really strange.  I posted a Tweet about an email that I had received a dozen times about how George Bush has a state of the art, energy-efficient ranch house in Crawford, TX while Al Gore has a giant, energy-gobbling house in Nashville.  I always ignored the email because I thought it probably was an urban legend kind of thing.  Then someone sent me a link to the Snopes report on it, which said that the email was true.  I posted the Snopes report on Twitter.  Then I started to wonder what makes Snopes the last word authority on everything, so I started looking into that.  I discovered that Snopes is a husband – wife team, who live in a double-wide house trailer on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  They do all the checking themselves.  I was stunned.  I always figured that Snopes was some kind of outfit with a staff of hundreds that checked out all these things.  The notion that the ultimate authority on everything was just a mom and pop operation who make their living by ads on their snopes.com website.  Now that I know the situation, I’ll be more careful when I accept snopes as the last word on everything.

I put up a Tweet that said basically Who would’ve thought Snopes was a mom and pop operation?  Some guy signed up to follow me on Twitter, and immediately sent a nastygram to @DrEades that said If Snopes is a mom and pop outfit, what does that make the Protein Power blog? A ‘Pop’ outfit?  I replied that the Protein Power blog is a ‘Pop’ operation, but isn’t considered by anyone to be the last word on everything.  He then deleted me from his list of people he followed. As I say, a lot of bizarre people in the weeds out there.

The whole experience has been very strange indeed.  But I’m still working my way through it, probably alienating people right and left.  So join up, follow me, and watch the fun.

Upcoming travel plans

MD and I are leaving late Sunday night for Hong Kong, then to Guangzhou, back to Hong Kong, then to London.  Sadly, the entire trip will be a working trip.  We’re hard at it in our efforts to change the world, and this trip is all about that.  By the time we get back, I should be able to write about what we’ve been working on.

I will take a lot of photos and continue to blog during the trip.  And Tweet.

Comments on the blog

I continue to be mired in comment woes.  I just checked, and I have 78 comments in moderation, some of which have been there for weeks.  It has kind of become a comments graveyard.

I’ve whined about the comment situation for that last two years. I’ve said that I wasn’t going to continue to answer questions and was just going to post the comments as they came in.  My resolve would last for about two days, then I was right back answering all the questions.  Now, I’ve gone into a funk over the whole thing, and have devolved into just ignoring the comments that require answering and letting them stack up, which I hate doing.  But, I’ve been so busy lately that there isn’t much else I can do.

I was reading a book titled Economic Sophisms by one of my heroes, Frederic Bastiat, when I came across the following paragraph that, in a way, applies to the comment situation.

We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us.  They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.

It’s easy to pen a comment that says, Hi Doc, what are your thoughts on this article? and attach a link.  I have to read the article, pull the actual study, read it, think about it, then write an answer that is considerably longer than the original comment.  What takes a commenter 20 seconds to write ends up costing me an hour or two to come up with an intelligent answer or even an ‘arid dissertation.’

I’m also getting a lot of comments asking for my ideas and recommendations on personal health issues.  People send me lab results and want to know what I think.  Without treating a given individual as a patient, medico-legal restrictions prevent me from answering these kinds of questions.

I never read the comments on blogs that I read, so I must assume that many people don’t read the comments on this blog.  But I end up spending way more time dealing with the comments than I do writing posts.  If I didn’t have to deal with the comments, I would write more posts.

I noticed that Mark Sisson, whom MD and I had lunch with yesterday, has started making posts out of some of his comments in a Dear Readers section of his blog.  He takes several comments that he thinks may be of interest to all his readers, posts them, and throws them out for the combined wisdom of all his readers to deal with. I may start doing this myself and weighing in along with the readers.  If anyone out there has any advice for me on this issue, I’m all ears.

Soda tax in New York

I just read this article this morning.  Was going to make a mini post out of it, but thought it would be better here.

