Re: Re: oreos

May 19, 2003

It seems to have both long-term and short-term addictive properties. I'm not

a sugar addict in the sense that I *never* crave sugar. But if I eat some

ice cream because I'm bored, I often find myself unable to stop eating it.

That isn't to say I'm utterly helpless, but it takes an enormous amount of

willpower to do so, much like it does to not smoke a cigarette when one is in

nicotine withdrawals.

If the anti-candida diet I tried did anything for me, it got me out of the

habit of eating ice cream when I'm bored. If I never start, I have no

problem. Now my added sugar amounts to a tablespoon or two of raw honey a

week, for the most part.

Chris

In a message dated 5/19/03 6:49:23 PM Eastern Daylight Time,

Idol@... writes:

> I'm pretty sure there's actual clinical data demonstrating that sugar is

> addictive, though I don't have any on hand and I'm sure many people would

> ridicule the idea. At any rate, I know from my own personal experience

> that sugar is extremely addictive for me. It's basically like being an

> alcoholic -- once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, even if you stop being

> a drunk. (Though supposedly some former alcoholics can eventually drink in

>

> moderation, I'm definitely not one of them when it comes to sugar.)

" To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are

to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and

servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. " --Theodore

Roosevelt

May 19, 2003

I'm with you on this one, . I too was raised in a

hippie-absolutely-no-junkfood household and I spent a large portion of my

allowance on candy from the 7-11 every week from grades 5-12. I was obsessed.

I think sugar is totally addictive--why did any traditional culture switch over

to the " foods of modern commerce " if this weren't the case???

Re: Re: oreos

Mike-

I was raised without sugar, and from my personal experience and from

watching other people like me I can assure you that's just not true.

>Children raised

>without sugar generally don't like sugar.

-

May 19, 2003

-

I'm pretty sure there's actual clinical data demonstrating that sugar is

addictive, though I don't have any on hand and I'm sure many people would

ridicule the idea. At any rate, I know from my own personal experience

that sugar is extremely addictive for me. It's basically like being an

alcoholic -- once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, even if you stop being

a drunk. (Though supposedly some former alcoholics can eventually drink in

moderation, I'm definitely not one of them when it comes to sugar.)

>I too was raised in a hippie-absolutely-no-junkfood household and I spent

>a large portion of my allowance on candy from the 7-11 every week from

>grades 5-12. I was obsessed. I think sugar is totally addictive--why did

>any traditional culture switch over to the " foods of modern commerce " if

>this weren't the case???

-

May 23, 2003

In a message dated 5/22/2003 9:44:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time, bwp@...

writes:

> Hello All!

> I hadn't been following the " oreos " thread, but I just read through it,

> and I wanted to say a few things.

>

> First of all, a resounding thanks to everyone who put so much thought and

> effort into the posts, especially to and Heidi for their incredibly

> thorough and insightful deconstructions of DMM's ridiculous and

> knuckle-headed posts.

>

> I'd like to re-state one of Heidi's crucial points: get the corporate

> influence out of the schools! It is completely unethical unadvertising.

> This is a huge idea that deserves to be pursued by parents with great

> aggression at all possible levels, local, state, federal, etc. If I

> become a parent someday and it hasn't been done yet, I'd certainly

> participate in a coordinated campaign to produce and disseminate focused

> documents arguing against any promotion of junk food in schools. It

> couldn't be too difficult for a group of people to pool together their

> resources and make a concise presentation of the evidence for a link

> between these junk foods and negative trends in the physical,

> intellectual, and social development of children. If the evidence was

> gathered and clearly presented in several formats of varying levels of

> detail, etc, and a group of parents in scattered locations hammered their

> local school boards with this, I could imagine a lot of simultaneous

> local successes that would reinforce each other and build an incredible

> momentum. The appeal of an anti-sugar/flour/soda/hydrogenation campaign

> would cross the boundaries of the various nutritional ideologies (low-fat

> v high-fat, plant v animal, lipid hypothesis v NT, low-carb v high-carb);

> it's hard to imagine any parent who would have an argument for the value

> of these things, unless they somehow have a lot in stake at a major food

> corporation. There would be some who don't care, and some who like junk

> food too much to imagine giving it up or witholding it from their

> children, but this would not constitute a defense of the junk food, only a

> lack of support for an anti-junk food agenda.

