The lady who died from Coke?

From The Press, "Woman drank up to eight litres of Coke a day":

Natasha Marie Harris, 30, died suddenly on February 25, 2010. Her partner, Christopher Hodgkinson, had earlier claimed it was a result of drinking too much Coca-Cola...She had been drinking a lot of Coca-Cola for several years and Hodgkinson estimated between four-and-a-half and eight litres a day in the past seven or eight years.

My sincere sympathies, Mr. Hodgkinson.  I wonder if she died of malnutrition? Here is what 8 liters of Coke looks like nutritionally (based on a low 4864 kJ diet and 100g required Carbohydrate, for my personal settings from Wagmu).  

Dieting: "Don't tell anyone"?

CNN has a typically chatty entry about a woman who lost a lot of weight.

Her doctor gave her these four tips:

1. Eat 8 ounces of food every 3 hours.
2. No sugary drinks.
3. Do not skip meals.
4. Do not tell anyone what you're doing.

The first three make sense, from what I've read of the scientific literature. But the last? How does not telling anyone help me stay on a diet?  Maybe this turns dieting into a personal vow?  It seems to contradict many reports that say having a buddy system and being accountable to someone else is effective. For myself, I've found it much easier to stay on task when I share the task with someone else.

I've designed Wagmu to be private information. You can't easily share what you're doing with other people, and neither can other people see what you're doing.  So it fits with not telling anyone, the personal vow approach.  But I'm not sure that's the right thing. Comments welcome.

Wagmu 2.0 & Decisions on The Menu

We watched "Julie & Julia" on Friday night. It's a lovely cheerful film about Julia Child and gorgeous food. It reminded me of our fabulous meal over Easter weekend at the Quickenberry Lodge.

Attracted by Meryl Streep and her character's obvious delight in cooking and eating, I spent much of this weekend looking at Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Aside from being hopelessly intimidated, I see some discouraging issues with this kind of cooking.

First issue: this kind of cooking takes a lot of time. The top chefs think nothing of taking 20 minutes simply to carmelize the onions or reduce a sauce to concentrate the flavour. Don't get me wrong - I love fine food. But I can't fit that kind of prep time into my life 7 days a week.

Second issue: this kind of cooking has a lot of fat. What are the three ingredients to French food? Answer: butter, butter, and butter. The typical French recipe for a super-food like cauliflower, cheap and high nutrient, has a half cup of cream per serving, plus the butter and Parmesan cheese. I'd love it! But, despite Dr. Atkins, those of us who need to reduce our waistlines are not going to succeed very well on that much fat.

Third issue: this kind of cooking is expensive. The recipe for beef bourgignon, for example, calls a full bottle of wine. Yum! Bring it on! - just don't make me pay for it, at least not every day. A modest look at the forums and comments around the web show that people are worried about the cost of food, especially in the current economic slowdown. Not everybody can afford a lot of wine, cream, and Parmesan cheese.

But I'm so attracted to it, nonetheless! I wanna eat the good stuff! But these decisions have tradeoffs.

Here's a chart of the tradeoffs. I've put the good stuff, palatability and nutrition, on the vertical axes, and the bad stuff, prep time and $ cost, on the horizontal axes.

Our ideal diet should look like Meryl Streep - tall and thin. Wouldn't it be great to find a nutritious diet that tasted great, but was quick to make and cheap, too?

Unfortunately, our actual diets tend to look like Danny DeVito, short and with a big belly. Not really all that good, not really all that cheap, but fast. And not too nourishing.
On the bottom left, I put raw cabbage: not really all that tasty, but low cost, great nutrition profile, and no prep time. Just buy, pull off a piece, and stuff it in your mouth. I guess you can buy it organic if you're worried that it might need washing first. Let's call this the Linda Hunt profile. (Great actress, but still the wrong character for the boss on "NCIS LA", which is not nearly as good as the original "NCIS".)

Now look at the bottom right, the Cauliflower Gratin. Huge on prep time, huge on palatability, huge on cost, and pretty good nutrition. I gave it a slightly lower nutrition rank due to its fat. But this profile is a Julia Child profile. She was a huge woman, 6 feet, two inches. She loved cooking, and she loved eating. I'd love to eat like that, but I really shouldn't!

