I'm not saying that high GI foods are more healthful than low GI foods. Evidently they are not. However, the question at hand is not which foods are nutritionally imperfect but which foods are causing the obesity epidemic.
Dietary fat is obviously the primary culprit, for the following reasons.
- Decreases satiety (contrary to popular myth). Don't believe me? Check out the "Satiety Index".
- Slows digestion, leading to overeating.
- Is directly released into the bloodstream and (particularly in the presence of insulin) absorbed by adipocytes.
- Has low thermogenic properties.
- Is "tasty" and psychologically addictive (yes, just like sugar).
Telling the average person to avoid high GI carbs is like telling a smoker to take more vitamins. Yes, it will make them slightly healthier but they should cut out the smoking first.
In a perfect world, people should prefer low GI foods. But a far more pressing problem is the overconsumption of dietary fat. Why are we distracting people with this GI sideshow when they are killing themselves with dietary fat?
Are you saying that excess sugars in the bloodstream are not converted to fat?
No, read my post again. Look up "de novo lipogenesis". Under normal conditions, 2-10g/day of fat is produced from carbohydrates. Only if subjects are force fed excessive carbohydrates (i.e. 600+g of carbs/day), are significant amounts of fat produced. Furthermore, this is an inefficient pathway with a significant number of calories lost (I believe it's 20%, but you'll have to check).
Simply put, DNL is a metabolic pathway of last resort. It cannot be honestly stated that, with regards to body fat, that macronutrient ratio does not matter. Carbohydrates are difficult to metabolize as body fat and easily oxidized if overeaten. Dietary fat, on the other hand, is simply released into the bloodstream and absorbed by adipose tissue.
The high GI/low GI issue is a red herring in the obesity debate. It cannot be understated: DIETARY FAT MAKES PEOPLE FAT.
In Australia, they have the glycemic index on food labels. Our kids could benefit from that here.
No they don't. There is no legal requirement, and even most foods that _are_ low GI don't have the actual GI figure stated, just "Low GI".
Also, FAT MAKES PEOPLE FAT. It's that simple. Under normal conditions, carbohydrates are not converted to fatty acids, even if they are high GI. Study after study (check Google Scholar) has shown that de novo lipogenesis (DNL) only occurs if very excessive levels of carbohydrate are ingested (i.e. 600g+ per day).
Regardless, explain why Asian countries are healthier and leaner than Americans and Europeans even though they have a high calorie intake, don't exercise much more and the staple of their diet is a high-GI starch (white rice). It's because they eat less fat.
I'm so tired of this ridiculous hysteria about carbohydrates.
Please explain why Asian countries have the lowest rate of diabetes in the world but they eat proportionally much more carbohydrates than we do and much less fat and protein.
The simple fact is that fatty junk food and dairy food is to explain for the high rates of type 2 diabetes in the West, not the consumption of healthy foods like grains and vegetables.
Sorry, you're wrong about CDs. It's rare that someone can discern the difference between a well-encoded 192kbps MP3 and the original CD version. If you doubt me, I challenge you to take a blind hearing test. And many networks have lossless compressed audio files, such as FLAC.
The real reason people don't blow the whistle on music sharing is because CDs are overpriced due to the RIAA oligopoly.
it's good business. Otherwise Google news might be blocked from China altogether and Google would lose access to a growing market. Corporations have always got along with authoritarian regimes, ever since the Nazis used IBM punch cards to tally the death counts.
The real question is why people expect a different standard of behaviour from Google than from other companies. I mean, you guys don't really believe that "don't be evil" stuff, do you? Google is Just Another Company.
In economics, the market price is decided by the intersection of supply and demand curves. Typically, there is a downward-sloping demand curve (a higher price means less quantity is desired by buyers) and an upward-sloping supply curve (a higher price means more will be produced by manufacturers) which meet at a single point which determines the market price.
This approach works with traditional commodities produced by companies and bought by consumers. It doesn't work with people selling labor to companies. The simple but crucial fact is that labour does not have an upward-sloping supply curve. As wages increase, people will not necessarily supply more labor. As wages decrease people will not necessarily supply less (and finally zero) labor.