>

> The whole line about " individual responsibility " and " critical thinking "

> is a joke. If no mainstream media provide information about the dangers

> of PHVO and large numbers of one's peer group consume PHVO-laden products

> without any evidence linking PHVO to any short-term health problems, then

> there could easily be many parents who take " individual responsibility " in

> many other matters and " think critically " about many other things, but

> lack any stimulus that would lead them to even consider PHVO a topic to

> think about at all, much less take a stance on when there are dozens of

> other worthwhile and pressing issues affecting what they believe to be

> the health and well-being of their children.

>

> Saying the " bottom line " is that corrupt corporations would go out of

> business if people stopped buying their products is a sad cop-out in this

> case, a clean, mono-dimensional, blinkered, smug theoretical gambit that

> is of trivial theoretical relevance and no practical relevance.

> It's like saying that there would never be wars if each individual

> soldier took individual responsibility and refused to participate (makes me

> think of

> the Donovan song...), ignoring the reasons why this would simply NEVER

> HAPPEN

> in practice, i.e. a certain subset of the human population will always

> simply

> like action, excitement, risk, killing, etc, and for any

> individual-soldier decision-context there will be bearers of values in the

> immediate

> socio-cultural context (parents, peers, government, etc) that will provide

> moral justification for the soldier's participation. Something that

> won't happen in practice is of no practical relevance. In the case of

> PHVO-laden snacks, I can't see any possible micro-level basis for a

> sufficient number of people suddenly taking " individual responsibility "

> about an issue they have virtually no knowledge of or exposure to. I

> don't think it's within the bounds of " individual responsibility " to spend

> countless hours scouring the internet and books for information about

> topics of no self-evident significance, as the incredibly tiny subset of

> the human population represented on this email group does. Any

> conceivable mechanism for positive change regarding the consumption of

> PHVO-laden snacks by children would come from the macro-level of

> informational politics and governmental regulation. Both of these systems

> could be successfully exploited by a lawsuit. The Oreos suit was a GREAT

> idea, and I hope further attempts are made along these lines.

>

> To strengthen this argument, I will use myself as an example. Without

> wanting to simply serve my ego, I would claim myself as a paragon of

> " individual responsibility " and " critical thinking " , yet I can cite

> examples where I acted with a sense of " individual responsibility " and

> " critical thought " while being insalubriously manipulated by the media and

> government. About a year-and-a-half ago, at the age of 25, I began to

> think about health and nutrition for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. Prior to

> this, I never thought about the nutritional aspects of what I ate; I never

> thought about trans fats; I never thought about how much sugar I

> ate; I never thought about where my food came from or how it was made.

> The following two concepts that now seem glaringly self-evident NEVER

> OCCURRED TO ME AT ALL:

> 1) There is a connection between health and happiness

> 2) There is a connection between food and health

> I repeat, these concepts DID NOT EXIST IN MY BRAIN. Now, I'd wager that

> there are a lot of people both under and over 25 who have also never had

> these thoughts materialize in their brains at any time in their lives.

> I'm at pains here to convey the severity of the contrast between a brain

> with these concepts and without these concepts, and the plausibility that

> there are a great many brains of both types in the population. It's the

> same severity of contrast between a brain with a certain religious belief

> and a brain with a specific rejection of that religious belief. There can

> be many brains of both types, and their operators can be equally

> accomplished practitioners of " individual responsibility " and " critical

> thought " . In my 25 years before gaining implementations of the above two

> important concepts, I had done graduate studies in mathematics; conducted

> original research challenging current theories in linguistics; evaluated,

> rejected, revised, or invented replacements for a large chunk of the

> global philosophical and aesthetic canon as a non-vocational pleasure;