A New York state senator (I’ll leave it to you guess from which party) says that by adding a measly one cent tax to each can of non-diet soda sold, the state of New York can add $100 million per year to its coffers.  If this is true, it means that citizens of and visitors to the state consume 10 billion cans of non-diet soda annually!  The population of New York state is a little over 19 million.  Dividing 10 billion by 19 million calculates out to about 525 cans of non-diet soda per man, woman and child in the state.  That’s almost 90 six-packs per person per year.  Wow!  There have got to be some low-carbers who live there who drink zero six-packs per year, which means that some other poor slob is drinking 180 six-packs per year.  That’s a lot of high-fructose corn syrup.

To my way of thinking, this is an onerous tax.  It moves $100 million from the pockets of the citizenry and puts it in the coffers of the bureaucrats to spend.  And, despite the fact that it sucks off 100 million bucks, the tax isn’t high enough to discourage consumption, so it really has no societal advantage except for transferring funds from the citizens to the government.

Where does your beef come from?

I don’t mean what part of the country.  I mean what part of the cow.  Here is a great site created by the University of Nebraska and the University of Florida showing way more than I (and probably you) need or want to know about beef anatomy.  But if you really do wonder where a flank steak or some other piece of beef comes from on the cow, click here to find out.  A lot of work went into this site.

Gradient gel electrophoresis

For those who hate to pay big bucks to have a lab tell you how much small, dense LDL you have, here’s how you can do it yourself.  That’s right.  With a drinking straw and a few other simple ingredients, you can make your own electrophoresis equipment and test your blood anytime you want for minimal expense.  Warning.  This is a real geek site.  I doubt that many will want to put together their own equipment, but at least it shows what’s involved in making a primitive version and how complex the testing process is.  May make you not feel so bad dropping the money to get the test done professionally.

Feel better immediately

And, finally, here is your feel-good YouTube of the day.  Watch this huge prank (if that’s what you would call it) played on the people in the train station at Antwerp one morning.  Really delightful.  Watch the faces of those watching.

Remember, don’t forget to help me out on this comment issue.  All suggestions will be appreciated.

It looks as though the fire has pretty much been contained.  After several days of high winds, low humidity and brutal temperatures (up to 100° F), Santa Barbara late spring weather has reasserted itself.  We woke up yesterday (after a fairly sleepless night, what with a big red glow looming over the horizon) to cool, foggy weather.  The flames we could see leaping up the night before from the canyon above us, were completely obscured by the fog.

As one of the fire officials said in a welcome respite from ‘incidentese’, “Now we can chase the fire instead of having the fire chase us.”  Which looks like what has happened.  They have chased it and beaten it down. Most people are back into their homes, including those evacuees who were bunking in with us and got the word they could go back home at 10 AM today. We and our house escaped unscathed.  Not even a cinder or ash so far.

As I was transferring my fire photos from my camera to iPhoto, I realized I hadn’t transferred the photos I took a couple of weeks ago when we were in Tahoe.  It was nice to see some peaceful pictures without fire and smoke in them.  The one above is the view from my office window looking across the lake toward Squaw Valley just a little after daybreak.  That’s the time I love to get up, grab a hot cup of Americano, and start into my reading before the phone starts ringing.  If MD didn’t have a big concert coming up in a couple of weeks, that’s where we would be now.  And would stay at least until all this fire cleanup is finished.  It would be nice to be able to sleep without one eye on the skyline and an ear open listening for the wind.

MD and I thank you all for your good thoughts, prayers and well wishes during these frightening times.  I hope we don’t have to go through anything like this for a good long time – if ever.  Twice in six months is a little much.

A Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there!  MD was treated to brunch today by a couple of our kids and our granddaughter.  I went along to provide the color commentary.

Since a bunch of readers have asked, I’ll give a quick update about the fire in Santa Barbara.  I took the photo above when MD and I went out to dinner last night in downtown Santa Barbara.  The top of our car, which is parked next to the restaurant, is in the foreground, providing some perspective.