This is for 2 reasons. Firstly, there's only 24 hours in a day which provides an upper limit on how much labour can be supplied by any single individual. Secondly, most workers have nothing else to sell. If labor becomes too cheap, they cannot switch to selling something else, because labor is all they have. Traditionaly, supply curves imply that the seller will switch between different commodities to maximize profit if any one commodity is undervalued. And thirdly, people generally need some basic amount of money for themselves and their families to survive. If labour becomes cheap, they will just work more and more. All this means that supply curve of labor generally slopes downward.
What does that mean? Well, if both the demand and supply curves slope downwards, there will be multiple intersections between the supply and demand curves. This means that there are multiple acceptable market prices; no single equilibrium point is the correct price but they are all possible alternatives. And this is assuming that employers have a downward sloping demand curve, which is not necessarily true, either; high wages do not necessarily equal high unemployment.
In reality, the price of labor does not reflect the market value of labor (or, indeed, it's marginal product) but the relative social power of employers and employees. Market prices are not a fait accompli that we must accept; they are the result of a compromise betwen different sectors of society. Forcing employees to out-bid themselves is hardly "fair" or "efficient"; it just places yet more bargaining power in the hands of employers.
No, try again. The RIAA is a monopoly. The average consumer has little choice when they want to buy music. If they want to buy music from any of their favourite bands, it's all from RIAA-supporting record companies. There's no real competition, and mass consumer action is pretty much impossible.
And who do you think you are telling people to "stop whining"? Why don't you stop whining about other people whining?
Bullshit. Just because a public space is privately owned does not mean the owners can do anything they like inside it, legally or morally speaking, or that we have to accept their actions as a fait accompli. If shop owners decide not to give service to blacks or Jews, damn right I will complain about it.
And we can complain about the private conduct of private organizations on their own property if we want to. Who died and made you the complaints police?
Notice I said "in practice". In the Soviet system all production was centrally planned in the form of a massive central budget that involved tens of thousands of commodities. There was a government department, Gosplan, that decided how much of every commodity should be produced and the price that the commodity should be sold for. Actual Russian consumers had no say in what and how much should be produced, leading to massive disparities in price (e.g. oil was cheap but there was a 2-year waiting list to buy a car).
I have actually read Marx and Engels, unlike many who claim to know what Communism is, so I guess your presumption is wrong. Communism involves the control of the means of productions by the proletariat, usually in the form of workers council, which, in practice, equates to centralized government control. Any questions?
Sorry, pal, but "conservative" is defined as anything that protects the status quo. On this basis, Libertarian philosophy, which idealizes economic rights at the cost of social and human rights, is one of the most conservative political viewpoints out there. It's sole function is to justify the growing inequality and social polarization between rich and poor.
Libertarians claim to support individual rights, yet they are obsessed with destroying the federal US government, an institution that has successfully safeguarded individual rights and democracy over the last 200 years. Libertarians proudly support corporations, many of which are massive collectivist organisations that treat individuals like dispensable components. Libertarians have a religious belief in the power of the "free market", which even economists realize fails in many circumstances.
Liberatiarians are really, at core, no different from communists. Communists want everything in the hands of one institution: the government. Libertarians want everything in the hands of another: the market. Both are profoundly anti-democratic.
even our citizens on welfare tend to be wealthier than many in smaller european countries!
Not necessarily. America may be wealthy, but it is still one of the most unequal countries in the world. The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the total wealth, whilst the bottom 40% only own 1%. Thanks to America's low minimum wage, a new class of working poor struggle to pay medical, housing and even food bills. I don't even want to think about the people who have to live on welfare.
I suppose some might be offended (I can think of other, more controversial examples...), but more than likely we'd give them the chance to fix it first.
You don't understand the huge political and cultural significance of Kashmir and Taiwan to their respective claimants. They are both the subject of ongoing conflicts which have cost thousands of lives, if you go back in history. It would be like a mapmaker labelling the South as "the Confederacy" in, say, the early 1900s.
And just look at America's overreaction to Subway having a little joke at your expense. So much for your supposed easy-going nature.
Also, I wonder what could trigger the Milky Way's black hole into an "active" state. Heck, it may already have happened, but it would take about 50,000 years for us to see it.