> forgone television and any mainstream news media for about 10 years; and

> done other things that could be considered prototypical of " individual

> responsibility " and " critical thinking " . I've also never consumed an

> alcoholic beverage, smoked a cigarette, smoked marijuana, or tried any

> drug (except for the occasional cup of coffee or tea). I think these

> facts show that even a model practitioner of " individual responsibility "

> and " critical thought " may fail to apply these virtues to certain domains,

> such as food. Considering that many people under the age of 25 are

> parents with children in school, I can very easily imagine someone who

> exercises great " individual responsibility " and " critical thought " yet for

> whom PHVO (or sugar, or flour, or gluten, or soy formula, or healthy

> gut bacteria, or omega-6's, or AGE's, etc) is a non-issue. However, if

> the government (of which the legal system is one part) stepped in and gave

> them a reason to take it seriously, then I can also very easily imagine

> them making sensible decisions involving the consumption of PHVO by

> themselves and their children.

>

> Furthermore, even when a person has taken it upon themselves to address an

> issue in their life, " personal responsibility " and " critical thinking "

> doesn't necessarily translate into beneficial choices. Think about how

> many people have expended tremendous " personal responsibility " and

> " critical thinking " in choosing veganism, or, more to the point, in

> choosing margarine instead of butter. When I first started my (probably

> never-ending) odyssey into the domain of food and health a

> year-and-half-ago, I read a few mediocre books whose content was a direct

> product of corporate and government practices, and which led me straight

> into a low-fat, zero-cholesterol vegetarian diet centered around

> unfermented soy foods. I remember picking up a can of tuna and seeing the

> tiny but non-zero amount of cholesterol and thinking " this can't be

> an optimal food choice, so I shouldn't even consider it " . I also stewed

> over the miniscule amount of cholesterol in non-fat powdered milk (!!!).

> Neither the label nor the books I had read said anything about denatured

> amino acids, oxidized cholesterol, nutritional losses due to

> pasteurization and processing, the value of butterfat, the influence

> of the diet of the cow, etc, just " cholesterol " . I felt like a

> well-informed consumer guaranteeing my future health by reading the

> label, yet I was completely clueless and duped by the informational

> climate created by powerful corporations and the government. I was

> certainly exercising " personal responsibility " and " critical thinking " ,

> and what about all the other people who have had the same exact experience

> but didn't have the dumb fortune to stumble across the WAPF website during

> some obscure websearch a few months later? " personal responsibility " and

> " critical thinking " are not solutions to the unethical practices of powerful

> corporations. (It was Irene who made the brilliant points " I just happen to

> believe the NT stuff after being exposed to it " and " why should anyone

> believe me? "

> early in the thread. We're dealing with issues of informational politics,

> not " individual responsibility " or " critical thinking " .)

>

> A large part of " individual responsibility " is to the creation and

> maintenance of shared cultural practices and trusting certain matters to

> certain sectors of a community. This is the human norm, and I believe it

> was Heidi who pointed out the anomalous nature of an individual needing to

> invest huge amounts of their time and other resources to finding out about

> the basic healthfulness of foods widely accepted in their society. The

> derogatory term " sheeple " captures certain unfortunate human traits

> currently in mass abundance, but it also captures certain positive and

> essential human traits that allow for the existence of stable and

> harmonious societies. Many " critical thinkers " see more value in

> conforming to cultural norms than resisting them. I would have to list

> myself as of this persuasion, even if I find myself unsuited to putting

> this into practice as much as would seem desirable due to incorrigible

> eccentricities.

>

> The problems of PHVO and other unethical products of greedy and powerful

> corporations come from macro-level phenomena involving the rupture of

> community-based systems of food production and distribution, the

> production and distribution of information, the economic

> influence on government regulation, etc, and the solutions to these problems

> can be found at these levels as well, without invoking the micro-level of

> " individual responsibility " at all.

