Fast Food founders & longevity

Ray Kroc (McDonald’s) at age 82
Jimmy Dean died at age 81
Taco Bell founder Glen Bell died at 86
Sonic founder Troy Smith died at 87
Hardee’s founder Wilber Hardee died at 89
Baskin-Robbins founder Irvine Robbins died at 90
Carl’s Jr. founder Carl Karcher died at 90
Frozen french fry mogul J.R. Simplot died at 99
Murray Handwerker, credited with making Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs into a well-known national chain, died at 89

Interesting.

Mark Menjivar, a photographer, took portraits of people’s refrigerators instead of people. For each portrait, he wrote a short blurb. The one on the left:

Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat all local produce. 

The right:

Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily.

My first practice was strictly a house call practice. I had no office, so I had to visit your apartment. This is the kind of thing I could understand about you. As a doctor, I could see how you lived and what you ate. This is why traditional clinic visits are so limited. People all tend to look the same when you’re seeing 25 people a day in a sterile white office. But, in fact, people actually reflect what’s in their refrigerator. And then docs typically prescribe pills when the real solution is changing what’s in the refrigerator. Medical care, and the way doctors deliver it, is broken in America. Since pills and scalpels don’t fix bad lifestyle, we must get away from the belief that modern medicine will save us. Doctors, and their antiquated tools, are failing our country’s health. 

In 2009, Kate Moss said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

In 1964, our Surgeon General said, smoking is bad for you. This was released when about 50% of all adults smoked. Now, in NYC, only about 12% of adults smoke. 46 years later.

Which one has the most influence over people? Pop culture vs. the surgeon general?

The issue of obesity is much, much more complicated than smoking. Smoking is one addictive behavior. Obesity is an entire ecosystem around you— your neighborhood, your means of transport, your corner store, your supermarket, your family, your culture, your attitude toward exercise, our media’s attitude toward skinny and overweight, our retail stores gradually increasing the measurements of a size to make us feel we’re not gaining weight, etc..

There is no quick fix to obesity.

So what does “quick” mean? In the world of smoking, quick meant 46 years to see a 38% decrease in a city with a very progressive, multi-factorial anti-smoking campaign. Regarding obesity, en masse behavior change takes generations. Just in the past decade, we’ve gotten the obesity conversation started. Hopefully, in 50 years and about the time I die, we’ll have seen a 38% decrease in obesity. 

It’s just important to have some perspective and keep the conversation, awareness, and inspiration going.

A new study from Cornell University graduate student Jenny Wan-chen Lee [pdf] either shows that the label “organic” creates some sort of placebo effect in which people are convinced they’re eating healthier, or that people can be really stupid. Maybe it’s a little of both? In her study, 144 volunteers were asked to compare “organic” and “regular” samples of yogurt, cookies and potato chips, rating them on taste, estimated fat content and estimated calorie content. However, all of the samples were in fact “organic.” Take a wild guess what happened.

Volunteers almost unanimously preferred the taste of the perceived “organic” samples, which they believed to be more nutritious and worth more money. And these perceptions were consistent across all the samples.

1. Eat food.
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
5. Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.
6. Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.
7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
8. Avoid food products that make health claims.
9. Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the terms “low-fat” or “nonfat” in their names.
10. Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.
11. Avoid foods that you see advertised on television.
12. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Everyone should read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. It takes a total of a half an hour of your time. And I hope that it changes your relationship with food forever. These are just the first twelve “rules” but there are 64 pleasantly entertaining rules to eat by. 

People think that drinking juice is “better for you” than drinking sodas or any other kind of sweetened drinks. For the most part, sugar is sugar no matter where it comes from. It’s still a massive load of carbohydrate. Back when I was a practicing pediatrician, juice was almost singlehandedly the biggest contributor to childhood obesity. For some reason, many mothers think that it’s okay to allow a kid to drink juice all day. Juice is a treat for kids, not a way to hydrate them.

via Sugar Stacks

What does 200 calories look like?

Alliance Delivers Farm-Fresh Produce to South Bronx Consumers

This is genius:

Unlike others who have come to the South Bronx to solve social problems through vegetables, he is offering neither charity nor an outsider’s idea of what the neighborhood might want to cook. He’s developed a commercial community-supported agriculture plan (C.S.A.) that lets residents determine what they’ll get, with an enticing prize at the end for people who stick with it: a chance to own shares in the farm. He started the project because, like others who have spent time looking at what people eat in the South Bronx, he became frustrated. “If there is a food revolution, it’s not yet including the low income,” Mr. Derryck said. Every day, hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce travel through the South Bronx to the Hunts Point market, one of the world’s largest food distribution centers. Little of it is actually sold in the surrounding neighborhood.