As it stands now, MD and I are a little ways from the evacuation area, but the margin is getting closer and closer.  Fires move pretty fast when they are driven by winds gusting from 60-70 mph.  I’ve driven around and looked at the fire and placed it on a map and compared it to where we are.  When I do this and think about it, the reasoning, cognitive part of my brain tells me that we are in no danger at this point, but the primitive, reptilian part of my brain screams a different message.

If you click this link you can see a Google map of Santa Barbara that will update every 15 minutes.  You can see the areas that are under voluntary and mandatory evacuations.  And you can see how far this fire has spread in just four days, which is what the primitive part of my brain is focusing on. You’ll have to scroll to the right to see the part of the fire that affects us.  Our house is north of E. Valley Rd and above the Birnam Wood Golf Course.  If you see the edge of this evacuation hit Birnam Wood, you’ll know we’re out of here.

The most annoying thing about this fire – aside, of course, from the potential of being burned to death and/or having your house burn to the ground – is the lack of information available from the press and the authorities.  I watched a press conference this morning and almost ran screaming from the room.  Instead of one person who knew what was going on transmitting information, the press conference was a parade of ‘authorities’ and politicians jockeying for TV time and thanking one another for all the support.  The politicians thanked the fire fighters, the fire fighters thanked the politicians, and both thanked those involved in law enforcement.  Absolutely no information of value was transmitted.

Which brings me to another almost unbearably annoying part of these press conferences.  Along with profusely thanking one another for all the help, everyone defaults to what I call ‘authority’ talk.  There are no policemen or sheriffs, only ‘law enforcement personnel.’ No firefighters, but ‘fire control personnel.’ There is no wind, but ‘wind events’ instead.  We have fixed-wing aircraft and rotary wing aircraft circling overhead instead of airplanes and helicopters.  A DC-10 tanker is on the scene dropping tons of fire retardant.  It’s called the ‘largest dropping resource’ we have.  The fire itself is referred to as the ‘fire incident.’ ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!

I’ll keep everyone posted on what goes on via Twitter.  If you don’t want to sign up, you can simply go to the Follow Me On Twitter button (with the little blue bird) in the upper right of this blog and find all the updates.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

What follows is a series of photos showing the fire in different stages.

Below is a photo I took from the tee box on the 17th hole two days ago.

Here is the view from the same spot about 18 hours later.  I was playing with our son, and hit our drives off the tee.

By the time we got to our balls, a hot spot had erupted.  You can see how much change can take place in less than five minutes.

Here is the view taken about an hour ago from behind an info kiosk located about a half mile from our house.

A view of the fire at dusk last night.

Just a bunch of odds and ends, none of which is worth an entire post.

Low-carb gains a foothold.

First, I’ll start off with the good news, then I’ll finish with the bad.

I took the photo above yesterday at Raley’s, a giant supermarket (and I mean giant) in Incline Village, NV.  There were no signs promoting low-fat foods anywhere in the store.  I took this to be a sign that enough customers were looking for low-carb foods and had asked for help that management decided to make the low-carb section (there really is one) easier to find.  I take this as a positive sign.

Tahoe skiing

We’ve been skiing with the kids and grandkids, all of whom have come to town for spring break.  We’ve had a blast, but family commitments have kept me from attending to this blog as much as I usually do.  Family commitments along with a few snafus, more about which later.  The picture below is from the top of a foggy ski run overlooking Lake Tahoe.  It was taken Monday when the weather was less than optimal.  Fortunately, it has improved since.

