Doug

I've learned a new word...  Obesogen a term coined by Bruce Blumberg, professor of developmental and cell biology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine.  

What's it mean?  Substances that are now prevalent in our food supply that may be altering the way our bodies store fat and regulate our metabolism. From: What's Really Making Us Fat? in The Atlantic.

I can buy into that.

The only premise I end up getting into an argument about is that this discovery somehow invalidates the "input minus output = weight gain or loss" Or calories in, calories out model..

And I just don't get that. The Phrase "Calories In, Calories Out" has *always* over simplified the dieting process. It has always been true that two different people can eat the exact same diet, calorie for calorie, exercise step for exercise step and get different results in so far as weight gain, muscle mass, etc. Why? they've been studying that for years, the answers can be found in things as complex as genetic dispositions and what sort of gut bacteria you have processing what you eat.

What they are researching and discovering now is a huge leap forward and a huge smack down on the processed low fat, low calorie meal industry, and they link to one of my favorite studies that answers the corn industries ad campaign about "what's so bad about High Fructose corn Syrup".. this study shows

The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

None the less.. I still see this as calories in / calories out

All these other bits.. they are changing the calories out.

I have never been an advocate that what the calories are does not matter, and I think that's what these articles may be trying to point out.

Processed foods are convenient.. wonderful.

They are also changing your calories out measurement in a negative way.  With the same amount of caloric input we're not getting the same output.  I suspect that if you, me and everyone moved away from processed foods toward more "real" food, and no I'm not talking all vegetable matter here, I'm an omnivore, not a herbivore, then we might find we can actually consume more calories with less weight issues.

The Quote at the heading of my post?

Science Friday, February 17th show,

Eat. Real. Food.-- Robert Lustig, MD.

For a limited time.. The show from here

But this raises another quandary for me.

Real Food?   It seems like it costs more.

So, if we really want people to eat more real food, how do we go about that?  

I'm going to see if I'm, missing something basic here..

In this article, House Speaker John A. Boehner has a quote I'm fairly used to seeing coming from Republicans:

"It sounds to me like the same old policies that we've seen: more spending, higher taxes more regulation – the same policies that haven't helped our economy; they've made it worse," Boehner said on "Fox News Sunday."

Now not even commenting on the fact that the state of the Union Address that Speaker Boehner is talking about is still two days in the future at the point he's giving this quote.. I'm surprised to see Republicans still on the "regulation is bad" band wagon.

Please correct me if I have this wrong, but didn't this current housing bubble/economic crisis/massive unemployment crap happen because of insufficient oversight/enforcement of regulations?

I get the Democratic (Clinton) culpability of trying to get lower income people into homes by pushing for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for working- and middle-class families.  But as far as I know, no part of that legislation suggested putting those people into more house than those less stringent credit requirements showed they could pay.

But even that by itself couldn't cause the world to come crashing down like it did without those Mortgage Backed Securities.

One thing that kind of irks me, because as far as I know it's still true... when you're sending off your securities to one of the ratings agencies, you can influence the rating they give your securities by threatening to take your business elsewhere.

So.. if you've got some ugly bad paper, you just have them rated as AAA paper because you're such an important customer to the rating agency..

It can't be quite that easy or we wouldn't have any bonds rated as Junk bonds at all, but I don't think I am the only one who heard news stories about whistle blowers at rating agencies describing the situation

The primary conflict of interest at Moody's is well known: The company is paid by the same "issuers" (banks and companies) whose securities it is supposed to objectively rate. This conflict pervades every aspect of Moody's operations, Harrington says. It incentivizes everyone at the company, including analysts, to give Moody's clients the ratings they want, lest the clients fire Moody's and take their business to other ratings agencies.

There's a whole Wiki page on the topic.

Now there is an area ripe for government regulation.

Now if Speaker Boehner is talking about the measures taken to pull us out of this economic crisis.. I'm pretty sure he was on duty for a good number of them, and he's prevented any higher taxes from being a part of the mix, no matter how the Democrat's might have wanted to pass some.

So.. standard rhetoric, or is he actually referring to some recent regulations that choked off jobs without a benefit to the taxpayer?

There are lots of things I don't like about the concentration of wealth going on, but this is one aspect of it that's been coming up frequently in my mind.