>

> Mike

>

> p.s. I just read the press release about the voluntary dismissal of the

> suit on bantransfats.com, and I couldn't help thinking the guy was

> paid-off in a BIG way by Nabisco for this dismissal and press release.

> One of the more suspicious passages:

> " There should be no more trans fat lawsuits, because everyone now knows

> about it, and if anyone files one they should consider me to be an

> opponent. The existence and danger of trans fats is now common knowledge

> as a result of the last three days of publicity and as far as I am

> concerned there is no longer any basis for suing anyone. "

> This is pretty sad, considering that there are plenty of people who still

> haven't heard about trans fats, and that many who were exposed to this

> publicity may have only caught a passing mention and quickly forgot about

> it as fast as the million other health scares they encounter in the news

> on a regular basis. If the legal action were sustained, then the depth

> and seriousness of the issue might have been exposed and it might have

> resulted in some changes more dramatic than just causing a few thousand

> people to reduce their trans fat intake.

>

May 23, 2003

Hello All!

I hadn't been following the " oreos " thread, but I just read through it,

and I wanted to say a few things.

First of all, a resounding thanks to everyone who put so much thought and

effort into the posts, especially to and Heidi for their incredibly

thorough and insightful deconstructions of DMM's ridiculous and

knuckle-headed posts.

I'd like to re-state one of Heidi's crucial points: get the corporate

influence out of the schools! It is completely unethical unadvertising.

This is a huge idea that deserves to be pursued by parents with great

aggression at all possible levels, local, state, federal, etc. If I

become a parent someday and it hasn't been done yet, I'd certainly

participate in a coordinated campaign to produce and disseminate focused

documents arguing against any promotion of junk food in schools. It

couldn't be too difficult for a group of people to pool together their

resources and make a concise presentation of the evidence for a link

between these junk foods and negative trends in the physical,

intellectual, and social development of children. If the evidence was

gathered and clearly presented in several formats of varying levels of

detail, etc, and a group of parents in scattered locations hammered their

local school boards with this, I could imagine a lot of simultaneous

local successes that would reinforce each other and build an incredible

momentum. The appeal of an anti-sugar/flour/soda/hydrogenation campaign

would cross the boundaries of the various nutritional ideologies (low-fat

v high-fat, plant v animal, lipid hypothesis v NT, low-carb v high-carb);

it's hard to imagine any parent who would have an argument for the value

of these things, unless they somehow have a lot in stake at a major food

corporation. There would be some who don't care, and some who like junk

food too much to imagine giving it up or witholding it from their

children, but this would not constitute a defense of the junk food, only a

lack of support for an anti-junk food agenda.

The whole line about " individual responsibility " and " critical thinking "

is a joke. If no mainstream media provide information about the dangers

of PHVO and large numbers of one's peer group consume PHVO-laden products

without any evidence linking PHVO to any short-term health problems, then

there could easily be many parents who take " individual responsibility " in

many other matters and " think critically " about many other things, but

lack any stimulus that would lead them to even consider PHVO a topic to

think about at all, much less take a stance on when there are dozens of

other worthwhile and pressing issues affecting what they believe to be

the health and well-being of their children.

Saying the " bottom line " is that corrupt corporations would go out of

business if people stopped buying their products is a sad cop-out in this

case, a clean, mono-dimensional, blinkered, smug theoretical gambit that

is of trivial theoretical relevance and no practical relevance.

It's like saying that there would never be wars if each individual

soldier took individual responsibility and refused to participate (makes me

think of

the Donovan song...), ignoring the reasons why this would simply NEVER HAPPEN

in practice, i.e. a certain subset of the human population will always simply

like action, excitement, risk, killing, etc, and for any

individual-soldier decision-context there will be bearers of values in the

immediate

socio-cultural context (parents, peers, government, etc) that will provide

moral justification for the soldier's participation. Something that

won't happen in practice is of no practical relevance. In the case of

PHVO-laden snacks, I can't see any possible micro-level basis for a

sufficient number of people suddenly taking " individual responsibility "

about an issue they have virtually no knowledge of or exposure to. I

don't think it's within the bounds of " individual responsibility " to spend

countless hours scouring the internet and books for information about

topics of no self-evident significance, as the incredibly tiny subset of

the human population represented on this email group does. Any

conceivable mechanism for positive change regarding the consumption of

PHVO-laden snacks by children would come from the macro-level of

informational politics and governmental regulation. Both of these systems

could be successfully exploited by a lawsuit. The Oreos suit was a GREAT

idea, and I hope further attempts are made along these lines.

