The Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America just published a report showing the amount of carbohydrate and the number of calories in the 26 best selling alcoholic beverages.

The report is in chart form in pdf format. You can download it here.

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I just sat down to deal with the 45 or so comments that have stacked up over the past few days and somehow deleted them.  The comment that was the top one on the list was a spam comment.  I thought I checked the box next to it, but somehow I checked the box (that was right above it) for all comments and hit the Remove Spam button.  Suddenly all the comments were gone.  I’ve fiddled around for the past half hour or so trying to get them back, but to no avail.  They are history.  If you’ve had a comment pending, I apologize.  Please resend.

One of the reasons this happens is that most of the comments aren’t comments – they’re questions.  If I don’t have the time to answer them, they stay in the awaiting moderation queue.  They stack up until I have some downtime to sit and answer them.  As of late, I haven’t had much time, consequently the questions stack up.

I think I’m going to start doing like everyone else who blogs and simply post the comments as they come in without answering them individually.  Many are asking the same general questions, so they can be answered with one comment from me instead of multiple individual responses.  We’ll see how that works.

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I have a close friend who was an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 13 years, during which time he broke a number of large stories. He left the WSJ to start a company to help businesses deal with the media. He had seen from the inside how businesses had tried to influence him and his colleagues, and he knew the business men were going about it all wrong. For the last 15 years or so he’s helped them get it right.

A couple of times per year my friend puts on seminars for people wanting to learn about how the media work. He invited me to one a few years ago in Las Vegas, and I can tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. The program started with my friend asking the attendees to write a few sentences describing what they thought constituted ‘news.’ Before you read on, stop for a moment and come up with your own definition of news. Have you got it? At this meeting virtually everyone (including yours truly and his lovely wife) came up with something on the order of: ‘News is when something happens of sufficient importance to the readers or viewers of a particular media format in a defined local (could be local – could be national) that it requires reporting.’

My friend gathered the papers and started reading them to the group. One after the other was a variation on the theme above. After he had read a dozen or so, he looked at the crowd and said: “Let me define news for you. News is what the media wants you to know.”

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As a group the elderly are keenly health conscious. Probably as a percentage of their population more elderly try to eat right and take care of themselves than any other group. And with good reason since the Grim Reaper is lurking right around the corner waiting to harvest them at the earliest opportunity. Senior citizens have seen their friends and relatives succumb to disease and realize more than most how precarious life really is.

But the elderly have a problem. Most of them get their health information from the mainstream press. And as regular readers of this blog know, the mainstream press is more often wrong than right. (See Gina Kolata’s review of Gary Taubes’ book in last Sunday’s New York Times and you’ll see what I mean.)

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A commenter today made me remember yet another reason that observational studies such as this one are never to be used to determine causality that I didn’t mention in the original post. It’s important enough that I want to post it here so that those who don’t read the comments and/or my responses to them will read it as well. Here is my response to the comment:
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