This is what her concentration on healthy eating can lead to: she sees everything on her plate in the guise of a future turd.

Brilliant.

Q: How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a lightbulb ?

A: Two. One to screw it in and one to screw it up

Here’s a new one. How many chickens does it take to lay 500 Million contaminated eggs? Well, I did the math. It’s a bit of a WAG*

• According to several sources on the web, a hen will produce about 5 eggs each week.
• The eggs being recalled were produced between the end of May and early August. Let’s call it 75 days.
• An average chicken will produce 53.57 during this period.
• To find how many chickens you need to produce 500,000,000 eggs, divide 500,000,000 by 53.57.
• 9,333,333 chickens are required. That’s a lot of chickens.
• Chickens can be productive for up to 4 years. Then what? Cat food?

Just because we can, consider also

• A chicken produces between 20 and 30 pounds of waste each year.** Let’s say 25 pounds.
• Over the course of 75 days this is about 5.14 pounds.
• For 9.3 million birds, that’s 47,945,204 pounds of waste.

Cup of ground water anyone?

It makes a good case of local agriculture…or going vegan.

** 20 -30 pounds includes straw and other nesting material. I don’t know how this applies to industrial egg production.

Stream-able on Netflix.

More broadly, wouldn’t be nice to have a pill that erases all bad choices? Got a job you don’t like? Pop a pill.  Marriage sucks? There’s a pill for that.

Of course, addicts have a pill for everything: Our substance of choice. Problem is, you take the pill and the problem doesn’t go away. It just gets moved forward on the agenda.

Until now:

Fast food outlets should hand out free cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to their customers to “neutralize” the heart risks of eating fatty foods like burgers and fries, British scientists suggested on Thursday.

In a study published in the American Journal of Cardiology, scientists from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London calculated that the reduction in heart disease risk offered by a statin could offset the increase in risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

Okay. It’s not exactly a magic pill but doesn’t it send the message, “Eat whatever. We got your heart covered”? What’s a bigger problem, obesity or blood lipids?  Is there any question that obesity negatively impacts health and quality of life? Most would not disagree. Heart disease isn’t different. It impacts both health and quality of life. Of course heart disease would be mitigated to a large degree by maintaining a healthy weight. Not completely and not for everybody, but maintaining a normal weight is an effective heart disease preventative for most people.

Still, if some good came of  consuming statins together with foods high in fat, wouldn’t that be a service?  Well, there is no clear evidence that statins help prevent first heart attacks. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported:

The drugs clearly help patients who have already had a heart attack. But their use has skyrocketed in patients hoping to prevent a first heart attack. In those cases, the benefits are dubious.

Anyone eating high fat foods who has had a heart attack already is well, never mind. Better not go there.

My point is simply this. Medical science, the public, drug makers, all perhaps with different motives, would leap at the chance to enable a diet based on sugar, fat and salt if they just had to tools to do so.  Not because they like this diet but because it’s what exists. I cannot easily imagine how much money is being spent on drugs to prevent weight gain but I bet it’s in the tens of billions of dollars. The “eat anything in any amount” pill.

What if we spent the same amount on farmer’s markets and local farming? What if we invested it in school lunches? For the poor who often have the least access to fresh fruits and vegetable, what if we provided higher value, fresh fruits and vegetable only food stamps? Not canned. Not frozen (though canned and frozen are fine if that’s what’s available). Just fresh. Just fruits and vegetables. If somebody’s great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, it’s not eligible.  This would drive demand, and supply would grow to meet it. That’s how capitalism works. It could be done.

Next time, why the agri-industrial complex would never permit it (just kidding…not about never permitting it. About next time).

OA/AA person: Hey, can I tell you about my experience in Overeaters Anonymous?

AA person: Why are you in OA? You’re not fat.

OA/AA Person: Why are you in AA? You’re not drunk.

The end.

Doctors from Craiova hospital in southern Romania said Lacatus’ heart stopped. Hospital manager Florin Petrescu said doctors tried to resuscitate Lacatus for 30 minutes, a task made difficult because of her extreme obesity.

I feel awful for her family.

Nothing more to say here.

Out of habit, I looked at the ingredient. The second ingredient in this plain yogurt is organic sugar.

Here is a legible list from the store’s website:

Ingredients:

Cultured Pasteurized Grade A Organic Nonfat Milk, Organic Sugar, Organic Corn Starch, Organic Cream, Inulin (Dietary Fiber), Fish Oil (Anchovy, Sardine), Kosher Gelatin (Beef, Tilapia), Vitamin D3, Contains a Blend of Live and Active Cultures Including: L. Acidophilus, Bifidus, L. Casei, Probiotic Bifidobacterium Lactis.

Not just that, but in addition to the sugar, this yogurt is a carnivore’s delight. Fish oil and gelatin (which comes from the bones of animals I believe). Overall, not this flexitarian’s ideal choice for his morning protein. I could have chosen another brand of yogurt but instead I went with my old standby, Friendship cottage cheese. Now there is a label a man can understand.

Ingredient Statement
Cultured Pasteurized Grade A Skim Milk, Milk, Nonfat Milk, Salt,
Vitamin A Palmitate, Carbon Dioxide Added To Protect Freshness
And Enzyme.

Yummy.

Still, HP sometimes erects a sign and a compulsive overeater ignores it at his own peril. Such a thing happened today.

I was out walking. A quick dash through the woods to the supermarket for raisins, which I needed for the applesauce slowly cooking on the stove. In the strip mall with the market is a pizza place. Their sign was face down on the sidewalk. Maybe some kid knocked it over. Maybe the wind toppled it. I did the good deed of righting the sign and walking past. I did not look at the sign.

I completed my shopping and headed back through the parking lot toward the woods and home. I passed the sign and happened to glance at it.I did a double take and took this picture.

No, I don’t know.

God help us.

Okay, that’s an awful joke. I’ve been super busy in good ways and just not motivated to write much. I am fine. My program is strong. The play is a huge amount of fun and the run is over this weekend so I will have more time. Until then, I thought this might explain some of what I see in the rooms of Overeaters Anonymous, not that there’s anything wrong with that!

A new study shows that gay men really are leaner than straight men. And conversely, it also found that gay women tend to be heavier than their heterosexual counterparts.

Now you know.