Odds and ends
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.
Dr Mike, have you see this clip? If you havent, hope you and everyone else can find it intresting. I did, pretty cool details! let me know what you think?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
I’ve seen it. I think I even posted on a couple of years ago.
Sigh. Does it ever stop? More obsession with fat.
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/eatthis/26542/americas-unhealthiest-restaurants
It will never stop with the lipophobes.
I don’t know about your theory that people move because of taxes. By that standard there should be no one left in Massachusetts. When I hear about people wanting to move it is almost always because of one of two reasons: general cost of living, and they found a higher-paying job somewhere else. I almost never hear complaint about taxes except as a general complaint of the type where the person just wants to whine and not actually do anything about it.
It should be noted that both mortgages and rents in California are astronomically high, perhaps because the state is a desirable one in which to live for many people. If they don’t go for Hollywood then they go for the redwoods. It’s possible that rent control plays a role with rental properties but that doesn’t explain the mortgages. Las Vegas is an expensive place to live for the same reason. It also doesn’t help that both regions are dry and must have water imported from elsewhere. That drives up the price of everything else.
Regressive taxes are called regressive precisely because they make everyone pay the same percentage right down to people who can’t afford to pay for anything at all. A flat tax above a certain income threshold would be more progressive than a flat sales tax that is slapped on everybody. I used to live in Tennessee and when I left, the state sales tax BASE was nine percent. That’s not counting anything the local governments pile on top. Guess who suffered more from the tax and who suffered less. And they didn’t have exemptions for food, either. (Man, that hurt!)
I don’t know what it’s like to run a business and have to deal with any extra taxes from that, but I’m perpetually surprised that business owners whine that much about them. Wouldn’t they simply be termed a cost of business? As such, if a business is profiting on top of those costs, what’s the problem? You have to pay for supplies, rent or mortgage on a building if your business has one, wages for employees, etc. You’re going to have to pay taxes either way you look at it, high or low. And businesses may create jobs but in some cases they also place a strain on the state’s resources and if they don’t pay their share of taxes then state residents who might have nothing to do with that business at all are going to have to foot the bill. If it’s a bad idea to pay for welfare or food stamps, why should Joe Blow Citizen have to pay for a toxic spill cleanup? But they always do. It’s a shame.
You wrote:
The problem with taxes is that they can’t be controlled or managed as other expenses can. For instance, if I have a business in California, I can work to keep my raw materials costs and all other costs low to be competitive. I can constantly be looking for better deals from different vendors and search for other ways to cut costs. I can move to industrial parts of town where rents are cheaper. I can do all kinds of things to manage my costs in an effort to be competitive, but I can manage taxes. I will always have to charge more than someone in a similar business in Nevada where there is no tax. Therefore, if really want to be competitive, I move my business to a state where the tax rates are lower or non-existent. It doesn’t matter as much if I’m competing only with other California companies because they are all operating under the same tax burden, but it makes a huge difference when I try to compete with those companies in other states.
Also, if a vendor decides to raise prices on me, I can start looking for another vendor with better prices. If the State of California decides to raise taxes on me, I’m screwed. Unless, of course, I move. Which many businesses have done.
Hey Doc, read the following. Are we similar to hamsters in this particular area of physiology? Comments?
Turns out the polyphenols in Chardonnay grape seeds may also help the body regulate its metabolism, even prevent obesity. In recent lab testing, scientists at the University of Montpellier wanted to see if grape seed extract could prevent weight gain in hamsters. Test subjects were divided into three groups:
1. Subjects fed a normal diet
2. Subjects fed a high-fat diet
3. Subjects fed a high-fat diet but supplemented with the grape seed extract
Not surprisingly, after 12 weeks the test subjects fed a normal diet maintained a healthy weight. Subjects on the high-fat diet gained abdominal fat. These hamsters also experienced spikes in blood sugar, triglycerides, insulin and insulin resistance.
And what about the grape seed group? Could they keep off the fat?
The grape seed group did keep off the fat! Despite receiving a high-fat diet, they did not increase their abdominal fat.
So, how did they eat more fat without gaining, you ask?
It appears that Chardonnay grape seeds somehow “turned off” the body’s “switch” to retain fat. In fact, the high-fat/grape seed hamsters had 61 percent more adiponectin in their blood than their high-fat alone counterparts. Adiponectin is inversely related to body fat. The more adiponectin your body produces, the less fat you collect.
Plus, the news just kept getting better for the grape seed group. They experienced improvements in several key markers of good health.
Insulinemia (abnormally high insulin in the blood) decreased by 16.5 percent in the high-fat/grape seed group. Leptinemia (a marker for diabetes) decreased by 45 percent. The researchers also noted lowered glycemia and insulin resistance values among the high-fat/grape seed group.