Airline/Expedia cautionary tale

One set of kids and grandkids flew in from Dallas and had a disastrous experience, which I want to relate in the hope of perhaps preventing it for some of you readers.  The tickets for this trip were purchased long ago through Expedia and were on US Air from Dallas through Phoenix to Reno.  When purchased, the confirmation had seat assignments for all four of the passengers.  Our son and fam arrived at the airport about an hour and a half early and went through the automated boarding pass machines.  The boarding passes that were issued them had no seats listed.  When my son went to the counter to speak with an actual human, he was told there were no seat assignments because his entire family had been bumped from the flight.  When he showed her the Expedia confirmation complete with seat assignments, she told him that Expedia travelers got bumped first.  She also told him that it was the airlines policy to overbook by about 20 percent, which almost never caused a problem because of cancellations and no shows.  She said that the only two times this didn’t hold was over Christmas and Spring break weeks, the only time, she said, that she really hated her job.  It would seem to me that the airlines would realize this and maybe not oversell the flights during these periods, but that’s just me.  I’m not an airline decision maker, but it seems pretty obvious.  Especially since they had to fork over four free flights on US Air and a bunch of meal vouchers.

The fam was booked on a later flight, and, of course, had no seats together.  So they had to fight that fight in order for a parent to be able to sit with each kid.  Same thing on the flight to Reno.  The kids got to the airport early in the day, waited around, and finally got to Reno at about 10:30 PM (midnight thirty for them and a long, long day for two little boys).  The other part of the fam came into the Reno airport as well, and we had it timed so that everyone got in at about the same time.  This airline fiasco caused a huge logistics problem for the family Eades, but we made it through it.

Two tired little boys late at night at the Reno airport

The moral of the story is to not book through Expedia and expect all to go smoothly, especially during busy times.  The son involved called the airline and made sure they had confirmed seats on the way home.  If you book with Expedia, I would recommend you do the same.

I use Expedia or Travelocity to find the least expensive flights and best routes between destinations, then I go directly to the airline site to reserve.  It’s usually a little less expensive than Expedia or Travelocity, and I am confirmed with the airline directly.

Blog info and snafus

There are a few blog issues I need to deal with.  First, I performed the much-loathed task of going through the stacked up spam caught by the spam filter and found about a dozen comments lodged therein.  I don’t know why they got caught – they didn’t have a bunch of links embedded, which is usually what trips them up.  I don’t know why the spam filter got them, but it did.  If you have had a comment over the past week or so that has remained unposted, you’re probably one of the victims.  I’ll get to them all soon.

Another thing I discovered, to my great chagrin, is that I have about 500 emails in my Gmail account from readers of this blog.  A couple of years ago I hired a blog consultant to help make my blog better.  The installed Feedburner to allow readers to sign up for the blog in their Google or other readers.  It also allowed people to sign up to receive the blog via email.  What I didn’t realize is that the blog came to those who signed up under my Gmail address.  Many people simply hit reply and sent me a comment or a question about the blog – much as others do in the comment section.  Problem is I never read my Gmail mail.  I have it as a repository for all my emails, which I have forwarded from my regular email address.  I keep all the emails in the Gmail account so that I will have them all in one place since I use so many computers.  I want to have them in case I ever need them.  But I never read them in Gmail.  When I heard from someone that he had been trying to contact me numerous times and hadn’t gotten a response, I asked how he had been trying.  He said through Gmail.  When I went to the account and searched, I found hundreds of people who had done the same.  I fixed the situation so that readers can’t simply hit reply.  I can’t possibly deal with all those emails that are already there, so if you have been waiting for an answer, you had better resubmit through the comments section.  Sorry for all the hassle.

Out of control taxation and regulation

The above sign affixed to the restroom door of the Squeeze In, my favorite breakfast restaurant in Truckee, CA is a symptom of the disease of a government run by Democrats allowed to go wild.  If you are interested in seeing what the country would look like after many years of an unopposed Democratic government, you have to go no further than California.  Due to a bipartisan gerrymandering over the past few years making basically all state legislative offices non-competitive, the Democrats have controlled the state government.  And they’ve never come across a regulation or tax they didn’t like.  (I’m sure that in Republican-dominated states there would be problems, too, but as far as I know, there isn’t a Republican-dominated state.)  Not only does California tax and regulate the bejesus out of anything it can, it aggressively enforces all these taxes and regulations.  Which brings me to the sign on the door at the Squeeze In.  If a California regulator were to walk in to the restroom at this restaurant and find writing on the wall, there would be a fine.  Which isn’t really a fine, but is a shakedown.  When the state needs money, the regulators are on the prowl.  Let me explain what I mean.

