DUD - Deadly, Unhealthy, and Distasteful

I have been reading a book called 'In Defense of Food' by Michael Pollan in which he describes the "nutrient industry" and the evolution and domination of the industrial "western diet."

There was an article in the WSJ recently titled "The Fine Print: What's Really in a Lot of 'Healthy' Foods." This furthers the argument put out by Mr. Pollan. The article is reproduced below.

It is a sad tribute to the great thinkers like Swami Vivekananda and Swami Ranganathanda. As they said often, when humans achieve a modicum of control over the external world, they become a threat to themselves. When human beings have time to "kill" they kill.
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A lot of Americans think they're eating a healthy diet these days. But it's easy to be fooled by our assumptions and the ways that food manufacturers play on them.
Take chicken. The average American eats about 90 pounds of it a year, more than twice as much as in the 1970s, part of the switch to lower-fat, lower-cholesterol meat proteins. But roughly one-third of the fresh chicken sold in the U.S. is "plumped" with water, salt and sometimes a seaweed extract called carrageenan that helps it retain the added water. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says chicken processed this way can still be labeled "all natural" or "100% natural" because those are all natural ingredients, even though they aren't naturally found in chicken. Producers must mention the added ingredients on the package -- but the lettering can be small: just one-third the size of the largest letter in the product's name. If you're trying to watch your sodium to cut your risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke, it pays to check the Nutrition Facts label. Untreated chicken has about 45 to 60 mgs of sodium per four-ounce serving. So-called enhanced or "plumped" chicken has between 200 and 400 mgs of sodium per serving, almost as much as a serving of fast-food french fries.Adding salt water became widespread when big discount stores began selling groceries and wanted to sell chicken at uniform weights and prices. Plumping packaged chicken helps even out the weight. But that means consumers are paying for added salt water at chicken prices -- an estimated $2 billion worth every year, according to the Truthful Labeling Coalition, a group of chicken producers that don't enhance their products. Makers of enhanced chicken, including some of the biggest U.S. producers, say many consumers prefer it in blind taste tests and that it stays moister. Ray Atkinson, a spokesman for Pilgrim's Pride, says the company sells both enhanced and unenhanced chicken because consumers ask for it. He also notes that even at 330 mg of sodium, the enhanced chicken qualifies for the American Heart Association's mark of approval.A survey released this week from Foster Farms, a member of the Truthful Labeling Coalition, found that 63% of consumers are unaware of the practice, and 82% believe that salt-water-injected chicken shouldn't carry the all-natural label. The telephone survey polled 1,000 consumers on the West Coast.Here are some other foods that may not be as healthy as they appear.

Salt substitutes. If you're trying to cut down on salt, check with your doctor before you start using a salt substitute. Most contain potassium chloride, which can exacerbate kidney problems and interact badly with some heart and liver medications.

Artificial Sweeteners. Sugar-free gum, mint and candy have fewer calories and are better for your teeth. But they frequently contain sorbitol, a plant extract that isn't completely absorbed by the body and works as a natural laxative. Consuming a single pack of gum or mints can cause bloating, flatulence, stomach pains and diarrhea in people who are sensitive to it. Some diabetics find that such sugar alcohols, which are sweet but have few calories, can raise their blood sugar. Others include maltitol and xylitol.

Trans fat. There's been a remarkable reduction in these artery-cloggers in processed foods recently. But manufacturers are allowed to round down: Products labeled zero grams of trans fat can have up to 0.49 gram of fat per serving. You could still be consuming significant amounts of trans fat, "especially when the serving size is unrealistic," says Bonnie Taub-Dix, a nutritionist and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, a nonprofit professional organization. If the ingredients include partially hydrogenated oil, hydrogenated oil or shortening, a product isn't completely trans-fat free. And it may have considerable saturated fat as well.The same rounding principle applies to zero calories, fat and carbohydrates. Walden Farms, which advertises a line of dips, spreads and dressings as "Fat Free, Sugar Free and Calorie Free," says its products do have trace calories and up to 0.49 gram of fat and carbohydrates per serving.

