(no subject)

The company started by the late nutrition guru Dr. Robert C. Atkins to promote a low-carb lifestyle has filed for bankruptcy court protection, a further sign of the waning popularity of the diet.

... A recent survey by the NPD Group, an independent marketing information company, found that the number of American adults on any low-carb diet peaked at 9.1 percent last February and dropped to 3.6 percent by mid-November.

from Low-Carb Pioneer Atkins Files Chapter 11

The low-carb "dieting fad" was undermined by stupidity and opportunism: the worst of capitalism.

I've been astounded to see products in the supermarket billed as "low carb" which were based on "enriched bleached flour." Other products I've tried were based on soy protein, which just doesn't work; the texture of these foods was usually unpalatable.

IF you are concerned about the possibility that refined sugar is toxic and want to avoid it, you just have to give up certain foods. There's no way around that. You also have to learn a healthy degree of mistrust towards the people who package and sell foods, because the way our economy is structured, they make the most profit by selling you the kinds of sugary and starchy foods that the low-carb diet no-nos. So really it should have come as no surprise to find "low-carb" foods containing enriched bleached flour. I'm just glad the whole fad fell through before I saw such products with high-fructose corn syrup in them too.

Here, just to add more confusion to the mix:

Lead study author Dr. David S. Weigle of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and his colleagues note that low-calorie diets rarely work. This has encouraged researchers to consider that changing the ingredients of the diet, but not its calories, makes a difference in people's waistlines.

Previous research shows that low-carbohydrate diets, typically high in fat and protein - are effective, the authors report, but so are low-fat diets.

Weigle and his team speculated that low-carb diets may work because they encourage people to eat more protein, which decreases people's appetites and causes them to consume fewer calories.

from High-protein diets curb appetite

Protein suppresses appetite... that must be why high-protein diets are used to help thin people "bulk up"? ::headdesk headdesk headdesk::

The bottom line: don't trust a multi-billion dollar industry to tell you better than your own brain what is best for you.

So where am *I* at this point? I dunno. I seek to be somewhat mindful of what I take in, and succeed some or maybe even much of the time. Oh well.

(no subject)

I live with three partners in a big ol' poly household. The biggest bone of contention the four of us have had in the eight months we've lived together is the fair sharing of chores, which IMO suggests that we're doing really great.

Before we devised a remedy, some of us were doing less than their fair share than others. After discussing the matter it became apparent that two of us felt that if they saw something they perceived needed to be done, they just jumped in and did it, whereas the other two didn't take the initiative in that way.

The way I look at it, housework is like any other kind of profession, in that you need to be trained in identifying and prioritizing tasks. To help in doing this, I proposed a system whereby we keep on the refrigerator a list of the chores that need to be done, and a column for each of us. As one of the two who did not routinely take initiative in doing chores, I figured this would help me determine what needed to be done at any given time, by having the tasks already broken down and prioritized. When one of us does a chore, we put a check mark under our names. Food shopping merits two checkmarks. Those of us who do not take the initiative to keep up with the others in numbers of checkmarks earned can expect to be rebuked by the others.

With some qualifications, this has been a success. It hasn't solved all of our problems, but the house has been kept in better shape, and the chores are being distributed more equitably. Sometimes in fact we find ourselves actually wrangling over who gets to do them because we are all afraid of falling too far behind in our check-mark count.

One caveat is that it actually caused chores to become, for lack of a better word, commodified. My partner R. first brought this to my attention by complaining that under this system chores are done in a way that is list-driven, rather than being motivated by the desire to do things for the household out of love. Getting the check mark becomes a bigger concern than how well one does the chore. For a while some of us were looking for ways to get check marks for just about anything non-routine we did for the household -- hefting an AC up the stairs, for instance. We solved this last issue by re-affirming that the main point was just to make sure the routine household maintenance items were being distributed fairly.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to polyamory

(no subject)

A brewing diplomatic conflict between the Vatican and Israel has been ignored by the mainstream press.

The Vatican, in a sharp retort to Israeli criticism of Pope Benedict XVI, said it could not protest every act of Palestinian terrorism because Israel's responses are "not always compatible with the norms of international law."

The unusually pointed statement issued by the Vatican on Thursday (July 28) follows Israeli criticism that the pope ignored Israel when mentioning terrorist attacks in London, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey last Sunday (July 24).

... "Not every attack against Israel could be followed by an immediate public condemnation," the church said. "There are several reasons for this, among them the fact that attacks against Israel were sometimes followed by immediate Israeli reactions not always compatible with the norms of international law. It would, consequently, have been impossible to condemn the former and remain silent on the latter."

from Conflict Between the Vatican and Israel Deepens

Edit. I should add some analysis of this, and the media silence about it. A sizeable portion of the US population is Catholic. This population has been in recent years one of the crucial targets of GOP propaganda; they have traditionally been Democratic allies but the GOP wants their vote.

The Vatican is signaling a move into deeper opposition to the US-Israel axis, having already called the invasion of Iraq illegal, and now adding that charge to some of Israel's actions. Any signal from the Vatican that comes counter to US policy is liable to send waves of second-thought through the US Catholic community, causing them to rethink any support they might have for the US war policy.

The media, by remaining almost completely silent on this matter, is preventing that from happening and is thus playing into the interests of the Bush junta.