I have a friend who works as a consultant for many different industries.  He recently had a gig working for a financial institution with offices all over California.  One of the California regulations is that the lettering on the signs in these facilities giving the interest rates must be two inches high.  Regulators recently did a savage burn on all these facilities throughout the state, descending upon them with rulers in hand.  They measured the height of the letters and found in multiple instances that the letters were from 1/16 to 1/32 of an inch short.  They then levied fines of almost two million dollars.  These institutions then had to hire a legal team to do battle with the state, which ultimately reduced the fines to about $150,000.  This was a shakedown for money pure and simple.  It may as well have been Tony Soprano.

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States and has no (none, zero) Fortune 50 companies headquartered there.  Why?  Because of the outrageous tax situation.  Why do business there and deal with all the tax and regulatory nonsense California slings out when you could headquarter your offices in Texas, where the population is growing by about 1,000 people per day?  And those people ain’t going there for the weather, let me tell you.  I’ve spent a lot of time in one other high-tax state, that being Massachusetts.  But there, people have learned to deal with it by creating and underground cash-based economy.  I can’t tell you how many businesses we ran into in Cambridge that took cash only.  No checks, no credit cards, cash only.  Anyone who came to work at your house demanded to be paid in cash.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on there.

In California people are inured to it, I guess, because they simply pony up and keep on electing the same people again and again.  Now the residents of the state have been saddled with a huge tax increase that all share in.  Increased gas taxes, sales taxes, car fees, and income taxes – all went up.  It should be no surprise that a state as burdened by taxes and regulations as California should be the one in the most trouble due to the recent downturn.  People are out of work, houses are being foreclosed on right and left, the economy is in the tank, and, as a consequence, the state government is short of funds.  So instead of working to help business, which is the machine that drives the economy, the state did the only thing it knew how to do: raise taxes on those workers and businesses still standing.  Makes a lot of sense. At least to California legislators.

Underhanded internet sales technique

Some of the comments on the recent post about Pentabosol reminded me about how some sleazy operators do business online.  If you’ve never been involved in a direct response (selling directly to customers) business, you probably don’t have any idea what kinds of shenanigans people pull to try to sell products.  Let’s look at how it works with weight loss supplements.  You want to make some money selling a weight loss supplement, but you don’t have the funds to mount a normal direct response campaign, so you decide to let others do the work for you.  You start your company to sell your supplement.  Let’s call it Weight Be Gone.  You create a website extolling the virtues of Weight Be Gone and set up a shopping cart so that people can buy it.  Then you create another website called something like Webscamsreview.com or weightlossscamreporter.com or something similar.  Then you write reviews of all the other legitimate supplements out there – Pentabosol, for example – and you find them all wanting.  You then say that the only supplement that you have tested that passes the stringent requirements for your Webscamsreview company is Weight Be Gone.  And, of course, you provide a link to your own website.  Then you go out and buy Google placement for other supplements, such as Pentabosol, and when people look up Pentabosol on Google, they find the Pentabosol site listed first but right below is a site supposedly providing an unbiased review of Pentabosol.  Who can resist taking a look?  Often the people who do take a look end up purchasing Weight Be Gone because they believe the fake reviews (both positive for Weight Be Gone and negative for all the other supplements) on the allegedly ‘independent review’ site, which is actually an ad and portal for their own supplement.

Sugar, the new health food

Finally, some bad news.  It looks like sugar is making a comeback.  And not just a comeback, but a comeback as a health food.  Expect to start seeing more sugar and less high-fructose corn syrup HFCS).  It’s easy to see why.  HFCS has a real image problem.  After all, would you feel better about eating something containing organic pure cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup?

Both are about the same.  HFCS contains a little more fructose, but not a lot.  And the little difference that it contains probably doesn’t make much of a difference unless intakes are huge, in which case it doesn’t much matter anyway.