"Wheat bread." This is a meaningless term, since almost all bread is made with wheat. Some manufacturers add to the illusion by using a brown wrapper or darkening bread with brown sugar or molasses. The more healthful stuff is whole wheat, which includes the outer bran and the wheat germ inside, good sources of nutrients and fiber. Check the ingredients. If the first one listed is "enriched wheat flour," you aren't getting much whole grain.A few bread makers are still displaying the USDA's old Food Pyramid on their packages -- the one that recommended six to 11 servings of bread or pasta a day. That's been replaced by a more individualized pyramid that recommends only six carbohydrate servings, three of which should be whole grains.

Fiber. Companies are adding fiber to all kinds of products -- including yogurt, ice cream and beverages. In many cases, the added fiber comes from purified powders, not the kind of fiber found in whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits. The latter have been shown to lower cholesterol, reduce the risk of diabetes and heart disease and may cut the risk of colon cancer. But there isn't much evidence that "isolated" fibers like inulin, maltodextrin, oat fiber and polydextrose have the same effect, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy group. The Nutrition Facts label doesn't differentiate between the kind of fiber counted, so check the ingredients."The added fiber is probably better than nothing, but it's not as good as fiber from natural sources like fruits, vegetables and whole grains," says CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson.

Yogurt. The yogurt aisle is dizzy these days with products that promise to reduce your cholesterol, control your blood pressure, protect your digestive health or boost your immune system. In many cases, it's a single ingredient that provides the benefit, and you can find much more of it in other sources. For example, Promise activ SuperShots say they "Help Control Blood Pressure" thanks to 350 mgs of potassium. There's much more potassium in a banana, a cup of spinach or a baked potato. DanActive probiotic dairy drink's immunity-boosting claims stem from its L. casei Immunitas active culture. There's lots of research interest in such probiotics, but for now, the marketing is ahead of the science. The friendly bacteria in DanActive has mainly been shown to fight diarrhea in people taking antibiotics.

Super water. The Center for Science in the Public Interest sued Coca-Cola Co. earlier this year over claims on its VitaminWater beverages. The center argued that the drinks -- with names like "defense," "rescue," "energy" and "endurance" -- are mainly sugar water with 125 calories per bottle. Coke called the lawsuit "frivolous" and said its VitaminWater brands are properly labeled. "Consumers today are savvy, they are educated and they are looking for more from their beverages than simply hydration," said Coke spokesman Scott Williamson.Government surveys show that most Americans aren't deficient in many of the vitamins supplied in these drinks. If you consume more than you need, the excess gets excreted.

Omega 3. Many foods are adding these essential fatty acids, said to cut the risk of heart disease, cancer and arthritis and help promote brain health. But you can get a lot more from natural foods. You'd need to drink 45 eight-ounce glasses of milk that is fortified with 32 mgs of omega 3 to get as much of these fatty acids as you get in a three-ounce serving of salmon.


Will any of the products mentioned here hurt you? No, but they may not help you as much as manufacturers would like you to think. "Try to buy foods as close to their natural state as possible," says Ms. Taub-Dix

Re-KINDLing interest in Newspapers

The newspapers are facing fierce headwinds, and giving customers content for free has not helped matters. An interesting news piece today is that Amazon is coming out with a new Kindle which has a much bigger screen. This screen is expected to make reading newspapers on the e-screen easier on the eyes.
Good newspapers deliver a great service. I hope they do not go away.

From the NYT.
Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press

By BRAD STONE

The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism.

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Such e-reading devices are due in the next year from a range of companies, including the News Corporation, the magazine publisher Hearst and Plastic Logic, a well-financed start-up company that expects to start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year at a plant in Dresden, Germany.

But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company’s relationship with Amazon.

These devices from Amazon and other manufacturers offer an almost irresistible proposition to newspaper and magazine industries. They would allow publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure.

“We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,” said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old, salmon-colored British newspaper The Financial Times. “The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.”

Perhaps most appealing about this new class of reading gadgets is the opportunity they offer publishers to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions. And publishers have found that they were not prepared to deal with the recent rapid decline of print advertising revenue.

Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.

The current version of the Kindle has proved in a limited way that this is possible. Even though its six-inch black-and-white screen is made for reading books, Amazon offers Kindle owners subscriptions to more than 58 newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. (The Journal subscription costs $9.99 a month, The Times is $13.99 a month and The New Yorker is $2.99 a month.)