To strengthen this argument, I will use myself as an example. Without

wanting to simply serve my ego, I would claim myself as a paragon of

" individual responsibility " and " critical thinking " , yet I can cite

examples where I acted with a sense of " individual responsibility " and

" critical thought " while being insalubriously manipulated by the media and

government. About a year-and-a-half ago, at the age of 25, I began to

think about health and nutrition for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. Prior to

this, I never thought about the nutritional aspects of what I ate; I never

thought about trans fats; I never thought about how much sugar I

ate; I never thought about where my food came from or how it was made.

The following two concepts that now seem glaringly self-evident NEVER

OCCURRED TO ME AT ALL:

1) There is a connection between health and happiness

2) There is a connection between food and health

I repeat, these concepts DID NOT EXIST IN MY BRAIN. Now, I'd wager that

there are a lot of people both under and over 25 who have also never had

these thoughts materialize in their brains at any time in their lives.

I'm at pains here to convey the severity of the contrast between a brain

with these concepts and without these concepts, and the plausibility that

there are a great many brains of both types in the population. It's the

same severity of contrast between a brain with a certain religious belief

and a brain with a specific rejection of that religious belief. There can

be many brains of both types, and their operators can be equally

accomplished practitioners of " individual responsibility " and " critical

thought " . In my 25 years before gaining implementations of the above two

important concepts, I had done graduate studies in mathematics; conducted

original research challenging current theories in linguistics; evaluated,

rejected, revised, or invented replacements for a large chunk of the

global philosophical and aesthetic canon as a non-vocational pleasure;

forgone television and any mainstream news media for about 10 years; and

done other things that could be considered prototypical of " individual

responsibility " and " critical thinking " . I've also never consumed an

alcoholic beverage, smoked a cigarette, smoked marijuana, or tried any

drug (except for the occasional cup of coffee or tea). I think these

facts show that even a model practitioner of " individual responsibility "

and " critical thought " may fail to apply these virtues to certain domains,

such as food. Considering that many people under the age of 25 are

parents with children in school, I can very easily imagine someone who

exercises great " individual responsibility " and " critical thought " yet for

whom PHVO (or sugar, or flour, or gluten, or soy formula, or healthy

gut bacteria, or omega-6's, or AGE's, etc) is a non-issue. However, if

the government (of which the legal system is one part) stepped in and gave

them a reason to take it seriously, then I can also very easily imagine

them making sensible decisions involving the consumption of PHVO by

themselves and their children.

Furthermore, even when a person has taken it upon themselves to address an

issue in their life, " personal responsibility " and " critical thinking "

doesn't necessarily translate into beneficial choices. Think about how

many people have expended tremendous " personal responsibility " and

" critical thinking " in choosing veganism, or, more to the point, in

choosing margarine instead of butter. When I first started my (probably

never-ending) odyssey into the domain of food and health a

year-and-half-ago, I read a few mediocre books whose content was a direct

product of corporate and government practices, and which led me straight

into a low-fat, zero-cholesterol vegetarian diet centered around

unfermented soy foods. I remember picking up a can of tuna and seeing the

tiny but non-zero amount of cholesterol and thinking " this can't be

an optimal food choice, so I shouldn't even consider it " . I also stewed

over the miniscule amount of cholesterol in non-fat powdered milk (!!!).