I'm not sure what you mean. Black holes are block holes - there's no such thing as an "active" or "passive" black hole, just a black hole. If one does exist at the center of our galaxy, it will be sucking things in.
He has to realise that with book-to-film adaptations, whether it be Harry Potter or Battle Royale, you can never satisfy the lunatic fringe. In fact, in the end, you can never win, all you can do is please as many people as you can.
But this assumes that the film moguls are actually trying to please people in the first place, rather than just exploiting well known brands to get more butts on seats.
My major grip with book-to-film adaptations is how much liberty the studios take with the plot. I'm no diehard. I fully understand if characters and scenes have to be deleted or altered, _as long as the basic plot is kept the same_. The problem is they rarely do have the disclipine to keep the integrity of the book, and make annoying, unnecessary changes to make the story fit boring Hollywood formulas.
Peter Jackson's LOTR was unusual in that the adaptation kept relatively (stress relatively) close to the book. And it was a massive success. I don't think this was a coincidence. If more adaptations kept true to the original vision of the writer then there would be more successes like LOTR. But this is rare.
For example, just look at how Hollywood screwed up the Illiad with Troy. It makes me sick - tacking on a happy ending to a classic story. I didn't even think Hollywood could stoop that low. It's like having Hamlet live. It's just unacceptable and it led to a boring, overemotional film.
The sooner that annoying ringtones are stamped out, the better. It's getting to the point where you can't even watch a movie or go to a lecture without being distracted by mobiles ringing constantly. What's the big appeal of having a loud, obnoxious musical ring tone, anyway? Is it just novelty or what?
Yes, because it's obviously impossible for the students to be later taught assembler and C as well as Java. We all know it's only possible to ever learn one language.
To be serious, at my Uni we were taught Java first, but that hasn't stopped them from giving us pretty hard-core courses in C and assembler. I think Java isn't perfect, but it's a good introductory language. Would you prefer students were taught C or assembler first? Many would drop out, I think.
It already exists. It's called Simple Directmedia Layer, or more commonly libSDL. It supports Mac, Linux and BSD and provides a rich library of multimedia, input and threading functions.
Geothermal activity on Mars? All the volcanoes are long dead. Mars cooled down long before Earth, because it's hot core is ten times smaller. I'm pretty sure most scientist think Mars is geologically "dead".
Cattle and poultry are given vital human antibiotics by agribusiness, just in order to allow animals to grow slightly faster. This means that bacteria have a far greater chance to grow resistant to the antibiotics. There have been many reported cases of people becoming infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria after they have eaten meat raised with antibiotics, (in particular, VRE).
Antibiotics are our only tools against the bacterial infections that killed untold millions before the 20th century. People forget that before the invention of antibiotics, a simple cut or scratch could lead to infection and death. And now we want to throw all that away, simply for cheaper meat?
Can you be sure that the cost savings of agricultural antibiotics are passed onto consumers, anyway? Let us not forget that agriculture in the US is massively subsidised by the government (albeit to a lesser extent than in EU or Japan). And I don't know about you, but looking at current epidemic of obesity, I would say that we get enough meat already.
Re:Why do Verisign have this level of access anywa
on
Verisign Plans DNS Changes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
History, I suppose.
The internet infrastructure should be managed and run by the community, and not driven by commerical proliferation of services offered to enhance a companies offerings.
That was what the recent UN conference was about I suppose. But everyone wanted to dismiss that as being useless.
The most viable known methods of generating and sustaining fusion both use and generate radioactive material.
The best fuel for igniting fusion is a tritium/deuterium mix because it fuses at a lower temperature. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen with 2 additional neutrons. It is "bred" from lithium, but it's still a very radioactive substance. Technically speaking, fusion reactions do use radioactive material as fuel. DD reactions are possible, but they require higher temperatures and are less likely to be viable.
Secondly, the DT reaction emits neutrons. It's a simple matter of math - you have a deuterium and tritium nucleus which collide and produce helium. There's a neutron left over, with high amount energy and no electric charge. It will "ping" right out of the magnetically confined plasma. Most such neutrons will be absorbed by the lithium shielding (creating more tritium) but some will fuse with other parts of the reactor, creating, you guessed it, radioactive waste.