From here.. (among other sites)

2. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income: While the richest 1 percent of Americans take home almost a quarter of national income today, in 1976 they took home just 9 percent — meaning their share of the national income pool has nearly tripled in roughly three decades.

Now what that says to me is that in 1976, a lot more of National Income was spread among a much larger number of people.

Now, since my income falls below this level, I forget there is such a thing as the Social Security Wage Base which is:

the maximum earned gross income or upper threshold on which a wage earner's Social Security tax may be imposed.

In 2011, that maximum is a bit over 106 thousand dollars per year.

i.e. After your first 106 thousand dollars of income, you no longer have to pay a percentage of your income to Social Security.

That, in and of itself blows my mind. I can understand it to some degree because it also sets the maximum benefit you can receive to that maximum income level, but in light of the concentration of wealth we end up with an increasing problem that's got to be messing with an already messed up Social Security problem.

I'm not enough of a mathematician to figure out how many dollars are not going into Social Security so take this with a large block of salt.,

I'm guestimating it's close to 13 percent of the national income times 12.4 percent (6.2 percent deducted from the employee's income, 6.2 percent contribution from the employer, or the whole thing if you're self employed).

So.. What's the National Income? Page 6 puts January's National Income a more than 12,000 Billion dollars, but lets go low here so we're not inflating numbers.. Wage and Salary Disbursements is more than 6,500 Billion Dollars.

So.. 13 Percent of 6,500 Billion Dollars is 845 billion dollars, and 12.4 percent of that is 104.78 billion dollars that isn't flowing into Social Security because that income is concentrated into 1 percent of the population instead of being spread out among lower income wage earners.

According to this, that's more than twice the

$46 billion projected deficit in 2011

I'm not sure how to make it "equitable", but I personally would like to see the maximum benefit remain, something like 110 thousand dollars income level worth tied to inflation going forward, but that *all* income remain FICA taxable so to counter this concentration of wealth's effect on Social Security.

I don't talk a lot about them here because I try to avoid tossing my sister and her little girls into the internet deep end. I figure they'll do a good enough job of establishing their net footprint without my help.

But none the less I absolutely adore my nieces and really have no words for what kind of awesome parents my sister and her husband Shawn are.

I may come back to that for a longer post at some point, but as much as I have expressed how impressed I am to my Mother and I think even said as much to my Sister, I still am not satisfied I really have the words to express either my adoration for how smart, pretty and downright capable my nieces have turned out to be, nor to express how impressive my sister and her husband's parenting skills are to encourage and support these capable little girls.

You can read about the innovation they came up with for this competition at the following link. And if you'd like to, you can vote for their innovation.

Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring -- View, and if you want to, vote, here.

My nieces are the three on the left, their BFF is the fourth team member on the right.

From what I can gather from the site, you're allowed to vote once a day. Teams that receive the greatest number of votes will have their solutions reviewed and considered for one of three cash awards to help the team actually patent their solution.

HOPA girl a brilliant marketing strategy to go viral befoer the world even wakes up.

Wonderful.. Am I the ony one who gets a tad grumpy when folks pull this crap?

The purpose of the hoax was to entertain and inspire, not to inform, so what difference does it make if the story has a single ounce of truth?

Because when something's presented as real and is later revealed not to be real, you are proving you're able to fool me. Fooling someone, i.e. to cause them to be/feel foolish. There is always the feeling there's someone pointing and snickering "Ha ha, got you!"

Wonderful, you've proved you are abole to pull the wool over my eyes. Since you're an entertainment/humor site there's no reason for you to worry about that fact I'm not going to believe a thing posted there has even a passing relationship with reality going forward.

Not quite on the scale of the whole youtube vlog/diary that turned out to be someone's take on a new way of creating a fictional storyline, but highly annoying none the less.

Of course if I was more up on my net culture I'd have known that the Chive is known for this.

The folks at BoingBoing obviously are up on net culture and spotted this right away.

Would this really have been that much less funny if it'd been presented as the wonderfully creative work of fiction that it is?

BoingBoing and a couple of hops to a Reuters article and a Google search finally lead to an example.

'cause being in a shade that's more plum today I got curious... "what shade(s) of red have this effect, only the bright red of my swingline stapler, or any shade of red?"

Apparently this isn't covered by the article.