Lastly, the high-fat/grape seed group experienced significant drops in two measures of oxidative stress. (Oxidative stress contributes directly to the formation of free radicals in the body.) But as an antioxidant, the grape seed extract seems to counteract oxidative stress in the test subjects. Production of NAD(P)H dropped by 30 percent and superoxide anion dropped by a whopping 74 percent. This is good news, as unchecked oxidative stress has been linked to everything from premature aging to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.
If this is like most of these studies, the amount of extract is huge. And I doubt that humans would respond the same, anyway. And if so, would be unlikely to take the dosages required.
“If you see a car ahead of you in traffic and you can see that there are a thousand bumper stickers plastered all over it, you can be almost 100 percent positive that when you get close enough to read them, you’ll find that they are all liberal bumper stickers.”
So true about bumper stickers, Dr. Eades! I go to school in Durham, and cannot escape the in-your-face liberal Obamania that has taken hold here in the Research Triangle/my university campus! It’s enough to make one apolitical if you’re not as well spoken as yourself regarding political science and economics. It’s difficult to cram current events and op-ed columns into your brain alongside chemistry problem sets and biology life cycle charts for pre-med!
Please keep sharing your political commentary! I come here for the nutrition research analysis, but stay for your humor and wit that make for engaging writing. I am always sharing your posts with my friends/family, who I am slowly converting to the high fat, low carb, nutrient dense dietary approach. Of course the erythritol-sweetened low carb sweets I make seem to help with doing the convincing. Good food talks, apparently. I admire what you do and hope to have accomplished even half as much as you have in the medical/nutrition world some day!
Dr. Eades,
I am new to your sight. My husband and I are following a low-carb way of eating based, primarily, on your book “Protein Power” that I read quite a while ago. So far, so good.
I was surprised to find political commentary on your blog. My husband and I recently left the Republican party, due to their lack of commitment to ‘common sense’ conservative values. We both fear greatly for our country. I find your blog not only informative for nutritional information, but now will view it even more for the political commentary.
You sound like a person of strong convictions. Please, keep your opinions coming. OUR COUNTRY DESPERATELY NEEDS YOUR VOICE!
Thank You!
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Never make the mistake of assuming that airlines are going to make any decisions that may benefit passengers (or their own employees) that may affect their bottom line! My husband’s job as an airline pilot has recently been sacrificed by UNITED AIRLINES (for the second time, mind you, since 9/11) upon the altar of poor management and corporate greed. You can expect extreme overbooking and bumping to become the norm now.
Doc,
I LOVE the fact that you speak your mind. I believe that the 1st amendment gaurantees this right to you…..at least for a little longer. We have very similar political views, btw. I find it so funny that you post one negative thing about liberals or democrats, and they swarm. I actually use this as a marketing tool on one of my blogs. I will bash a liberal political figure under my normal blogger identity, then under the guise of a “ghost writer”, post a somewhat positive blog entry. I have received huge spikes of traffic from the ever tolerant and oh-so loving liberals of this country. Just as a warning….don’t do a Carrie Prejean…..then you will REALLY be cut up and thrown into the bay. I would miss your blog and and insights, so I would be really sad.
I don’t set out to offend anyone. And I don’t try to muzzle myself either. As my childhood hero Popeye the Sailor says, I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam. Based on comments such as yours and others, I would guess that my readership is roughly 50-50 as to a conservative-liberal bias. But liberals are much more vocal. If I publish anything anti conservative, I don’t get much, if any, commentary. If I post something anti liberal, they come out of the woodwork.
And, BTW, I don’t consider myself conservative at all, at least not in the Republican sense of conservative. My political bent is libertarian.
I used to be a card-carrying liberal, but somewhere along the line I woke up to the hypocrisy of liberal intolerance and “progressiveness”, and tore up my card sometime in the middle of the 2nd Clinton administration. Major life changes (marriage, moving from one coast to another, motherhood) opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn’t been seeing because I kept them squeezed shut too often (cognitive dissonance, I’m sure).
My views are all over the spectrum now, so I don’t belong to any political party more nor have I found a party to join or “call home”, but do find myself taking the libertarian path more often. I still vote, but it’s torture in the big elections deciding how to cast my vote, or I cave and give the lesser of the two evils my vote.
You know, be careful what you wish for, you may get it…
My biggest problem with card-carrying liberals is their lack of tolerance. They preach tolerance and are willing to be tolerant toward almost anything except criticism of liberals. This can be seen anytime I write any kind of post that has the least anti-liberal slant.