The problem I see with HFCS is that it works much better than sugar as a food additive.  It has properties that sugar doesn’t have, making it perfect for many processed foods that otherwise wouldn’t contain sugar.  As a consequence we now have a lot of foods with sweetener in them that we didn’t have when sugar was the only sweetener available.   Problem is that the battle between sugar and HFCS isn’t fought on the field of these small amounts of additives, but on the field of products such as soft drinks that contain a ton of one or the other.  People will still get the additional sugar from HFCS in all the small portions added to processed foods and will get sugar instead in drinks and other highly sweetened foods.  And they’ll think they’re eating a health food because it is pure cane sugar and not that nasty HFCS.  I suspect that all this will do nothing but bring about an increase in sugar intake.  Why?

Because HFCS is sweeter than sugar.  And since people have become accustomed to this level of sweetness, when HFCS is replaced by sugar, more sugar will be required to give the same degree of sweetness.  And so sugar intake will increase.  All in the name of health.  A sorry situation indeed.

I told her she looked fabulous and asked her what happened. I knew that she had been a perennial low-carber, but, like so many people, never really got into it seriously for any length of time. She knew how much better she felt when she stuck to her regimen, but a million things kept coming up – parties, weddings, business travel, etc. – preventing her from really taking her diet seriously. As she put it:

There was always a valid reason that I couldn’t really get going. I had a friend’s wedding coming up, and I knew I was going to eat and drink. So, I put off starting until after the wedding. Then it was a business trip, then it was something else. It seemed that there was always something lurking in the future that kept me from getting serious today.

As she related it to me, one day, late last summer, she had been invited to a beach party. She agonized over going because she didn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit. But she went. And she ate too much of all the wrong kinds of foods and she drank too much. That night, in her bedroom at her host’s house, she couldn’t sleep. She was propped up in the bed trying to keep her acid reflux at bay, looking at her reflection in the mirror across the room, and wallowing in misery. She started ruminating on her condition, or, as she put it, meditating in her Garden of Self Loathing.

She looked back over her life and realized that her financial success had not come without a price. She had made commitments that were difficult to keep, but she kept them. She had worked all night long, numerous times, on projects to get them finished on time. She had gone to work sick. She had traveled when she didn’t want to. She had overcome looming financial disaster in the early days of getting her business going. She had met all kinds of challenges and dealt with them successfully, but she couldn’t meet the challenge of staying on a diet that she knew was good for her.

When she analyzed the situation during her meditation, she concluded that all the commitments she kept – sometimes seemingly having to move heaven and earth to do so – were all commitments to someone else. She had promised someone to have a project done by a specific time. She was working under a tight deadline imposed by a boss or by a customer. If she made a commitment to someone, she delivered. No matter what the cost to her in angst, lost sleep, time away from family, whatever. Her word was good as gold. When she committed to anyone, she came through. For everyone but herself. When she committed to herself to change her eating, to lose weight, to get rid of her GERD, she never followed through.  But she did recall that she had easily given up drinking and smoking (she smoked at the time, but hasn’t in years) during her pregnancy.  Again, however, she realized that she made these sacrifices for someone else.

That was her epiphany during her self-loathing meditation. She was perfectly capable of making commitments to others and keeping them but not commitments to herself.

She decided as she lay there in misery that she was going to commit to herself, and she was going to by God keep the commitment just as if she had made it to someone else.

The first conflict arose in her mind immediately after making the commitment to herself. It dawned on her that she was staying with friends over that weekend (in fact, she was in their guest room at that very moment), and that they had all planned Sunday brunch before she left. And Sunday brunch for her always included a Bloody Mary followed my several mimosas. So, she decided to start her commitment to herself on Monday morning. Then she realized that this was what she had been doing all along: making commitments to herself, then putting off getting started on them until after some future event had passed.

She recommitted at that moment and decided to eat correctly starting the next morning. She also decided to forswear alcohol until she lost the weight she wanted to lose. She concluded that if she ate right and didn’t drink starting the next morning, she would be one Bloody Mary, several mimosas and a whole lot of carbs ahead of the game come Monday morning.