Is This Why We're So Fat?

The current edition of the  Journal of the American Dietetic Association includes an interesting study reviewing food commercials on TV. Over a 4 week time period, researchers taped food advertisements during 84 hours of prime time TV and 12 on Saturday mornings. In 3000 ads, 800 food items were promoted. The conclusions shouldn’t shock anybody who has a television set at home:

Results suggest that a diet consisting of observed food items would provid:

2,560% of the recommended daily servings for sugars

2,080% of the recommended daily servings for fat,

But only:

40% of the recommended daily servings for vegetables,

32% of the recommended daily servings for dairy, and

27% of the recommended daily servings for fruits

Got it? 25 times more sugar than we should consume, and 20 times more fat then we require. PER DAY.

Now before our blood glucose goes into orbit, let’s remember that obviously we don’t eat burgers, pancakes, and pizza every meal. Nor do we chug down 20 oz. milkshakes or Colas. But being bombarded with so many mental nudges – and then encountering vending machines, fast food joints, and other calorie ingestion opportunities every which way we turn – is taking its toll on our weight and our health.

This isn’t why our nation is fat, but it sure is one of the contributors. It’s much easier to package a candybar than figure out how to make money off branding kale.

It’s hard to think of anyone in American life who gets the freak sociological privilege of abrupt, overwhelming wish fulfillment. There are the impoverished kids who sign NBA contracts, perhaps, or cafeteria workers who win the lottery; on television, there are the lucky contestants who are selected for extreme-makeover shows.

Yet for the morbidly obese, the possibility of rapid and radical change, of a near-existential reorganization of life, is becoming increasingly common: Last year, the number of patients who underwent weight-loss procedures was an estimated 140,600, according to the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, more than double that of 2002.

Most people who undergo this procedure are not doing it to look pretty. They’re doing it to not die young, to save their knees, to be able to walk to and from the grocery store without gasping for breath. Yet the procedure often has striking aesthetic consequences, making conventional beauties of people whose self-images were previously organized, at least in part, around the very principle of invisibility or unsightliness. For them, losing weight turns out to be the least of their transformations. They don’t just have new bodies; they have new narratives, new public identities. “Many patients greatly underestimate just how significant the psychological transformation is,” says Warren Huberman, a clinical psychologist who evaluates prospective bariatric patients at NYU Medical Center. “I ask what they anticipate—and what changes they think will be unpleasant. They look at me like I’ve got three heads. They can’t imagine anything will go badly if they’re thin.”

In the annals of obesity literature, this is not a topic that’s received a ton of attention. But attend any bariatric support-group meeting, and this much is clear: One has to learn to be skinny. Even the smallest adaptive behaviors take years to shake—buying clothes too big, deeming a subway seat too small, refusing to be first through a crowded bar.

via My Life as a Thin Person

T-Shirt Says to “Eat Less”

So Urbane Outfitters pulled this T-shirt from their stores due to cries from anorexia groups that it sends the wrong message. So let’s look at the numbers:

Prevalence of Anorexia = 1%

Prevalence of Obesity = 35%

Americans eat, on average, 3,790 calories a day. That’s nearly double what we should eat. Know how many calories you should eat.

I think it’s safe to assume that the US could stand to “eat less.” In fact, obesity kills more people than smoking. It’s a message the vast majority of us need to implement in our lives. Because remember, the kids today are expected to live a shorter, lower quality life than their parents. And that’s not due to anorexia.

UPDATE: So any time I mention anything on my blog about eating less/obesity, it tends to irk many people. A few people have commented saying “No, the US doesn’t need to eat less, we need to eat healthier.” So here’s the deal. If one person eats 5,000 calories of fast food a day vs. another person who eats 5,000 calories of food from Whole Foods, both will be obese. It’s simple physics. First, ensure you are taking in just the right amount of calories per day. Then, ensure those calories come from healthy, fresh, and whole foods.

I don’t support this t-shirt, but I do support the conversation it brings up. We need to have a real dialogue about this issue of obesity. Our culture doesn’t want to talk about it for fear of offending 35% of the population. But the real issue is, it’s killing 35% of the population. Ignoring the issue won’t help us progress and solve this epidemic. So what does the conversation look like? We desperately need to change our culture and understand that obesity is bad for you, bad for our economy, and bad for the environment. 

UPDATE 2: Why did I post this?