Specifically, in a series of 7 experiments we demonstrate that women perceive men to be more attractive and sexually desirable when seen on a red background and in red clothing, and we additionally show that status perceptions are responsible for this red effect. The influence of red appears to be specific to women's romantic attraction to men: Red did not influence men's perception of other men, nor did it influence women's perception of men's overall likability, agreeableness or extroversion.

Ok.. I don't know if I'm buying the men's perception of other men part since:

Participation was restricted to individuals who did not have an experiment-relevant (Red-Green or Blue-Yellow) color deficiency and, from Experiment 2 on, to heterosexual and bisexual individuals.

So.. gay men may or may not find men more desirable in red, nobody tested that. We've already specified that wearing red didn't influence women's perceptions of a man's overall likability, agreeableness or extroversion, so apparently that much is in common across genders. They didn't even check to see if sexual desirability and attraction did because they didn't include gay men in their study.

As far as I have read so far, each of the experiments had less than 100 participants mostly or all college aged, and nothing really indicates if any of the participants in one experiment were also participants in another. So.. I'm not suggesting a total wardrobe change, but perhaps it might be worth including at least one picture in red into your portfolio of dating profile pictures.

One would hope that being a police chief of a major city would actually require you be able to examine what idiocy you're about to spew forth from your mouth and put a halt to the worst of what's coming out before you speak, especially at a public event like a Public Safety Meeting.

Not so much.

Don't take the bloggers word for it, listen for yourself..

"a little bit of known offenders, date rape primarily, where alcohol is involved.. We're needing to create a message to the victims of these types of crimes on a prevention kind of component related to first date, second date, someone you don't already know all that well but you're at a club, you had a little too much to drink. Having friends or someone help watch you and maybe have someone that doesn't drink in the group"

"These are people you may go out on a date with and have a little bit too much to drink, you don't know them that well, and it ends in a sexual assault. So we're needing to do quite a bit of awareness education campaign to that victims group that's causing this spike."

If he hasn't started with known offenders, which really caused everything else he said to be filtered through that, I don't know if I would have had that much of a problem with the rest.

Yes, potential victims of every crime need to learn habits that minimize their chance of being that crime. If you're used to driving your car around a small town and go to college in the big city you might need to learn the habit of locking your car and not leaving valuables out on the seat where they can be seen.

So yes, if you're just becoming legal to drink, or coming to the big city from a smaller and more trustworthy community, and you haven't already formed the habit of having a designated driver and viewing potential dates/hook ups with a certain level of caution, yes you should be aware of the risks to lower your chances.

But if this spike of 25 percent more sexual assaults didn't happen to be accompanied by 25 percent greater alcohol intake, or an influx of potentially uneducated victims into the area, then educating the victims isn't your issue folks, it's the fact you've got known offenders who are apparently still on the freaking street!

Also, looking at the crime statistics every other crime listed is going down, violent and non-violent. Just Rape is up by more than 25 percent.

Dallas, we have a problem.

Male Antelopes lie to Female Antelopes to increase their chances of having sex

Good to know...

Attractive Waitresses get better tips! Stop the universe, this is really shocking news!

ahem

Ok, survey of 374 waitresses self reporting both their beauty and physical characteristics and self reporting their tips for the night?

And someone thinks they did something resembling science or that any attention should be paid to the results?

Prof. Michael Lynn, marketing and tourism

Cornell has a professorship of Marketing and Tourism????

So you want to tell me bigger breasts leads to bigger tips. I'm fairly sure that's not a surprise to anyone.

How about answering.. did women tip more largely on service or did they fall into the same attractiveness trap? Did women tip an attractive man more than an attractive woman and men tip an attractive man more or less than an unattractive one? Did the behavior change when dining out with the guys vs alone vs with the family? Did the behavior change for breakfast vs lunch vs dinner?

I just can't see any way to actually perform a double blind study on this one, but I'm fairly sure that you can construct a slightly more rigorous study than surveying a sample of less than 500 people.

Anybody running a restaraunt that changes their hiring practices in any way based on this study really needs to look at their business plan.

A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

I'm going to be really interested to see how/if the "what's the problem with corn syrup" commercials change after this is out for a while.

"When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."

I'm not about to point to this as the only reason America's obesity rates went from 15 percent in 1970 to nearly 33 percent now, but I am going to point to this as a contributor.    Now it's time for science to do what science does best.. prove that this experiment is reproducible.