Neither the label nor the books I had read said anything about denatured

amino acids, oxidized cholesterol, nutritional losses due to

pasteurization and processing, the value of butterfat, the influence

of the diet of the cow, etc, just " cholesterol " . I felt like a

well-informed consumer guaranteeing my future health by reading the

label, yet I was completely clueless and duped by the informational

climate created by powerful corporations and the government. I was

certainly exercising " personal responsibility " and " critical thinking " ,

and what about all the other people who have had the same exact experience

but didn't have the dumb fortune to stumble across the WAPF website during

some obscure websearch a few months later? " personal responsibility " and

" critical thinking " are not solutions to the unethical practices of powerful

corporations. (It was Irene who made the brilliant points " I just happen to

believe the NT stuff after being exposed to it " and " why should anyone believe

me? "

early in the thread. We're dealing with issues of informational politics,

not " individual responsibility " or " critical thinking " .)

A large part of " individual responsibility " is to the creation and

maintenance of shared cultural practices and trusting certain matters to

certain sectors of a community. This is the human norm, and I believe it

was Heidi who pointed out the anomalous nature of an individual needing to

invest huge amounts of their time and other resources to finding out about

the basic healthfulness of foods widely accepted in their society. The

derogatory term " sheeple " captures certain unfortunate human traits

currently in mass abundance, but it also captures certain positive and

essential human traits that allow for the existence of stable and

harmonious societies. Many " critical thinkers " see more value in

conforming to cultural norms than resisting them. I would have to list

myself as of this persuasion, even if I find myself unsuited to putting

this into practice as much as would seem desirable due to incorrigible

eccentricities.

The problems of PHVO and other unethical products of greedy and powerful

corporations come from macro-level phenomena involving the rupture of

community-based systems of food production and distribution, the

production and distribution of information, the economic

influence on government regulation, etc, and the solutions to these problems

can be found at these levels as well, without invoking the micro-level of

" individual responsibility " at all.

Mike

p.s. I just read the press release about the voluntary dismissal of the

suit on bantransfats.com, and I couldn't help thinking the guy was

paid-off in a BIG way by Nabisco for this dismissal and press release.

One of the more suspicious passages:

" There should be no more trans fat lawsuits, because everyone now knows

about it, and if anyone files one they should consider me to be an

opponent. The existence and danger of trans fats is now common knowledge

as a result of the last three days of publicity and as far as I am

concerned there is no longer any basis for suing anyone. "

This is pretty sad, considering that there are plenty of people who still

haven't heard about trans fats, and that many who were exposed to this

publicity may have only caught a passing mention and quickly forgot about

it as fast as the million other health scares they encounter in the news

on a regular basis. If the legal action were sustained, then the depth

and seriousness of the issue might have been exposed and it might have

resulted in some changes more dramatic than just causing a few thousand

people to reduce their trans fat intake.

May 23, 2003

>The following two concepts that now seem glaringly self-evident NEVER

>OCCURRED TO ME AT ALL:

>1) There is a connection between health and happiness

>2) There is a connection between food and health

>I repeat, these concepts DID NOT EXIST IN MY BRAIN.

--> I really like that. Your revelation occured much earlier than mine! I

suffered for 20 years with ongoing anxiety/depression, which are now just

an unhappy memory. Spent much money on therapists. One thing the therapists

did teach me: to THINK.

" . I felt like a

well-informed consumer guaranteeing my future health by reading the

label, yet I was completely clueless and duped by the informational

climate created by powerful corporations and the government. I was

certainly exercising " personal responsibility " and " critical thinking " ,

and what about all the other people who have had the same exact experience

but didn't have the dumb fortune to stumble across the WAPF website during

some obscure websearch a few months later?

--> Well put, and a nice post. I really agree -- humans really are not

designed to " stand alone " and when you read history, a lot of very

intelligent and responsible people were quite willing to participate in

this or that atrocity deemed necessary at the time. I think " Snow Crash " by

Neal son puts this well.

-- Heidi

May 23, 2003

In a message dated 5/23/03 12:44:12 AM Eastern Daylight Time, bwp@...