Subscribers get updates once a day over a cellular network. Amazon and other participating publishers say they are satisfied with the results, although they have not released data on the number of subscriptions that have been sold.

For the all the hope publishers are placing in dedicated electronic reading devices, they will be encumbered at the start with some serious shortcomings. Most use display technology from E Ink, a company in Cambridge, Mass., that was founded in 1997 based on research started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology M.I.T. Media Lab to develop thin electronic displays capable of mimicking the readability of regular paper, while using a minimum amount of battery power.

The screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. That has some people in the magazine industry, in particular, keeping their hopes in check until E Ink evolves.

“I don’t think we would be anywhere near as excited about anything in black and white as we would about high-definition color,” said Tom Wallace, the editorial director of Condé Nast, publisher of glossy magazines like Vogue and Wired. “But technology changes at a pretty high clip these days, and if we are now in the Farmer Gray days, it will be only a very short while until we are in the video game era.”

Another hitch is that some makers of reading devices, like Amazon, want to set their own subscription prices for publications and control the relationship with the subscriber — something media companies like Condé Nast object to. Plastic Logic and Hearst have said publicly that they will take a more open approach and let media companies deal directly with readers and set their own prices.

Then there is the looming presence of Apple, which seems likely to introduce a multipurpose tablet computer later this year, according to rumor and speculation by Apple observers. Such a device, with a screen that is said to be about three or four times as large as the iPhone’s, would have an LCD screen capable of showing rich color and video, and people could use it to browse the Web.

Even if such a device has limited battery life and strains readers’ eyes, for many buyers it could be a more appealing alternative to devices dedicated to reading books, newspapers and magazines.

Such a Web-connected tablet would also pose a problem for any print publications that hope to try charging for content that is tailored for mobile devices, since users could just visit their free sites on the Internet. One way to counter this might be to borrow from the cellphone model and offer specialized reading devices free or at a discount to people who commit to, say, a one-year subscription.

Then there is the possibility that all these devices from Amazon, Apple and the rest have simply not appeared in time to save many players in the troubled realm of print media.

“If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,” said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it’s going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.”

“And all of us are very worried about how newspapers are going to survive in the next few years if we don’t see any turnaround in the economy,” Mr. Fidler said.

Whether or not the situation is hopeless, newspapers and magazines now find themselves weighing offers of aid from outsiders. When asked at the debut of the Kindle 2 in February whether the Kindle could help the print media, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said he thought there were “genuine opportunities” to save journalism.

“And we’re excited about helping with that,” he added.

Firms waging war on wages

Even while reporting huge profits, firms like IBM, Microsoft and others are resorting to layoffs and wage reductions for those still working in their firms. No shareholder is coming out and telling these firms to stop these actions and actually invest during these times in new ideas.

U.S. Workers' Wages Stagnate As Firms Rush to Slash Costs

n December, Timothy Owner, a trombone player with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, called his landlord to tell her he might have trouble paying rent around May. He and the orchestra's 53 other full-time members, many of whom are paid less than $30,000 a year, had agreed to a month-long furlough.

The furlough, which ended yesterday, was rough, Owner said. But he and other musicians acknowledged that the alternative could have been worse. "We're less unhappy if this means the orchestra will survive," he said.

Across the country, workers' earnings are stagnating or, in some cases, declining. For many Americans, the setbacks are all the more troubling because they have lost so much wealth in recent months, with the value of their homes and retirement packages plummeting.

Employers big and small have resorted to slashing hours and once-unthinkable wage cuts. In March, staffing agencies that work for Microsoft agreed to a 10 percent reduction in their bill rate. In April, hotel operators in New York City asked unionized waiters, housekeepers and bellhops to reopen their contract and accept wage cuts. State governments such as Indiana's have frozen pay, while others, including Maryland and California, have furloughed employees.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than a third of Americans say they or someone in their household has had their hours or pay cut in the past few months. That's a nine-point increase since a similar poll was conducted in February.

