English breakfast at our hotel. A good low-carb diet.

It was bound to happen.  Forever the low-fat diet promoters, whenever asked about low-carb diets, would always say: Show me the studies.  Well, we showed them the studies, the vast majority of which demonstrated the superiority of low-carb diet, but they didn’t like what they saw.  So they demanded more.  The rallying cry became: Show me the long-term studies.  Now that those are in, the anti-meat folks are running out of options.  But one of their own great lipophobes (Lipid  = fat; phobic = fear of.  Lipophobe = fearer of fat.), David Jenkins, has come to the rescue.

Since the low-carb diet has proven so effective, opines he, why not make it even more so by making a vegetarian version?  Then dieters can have all the advantages of a low-carb diet along with all the advantages of a plant-based diet.  That is, assuming there are advantages to a plant-based diet, more about which later.

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After our meeting at the factory we’re working with, the president of said factory treated us all to a feast at our restaurant.  As Chinese tradition dictates, such feasts are accompanied with many, many toasts.  The toast works this way:  the person making the toast picks out a specific person to toast, walks over to that person, raises his/her glass and gives the toast.  The translator translates.  The person receiving the toast answers back.  The translator translates back.  Then both toaster and toastee down drinks in one swallow.  After this, the glasses are immediately refilled by one of the servers.

In our case, the liquor used for toasting purposes was either red wine or bai jiu, a Chinese white wine that is actually more of a distilled liquor.  The Chinese love bai jiu, which has a distinctive flavor.  It’s about 50 percent alcohol and has a front end taste that is kind of like the essence of an infusion of dirty socks in some sort of floral alcohol and a back end like lighter fluid.  It’s an acquired taste, and one that I had sort of acquired after a zillion toasts.

As the meal progressed, the toasting evolved into each toast requiring the downing of both a glass of red wine and a glass of bai jiu.  Thank God we ran out of red wine and baiu jiu before I ran out of consciousness.  The photo above shows me just before downing a glass of each after a toast from the head of operations at the factory.

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Your faithful correspondent slaving away

As those who follow me on Twitter know, MD and I made it safely to Hong Kong.  We have in enormously busy schedule while we’re here, so I’ll put up smaller posts as we go along interspersed with some larger ones as I have time.  As you can see from the above photo, I’m hard at it, ensconced in our hotel room overlooking the harbor with the Hong Kong skyline in the background.  Below is another photo from our hotel room window.  Our hotel (for one night) is on Kowloon across from Hong Kong Island, which is the skyline you see.  Actually, it’s only a small part of the skyline.  Hong Kong is New York on steroids.  An amazing place.

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In my ongoing quest to become a little more technically adept, I started using Google Alerts for a number of things I’m interested in, including my own name.  (Believe me, there are a lot of people out there in the world with the last name Eades, including the Fire Chief of London.)  For those of you who don’t know, you can go to the Google main page and navigate around until you come to ‘Alerts.’  You can then sign up for these ‘Alerts’ to be delivered to you via email.  It’s a free service provided by Google, and it uses the Google system to crawl through cyberspace and find anything (blogs, articles, news reports, etc.) that has whatever word, words or phrases you submitted included and emails the link back to you.  I put a bunch of stuff in and get emails from Google throughout the day.  Most of it is stuff that is totally unrelated to anything I give a flip about, but every now and then it turns up something of interest.  Having my name listed has cost me money because one of the first things I that came back to me was an article about Eades Whisky, which I had no idea existed and which I had to try.  It is expensive, about $75 per bottle, but I ordered some.  It’s very good.  But it hasn’t replaced Jameson, however, by a long shot.

Yesterday I got back a hit about something that I had totally forgotten about:  our rebuttal to the idiotic ’study’ presented by the PCRM (Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine – a name straight out of Orwell if there ever was one) a few years ago.  This group, composed mainly of militant vegetarians, came up with an insipid ’study’ during the height of the low-carb frenzy back in 2003.  Neal Barnard, the head of the outfit, appeared on most of the morning talk shows telling how dangerous his study had found low-carb diets to be.  A couple of the national networks called MD and me asking us if we would provide a rebuttal.  We happened to be in Santa Barbara at the time, and we said sure.  Two different networks sent camera crews to interview us late in the afternoon.

As I’ve probably mentioned numerous times, we have an absolute knack for getting pre-empted whenever we get TV time.  This day was no exception.  The news teams were on their way to the little condo we had at the time to set up and shoot our rebuttal when the news came through that Michael Jackson was going to be flying in to the Santa Barbara airport to turn himself in on the child molestation charge that he later beat in court.  Of course, all the news vans and camera crews that were heading for our place were diverted to the Santa Barbara airport, and MD and I never got to rebut the PCRM idiocy on air.

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