So there's this whole confusing issue of what we want to do, what we should do, what we are able to do, and what we actually do.

I want Cauliflower Gratin. I should probably eat plain blanched cauliflower. I'm not able to make Cauliflower Gratin, at least not very well, because the broiler on our ancient second-hand stove isn't working, and I don't have the cream and Parmesan cheese anyway. What will I actually do? Dunno yet. I was planning the Gratin for lunch, but ended up with toast. LOL!

Somewhere among the infinite set of recipes, surely one cauliflower recipe out there is reasonably easy to make, doesn't have too much fat, and tastes good.

What I really want is a system that helps me with the search. I want to find those Meryl Streep diets. Google's great, but not enough, as on-line recipes never cover all four of palatability, nutrition, prep time, and cost. Enter Wagmu 2.0! Stayed tuned for the big launch sometime this year.

The Economic Value of Nutritional Supplements

Help! I have been asked to write a book chapter with the above title. I can write a technical document that will be correct, and maybe even interesting. But what would you want to know about this question? Leave comments please!

Another reason to avoid sugar drinks

Researchers at Georgia State have shown that fructose disrupts memory in rats.

Besides the obvious, another point struck me: "Fructose, unlike another sugar, glucose, is processed almost solely by the liver, and produces an excessive amount of triglycerides — fat which gets into the bloodstream. Triglycerides can interfere with insulin signaling in the brain, which plays a major role in brain cell survival and plasticity, or the ability for the brain to change based on new experiences." Whoa! Dr Atkins would be pleased.

When we think of Coca Cola, what comes to mind? It's all bikini-clad girls, dancing, sports, and good times. Fantastic marketing! What actually happens to us when we drink the stuff? We get health and brain problems, our teeth literally dissolve, we get fat, we get diabetes, we get dementia. And we've wasted a lot of money, which incentivizes environmental damage.

I've written about this problem before. If you drink sugar drinks (or worse, low-cal chemical drinks), ask yourself, "Am I suckered by the marketers? Why don't I just drink water or milk, which are cheaper and healthier?"

File this one under agriculture, corruption, diet, environment, greenwash, nutrition, and obesity. Why all those tags? Because agriculture is taking massive subsidies to give us pseudo-food that makes us sick, while the marketers do their part to hide the facts.

Dental image source.

Save the economy by losing weight.

CNN iReport has a post titled "Won't you join me?" This is a surprisingly well-done posting about our health and our economy.

I successfully lost weight using DietPower. I hugely improved my health. I remember some fantastic days, when I went to bed feeling great, slept soundly, and woke up feeling energized. Amazing!

Eventually, I was sufficiently dissatisfied with DietPower that I have started developing my own, Wagmu.

While I have not regained the weight, I am now very much out of shape, partly because I've had a painful case of shingles for the past month, but more because I wasn't going to the gym for months before that. Perhaps being out of shape weakened my immune system, and allowed entry to the shingles.

So it's time I went back to the gym! We can improve our health and improve the economy (through better productivity and lower health costs) if we diet and exercise. We can also reduce our dietary impact on the earth by eating less sugar, less dairy, and less meat. So I'll join Alison Victoria on this, and I hope you will, too.

Update: So I went to the gym, and despite my weeks of discomfort, finished supercharged! I felt fantastic. I wanna do that again!

Death by obesity

Today's news had another tragic tale of a person dying of obesity. When the average shifts a bit, the tails of the bell curve shift too. The most obese people are now much heavier than the most obese people of 50 years ago.

Over the past five weeks, I have been traveling across the U.S. presenting my research on smart markets for water resources. I see that many Americans are still driving alone in SUVs, still packing huge portions from Portillos and giant burgers from Burger King, still drinking chemical drinks - with and without sugar, still buying bottled water, and still without a clue about the health problems they are imposing on themselves and the environmental problems they will leave to their children.

Could we please control our eating? If we think we have some self-control, can we demonstrate it by buying the garden salad instead of the extra large fries? Can we choose a bowl of oatmeal instead of steak, two eggs, hash browns, and four pancakes? Can we split the corned beef sandwich with a friend, rather than eating the whole thing alone? Please?