Wages in absolute terms -- not adjusted for inflation -- tend not to fall, even during economic downturns. In a study of the recession of the early 1990s, Yale economist Truman Bewley found that employers are loath to reduce wages because of the potential impact on morale and productivity. That's why wages are considered "sticky" -- they rarely slip.

So far, there's no evidence that cuts to compensation have reversed overall wage growth. But, as in past recessions, the growth is slowing rapidly. The Labor Department's employment cost index, which tracks wages, salaries and benefits, rose in the first quarter by the smallest amount since the index began in 1982.

That bodes ill for those workers trying to rebuild nest eggs depleted by the housing and stock market downturns. To boost their savings, they typically need faster income growth or lower spending, and, as Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz put it, "It is going to be a long time before we see sustained pay raises."

The previous U.S. recession, in 2001, was relatively weak and didn't last the full year. But once inflation is factored in, wages actually fell, sapping workers' buying power, and didn't return to pre-recession levels until 2006, just before the economy fell into its latest funk. As a result, from 2000 to 2007, the median income of American households, when adjusted for inflation, fell by $324, according to the Commerce Department.

By comparison, the current recession has already lasted 17 months and is far more severe than the last one.

Wages for new hires have already fallen, according to an index compiled by the Society for Human Resource Management, a trade association based in Alexandria. Temporary workers' hourly rates are shrinking, too. Joanie Ruge, senior vice president of the staffing firm Adecco Group North America, said her company's clients have shaved as much as 10 percent off their rates.

In recent months, falling energy and food prices have helped Americans stretch their money. But inflation could easily erode those gains if it returns to a more normal annual rate of about 3 percent.

Experts fear that wages will not keep up. Once the recession ends, economists expect, the recovery will be long and slow, with sluggish job creation. Without a tight labor market, employers won't have to compete as much for talent and workers will have less leverage to push for higher pay, experts say.

"Once you knock down wage growth, it will take a substantial change in unemployment to move it again," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. "The recovery is going to be weak. I think as wage growth subsides, it is going to subside for many years."

Members and employees of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra are bracing for more hard times. The orchestra has had to contend with a $1.5 billion debt. Carla Johnson, the VSO's executive director, said she noticed donations and ticket sales start to slide in 2007, before the recession officially started. After the economy took a nose dive in September, grants dried up. People who had pledged to buy season tickets reneged. Some longtime subscribers, in particular retirees living off investment income, "were so embarrassed they could barely speak to us," Johnson said. The musicians were furloughed, and the administrative staff, including Johnson, took a 20 percent pay cut. The two moves saved the VSO about $500,000.

Since then, nearly everyone with the orchestra has had to make adjustments. Viola player Matthew Umlauf, the primary breadwinner for his family of four, shelved plans to buy a house in order to put more money aside in an emergency fund. Owner, the trombone player, called friends around the country in search of gigs in April to make up for his lost income. Public relations director Donna Hudgins planted a vegetable garden, while her husband, a judge who recently stepped down, went back to work as a substitute judge. He's worked every day since he retired, she said, and she has no plans to stop, either. "I'm working longer than I ever thought I would," Hudgins said.

She and other VSO staff, who are not unionized, had little say in the changes. But the orchestra members, who are organized, did. They accepted the furlough knowing that the standard cost-cutting measure -- layoffs -- was not an option. A clarinet player, for instance, can't pick up the slack for a missing violinist.

Orchestras everywhere are feeling the pain. Just last week, members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra volunteered to give up wage increases and other benefits in order to save the BSO $1 million.

The VSO members will probably have to make further concessions during upcoming contract negotiations, Johnson said. While the musicians don't relish the idea of more financial hardship, the orchestra members said they will find some way to keep performing.

"We don't stop playing because times get tough," Owner said. "We love what we do."

GOOGLE G(L)OATS AWAY

A rather green story out of Google..

Google outsources lawnmowing -- to goats. San Francisco Business Times. Google is renting goats to mow lawns at the Googleplex in Mountain View, according to a blog post from the company (in which it affirms that it is not kidding). Google is renting the goats from a company called California Grazing, which provides the services for the San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego areas. The company says the goats cost about the same as lawn mowers.A herder will bring about 200 goats who stay for about a week, eating and fertilizing the grass.