Commercially viable fusion reactors, if they ever exist, will almost certainly produce radioactive byproducts. It will be a great improvement on fission power, as there will be less waste in total with a shorter half-life, but radioactive waste is radioactive waste. Like fission waste, fusion waste will be expensive to deal with and be around for many generations.
People used to talk out their differences and act reasonably. They didn't attack each other, except in extreme cases. As for your "gang" argument, I think you're confusing law with order. There will always be a crime problem, but that's got little to do with the current argument.
lawyers and insurance firms are a vast improvment over roving gangs with knives and clubs.
Are they?
It's reached the stage where people are suing local governments for not providing adequate signage when they jump head first into a pool. Where fat people are suing McDonalds for "making them fat". Where companies can make money by claiming to have created something that they obviously did not. Where anyone can patent, and monopolize, an obvious invention provided their willing to pay the fees.
Slashdot Mirror
30,000?
So, even if the guy was 100 when he got busted, he molested 1 kid a day, every day? Yeah, right.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not saying that high GI foods are more healthful than low GI foods. Evidently they are not. However, the question at hand is not which foods are nutritionally imperfect but which foods are causing the obesity epidemic.
Dietary fat is obviously the primary culprit, for the following reasons.
- Decreases satiety (contrary to popular myth). Don't believe me? Check out the "Satiety Index".
- Slows digestion, leading to overeating.
- Is directly released into the bloodstream and (particularly in the presence of insulin) absorbed by adipocytes.
- Has low thermogenic properties.
- Is "tasty" and psychologically addictive (yes, just like sugar).
Telling the average person to avoid high GI carbs is like telling a smoker to take more vitamins. Yes, it will make them slightly healthier but they should cut out the smoking first.
In a perfect world, people should prefer low GI foods. But a far more pressing problem is the overconsumption of dietary fat. Why are we distracting people with this GI sideshow when they are killing themselves with dietary fat?
Simply put, DNL is a metabolic pathway of last resort. It cannot be honestly stated that, with regards to body fat, that macronutrient ratio does not matter. Carbohydrates are difficult to metabolize as body fat and easily oxidized if overeaten. Dietary fat, on the other hand, is simply released into the bloodstream and absorbed by adipose tissue.
The high GI/low GI issue is a red herring in the obesity debate. It cannot be understated: DIETARY FAT MAKES PEOPLE FAT.
In Australia, they have the glycemic index on food labels. Our kids could benefit from that here.
No they don't. There is no legal requirement, and even most foods that _are_ low GI don't have the actual GI figure stated, just "Low GI".
Also, FAT MAKES PEOPLE FAT. It's that simple. Under normal conditions, carbohydrates are not converted to fatty acids, even if they are high GI. Study after study (check Google Scholar) has shown that de novo lipogenesis (DNL) only occurs if very excessive levels of carbohydrate are ingested (i.e. 600g+ per day).
Regardless, explain why Asian countries are healthier and leaner than Americans and Europeans even though they have a high calorie intake, don't exercise much more and the staple of their diet is a high-GI starch (white rice). It's because they eat less fat.
I'm so tired of this ridiculous hysteria about carbohydrates.
Please explain why Asian countries have the lowest rate of diabetes in the world but they eat proportionally much more carbohydrates than we do and much less fat and protein.
The simple fact is that fatty junk food and dairy food is to explain for the high rates of type 2 diabetes in the West, not the consumption of healthy foods like grains and vegetables.
Sorry, you're wrong about CDs. It's rare that someone can discern the difference between a well-encoded 192kbps MP3 and the original CD version. If you doubt me, I challenge you to take a blind hearing test. And many networks have lossless compressed audio files, such as FLAC.
The real reason people don't blow the whistle on music sharing is because CDs are overpriced due to the RIAA oligopoly.
it's good business. Otherwise Google news might be blocked from China altogether and Google would lose access to a growing market. Corporations have always got along with authoritarian regimes, ever since the Nazis used IBM punch cards to tally the death counts.
The real question is why people expect a different standard of behaviour from Google than from other companies. I mean, you guys don't really believe that "don't be evil" stuff, do you? Google is Just Another Company.
It's not that simple.
In economics, the market price is decided by the intersection of supply and demand curves. Typically, there is a downward-sloping demand curve (a higher price means less quantity is desired by buyers) and an upward-sloping supply curve (a higher price means more will be produced by manufacturers) which meet at a single point which determines the market price.