She went to Sunday brunch; she ate right; she didn’t have a drop to drink; and she told her friends about her commitment. They all had just as pleasant a time together as they would have had she indulged. The difference was that she didn’t have reflux that night and was a couple of pounds lighter on Monday morning.

She maintained her commitment to herself just as she would have maintained it to someone else. She ate just as she told herself she should eat, and she avoided booze until she reached her goal weight. She persevered through weddings, parties, and travel – all the events she formerly thought she couldn’t make it through without eating the wrong foods or consuming alcohol. Now she eats whatever she wants whenever she wants it; but she doesn’t eat everything she wants all the time. She drinks again, but she watches herself. Whenever she does overdo it with either alcohol or food, she gets back on the straight and narrow until the pound or two she may have picked up is gone. She says she views her days of no drinking and following her low-carb diet to the letter as being in boot camp and her current life as like being in the regular Army. She requires some discipline, but not like she did in boot camp. She can live with it. She says it getting easier every day.

And she looks terrific.

My conversation with her got me to thinking about the whole diet/health commitment from a different perspective. Which is why the photo of me with my grandsons is at the top of this post. (It’s not totally just because I want to show them off.)

We all have people in our lives whom we have loved dearly and who have gone on because they didn’t take care of themselves. Think of a loved one who has died who would have lived longer had he/she been more committed to improving or maintaining his/her health. What would a year or two more (or three or five or even 15) with this person have meant to you? A lot, I would imagine.

And how many of these people had the attitude that it was their life, so they would live it like they wanted? I suppose that’s true if you leave no offspring or have none that count on you. But most of us do. And, although it is our own life to live how we like, we owe it to those who love and depend upon us to stay around as long as we can. It’s really kind of selfish to deny your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren your company because you would rather eat carbs. That’s the way I like to look at it.

When MD and I left after our recent visit with the grandsons, they both wailed when we departed. During the last couple of days we were there, they kept asking if we couldn’t stay just a day or two longer. I know the PETA folks probably hate me, but there is no doubt in my mind that my grandchildren love me. And they love their granny (MD) even more (or at least they think they do at this stage of their development ). We want to be around for them, not just for our sake, but for their sake.

When I was a kid, I loved my maternal grandfather so much it hurt. He got sick once, and I started worrying that he might die. (He was in his mid sixties at the time, but he seemed old as a rock to me.) I stressed over the loss of him mightily. And must have looked really down in the mouth. Finally he asked me what was wrong. Why was I moping around? I told him that I was worried that he might die. He said to me, ‘Mike, don’t worry about that. I’m going to live until you’re way up in college.’ (He actually made it until I was 30.) I can’t tell you how much relief flooded over my young self on hearing those words. (It never occurred to me, of course, that he really couldn’t predict such a thing, but since I trusted him implicitly, I was assured of his long survival.)

I know my grandchildren feel the same about me. So, I don’t want to live a long time just so I’ll be around to watch them grow up – I want to live a long time so I’ll be there for them.

Thinking this way helps keep things in perspective, and it makes it a whole lot easier to avoid eating what I shouldn’t eat.

Should you ever find yourself meditating in your own Garden of Self Loathing (and who hasn’t?), take a page from my friend’s book.  If you can make a commitment to yourself like she did, go for it. If you don’t seem to be able to do it that way, then make a commitment to someone who would be devastated to lose you.

Either way, whether it’s making a commitment to yourself or to your loved one, you need to do it. And keep it. I would bet that everyone reading this post has had to overcome major adversity at some point. We’ve all had to do a lot tougher tasks than just to eat right, and we’ve done them. Following a proper nutritional regimen is far easier than many, many things we’ve all done. Just make the commitment and follow through.

Enough sermonizing. Back to the normal in the next post. Meeting this woman and leaving our grandkids has had an effect on my psyche, so I figured I would spread it around.