This approach works with traditional commodities produced by companies and bought by consumers. It doesn't work with people selling labor to companies. The simple but crucial fact is that labour does not have an upward-sloping supply curve. As wages increase, people will not necessarily supply more labor. As wages decrease people will not necessarily supply less (and finally zero) labor.
This is for 2 reasons. Firstly, there's only 24 hours in a day which provides an upper limit on how much labour can be supplied by any single individual. Secondly, most workers have nothing else to sell. If labor becomes too cheap, they cannot switch to selling something else, because labor is all they have. Traditionaly, supply curves imply that the seller will switch between different commodities to maximize profit if any one commodity is undervalued. And thirdly, people generally need some basic amount of money for themselves and their families to survive. If labour becomes cheap, they will just work more and more. All this means that supply curve of labor generally slopes downward.
What does that mean? Well, if both the demand and supply curves slope downwards, there will be multiple intersections between the supply and demand curves. This means that there are multiple acceptable market prices; no single equilibrium point is the correct price but they are all possible alternatives. And this is assuming that employers have a downward sloping demand curve, which is not necessarily true, either; high wages do not necessarily equal high unemployment.
In reality, the price of labor does not reflect the market value of labor (or, indeed, it's marginal product) but the relative social power of employers and employees. Market prices are not a fait accompli that we must accept; they are the result of a compromise betwen different sectors of society. Forcing employees to out-bid themselves is hardly "fair" or "efficient"; it just places yet more bargaining power in the hands of employers.
No, try again. The RIAA is a monopoly. The average consumer has little choice when they want to buy music. If they want to buy music from any of their favourite bands, it's all from RIAA-supporting record companies. There's no real competition, and mass consumer action is pretty much impossible.
And who do you think you are telling people to "stop whining"? Why don't you stop whining about other people whining?
Bullshit. Just because a public space is privately owned does not mean the owners can do anything they like inside it, legally or morally speaking, or that we have to accept their actions as a fait accompli. If shop owners decide not to give service to blacks or Jews, damn right I will complain about it.
And we can complain about the private conduct of private organizations on their own property if we want to. Who died and made you the complaints police?
Notice I said "in practice". In the Soviet system all production was centrally planned in the form of a massive central budget that involved tens of thousands of commodities. There was a government department, Gosplan, that decided how much of every commodity should be produced and the price that the commodity should be sold for. Actual Russian consumers had no say in what and how much should be produced, leading to massive disparities in price (e.g. oil was cheap but there was a 2-year waiting list to buy a car).
I have actually read Marx and Engels, unlike many who claim to know what Communism is, so I guess your presumption is wrong. Communism involves the control of the means of productions by the proletariat, usually in the form of workers council, which, in practice, equates to centralized government control. Any questions?
Sorry, pal, but "conservative" is defined as anything that protects the status quo. On this basis, Libertarian philosophy, which idealizes economic rights at the cost of social and human rights, is one of the most conservative political viewpoints out there. It's sole function is to justify the growing inequality and social polarization between rich and poor.
Libertarians claim to support individual rights, yet they are obsessed with destroying the federal US government, an institution that has successfully safeguarded individual rights and democracy over the last 200 years. Libertarians proudly support corporations, many of which are massive collectivist organisations that treat individuals like dispensable components. Libertarians have a religious belief in the power of the "free market", which even economists realize fails in many circumstances.
Liberatiarians are really, at core, no different from communists. Communists want everything in the hands of one institution: the government. Libertarians want everything in the hands of another: the market. Both are profoundly anti-democratic.
And just look at America's overreaction to Subway having a little joke at your expense. So much for your supposed easy-going nature.
My major grip with book-to-film adaptations is how much liberty the studios take with the plot. I'm no diehard. I fully understand if characters and scenes have to be deleted or altered, _as long as the basic plot is kept the same_. The problem is they rarely do have the disclipine to keep the integrity of the book, and make annoying, unnecessary changes to make the story fit boring Hollywood formulas.
Peter Jackson's LOTR was unusual in that the adaptation kept relatively (stress relatively) close to the book. And it was a massive success. I don't think this was a coincidence. If more adaptations kept true to the original vision of the writer then there would be more successes like LOTR. But this is rare.
For example, just look at how Hollywood screwed up the Illiad with Troy. It makes me sick - tacking on a happy ending to a classic story. I didn't even think Hollywood could stoop that low. It's like having Hamlet live. It's just unacceptable and it led to a boring, overemotional film.
The sooner that annoying ringtones are stamped out, the better. It's getting to the point where you can't even watch a movie or go to a lecture without being distracted by mobiles ringing constantly. What's the big appeal of having a loud, obnoxious musical ring tone, anyway? Is it just novelty or what?
Yes, because it's obviously impossible for the students to be later taught assembler and C as well as Java. We all know it's only possible to ever learn one language.
To be serious, at my Uni we were taught Java first, but that hasn't stopped them from giving us pretty hard-core courses in C and assembler. I think Java isn't perfect, but it's a good introductory language. Would you prefer students were taught C or assembler first? Many would drop out, I think.
It already exists. It's called Simple Directmedia Layer, or more commonly libSDL. It supports Mac, Linux and BSD and provides a rich library of multimedia, input and threading functions.
Geothermal activity on Mars? All the volcanoes are long dead. Mars cooled down long before Earth, because it's hot core is ten times smaller. I'm pretty sure most scientist think Mars is geologically "dead".
Cattle and poultry are given vital human antibiotics by agribusiness, just in order to allow animals to grow slightly faster. This means that bacteria have a far greater chance to grow resistant to the antibiotics. There have been many reported cases of people becoming infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria after they have eaten meat raised with antibiotics, (in particular, VRE).
Antibiotics are our only tools against the bacterial infections that killed untold millions before the 20th century. People forget that before the invention of antibiotics, a simple cut or scratch could lead to infection and death. And now we want to throw all that away, simply for cheaper meat?
Can you be sure that the cost savings of agricultural antibiotics are passed onto consumers, anyway? Let us not forget that agriculture in the US is massively subsidised by the government (albeit to a lesser extent than in EU or Japan). And I don't know about you, but looking at current epidemic of obesity, I would say that we get enough meat already.
History, I suppose.
The internet infrastructure should be managed and run by the community, and not driven by commerical proliferation of services offered to enhance a companies offerings.
That was what the recent UN conference was about I suppose. But everyone wanted to dismiss that as being useless.
People always get that quote wrong.
Captain: What happen?
Operator: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
I know it doesn't sound right, but that's how poorly translated it was.
The most viable known methods of generating and sustaining fusion both use and generate radioactive material.
The best fuel for igniting fusion is a tritium/deuterium mix because it fuses at a lower temperature. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen with 2 additional neutrons. It is "bred" from lithium, but it's still a very radioactive substance. Technically speaking, fusion reactions do use radioactive material as fuel. DD reactions are possible, but they require higher temperatures and are less likely to be viable.
Secondly, the DT reaction emits neutrons. It's a simple matter of math - you have a deuterium and tritium nucleus which collide and produce helium. There's a neutron left over, with high amount energy and no electric charge. It will "ping" right out of the magnetically confined plasma. Most such neutrons will be absorbed by the lithium shielding (creating more tritium) but some will fuse with other parts of the reactor, creating, you guessed it, radioactive waste.
Commercially viable fusion reactors, if they ever exist, will almost certainly produce radioactive byproducts. It will be a great improvement on fission power, as there will be less waste in total with a shorter half-life, but radioactive waste is radioactive waste. Like fission waste, fusion waste will be expensive to deal with and be around for many generations.
For more info, here's a link to the Wikipedia entry.
People used to talk out their differences and act reasonably. They didn't attack each other, except in extreme cases. As for your "gang" argument, I think you're confusing law with order. There will always be a crime problem, but that's got little to do with the current argument.
lawyers and insurance firms are a vast improvment over roving gangs with knives and clubs.
Are they?
It's reached the stage where people are suing local governments for not providing adequate signage when they jump head first into a pool. Where fat people are suing McDonalds for "making them fat". Where companies can make money by claiming to have created something that they obviously did not. Where anyone can patent, and monopolize, an obvious invention provided their willing to pay the fees.
It's hardly an "improvement".