Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
I've found that starting the day with a bowl of oatmeal and yoghurt seems to be very beneficial
I got interested pretty much the opposite way... via an exclusion diet to reduce the volume and intensity of my farting. The low FODMAP diet seems to be a close summary of what works for me, but I do regularly and deliberately push the edges both for a bit of variety in my diet and because many of the foods I particularly like are outside the restrictions. OTOH, it appears I can tolerate (possibly benefit) from small amounts of some "bad" foods.
Yoghurt and oatmeal, though, not so much. I found it... explosive. But the combination of lactose (makes my gut unhappy) and oats (make my gut unhappy) proved to... make my gut unhappy. And I generally dislike fermented products, which I'm inclined to say is my brain going "hmm, in the past I felt bad after eating things that smell like that".
So I watch the microbiome suggestions with interest, and try them with care. I fear that there's a critical threshold below which there's not enough gut bacteria that can deal with lactose usefully to allow me to deal with lactose at all. Soygurt, BTW, causes the same problem (so does soy in general, which is kinda sad coz I like tempeh and tofu)
Eating straight from the garden I definitely do :)
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
One thing I have noticed is that, because many interact with other forms of communication
And we regularly seem to get a couple of pages of "but you said on Yabber", "she started it with what she said on Fugwob" nonsense that possibly makes sense to the three people having this cross-media battle, but just pollutes the discussion for everyone else. And often in a derailing way. Fuxake people, pick a venue and have it out, then leave it there.
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Access: The Meltdown, in reply to Hilary Stace,
rather than wait all day at the bus stop.
For reasons that have never been clear to me (beyond the trivial "he's an arsehole") my birthfather used to love the "joke" where if someone got out of the car he'd drive off a little way, they'd run to catch up, he'd drive a little further, until eventually he let them get back in the car. Except me. I would just sit down and wait for him to back up. Or in one case, my mother drove back to get me once they got home. I didn't actually mind sitting on the side of the road, as I recall, by my mother was livid.
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Access: The Meltdown, in reply to Russell Brown,
I've been conditioned to expect failure, because it happens so frequently - and I think I find a certain comfort in powerlessness.
This. I find I actually quite like Jetstar and other "we'll have a go" airlines because I just turn up to the airport with my book and hope to get where I'm going eventually. Similar to how I quite liked hitchhiking when I was younger.
With more organised airlines I seem to always end up having to fight about something, usually an extra fee, and that's annoying. Coming back from Alice Springs the staff looked at our printed tickets with pre-paid bicycle luggage allowance and said "yes, that'll be $240 for two bikes". The woman behind the counter agreed that I'd paid for the bikes already, that I'd paid the correct amount (about $50), they were going to take our bikes, but only if I paid $240 to her right now. Fortunately my partner was there and I could just walk away. She paid, we flew home, she spent an hour or so on the phone getting that extra payment refunded.
With Tiger or JetStar I'd just expect that they would screw everything up and that I'd be lucky to get my bike on one of their planes at all, having it travel on the same day as me would be a miracle. Also, I'd have to pay for the actual weight at a per-kilo rate made up on the spot.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
far more of a loss of their freedom than any tax might ever be.
I think it's interesting that when we talk about restricting the ability of alcohol and tobacco dealers to push their wares there's some discomfort but broad acceptance that we do need both regulations and taxes. Even though the users enjoy the products and find the restrictions annoying. But when it's Coke{tm} rather than coke, some people get all "free to sell a legal product" about it. Yeah, I'm sure Coke{tm} has no interest in making their product more widely available or more addictive, and the health of their users is of paramount concern.
Speaking of perfectly lawful chemicals that make people fat, I'm expecting is that the new BPA substitutes will prove to be problematic and probably in the same way. So we're going to play the synthetic-cannibis whack-a-mole game with a whole different class of harmful synthetic chemicals. At least there's little chance to argue that people have to eat those one, although manufacturers are still crying "too hard to avoid".
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to David Hood,
the subeditor Yoda is.
I want that on a t shirt.
But "my", in homage to the meme I can't remember in detail, the "X is my Y" one.
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Turns out I have a libertarian available to expound on this issue. He's in the US so there's some bias. But a few key points:
If someone has enough money to buy food and be fat, they can just as well eat less of that food, have more money and probably still be healthier for being lighter.
it boils down to calories burned versus calories in.
Trying to attack all the issues at once takes power away from those folks
Sure it sucks that healthy food isn't available, but that's a different problem.
What I expect is that clear information be provided and the waters not muddied with targeted propaganda. "Food desert" is an issue of health, to be sure, but it is unrelated to the fact that he is obese because he consumes too many calories.
Specifically on the sugar tax (and to be clear, he is definitely being sarcastic here):
Sure, taking away ignorant people's freedoms to protect them is usually the correct answer. Especially if it makes the government money in the process.
And he spontaneously observed that him and me were indeed talking past each other on this issue.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
some toddler snacks are as much as 60% sugar.
I said above, thinking it was a bit over the top and unlikely to be necessary: " require labelling of the rest as per cigarette packets, just so there's no confusion. 20% of front of wrapper to consist of text UNHEALTHY SNACK ".
Who's with me?
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
are there ways to directly influence manufacturers? Or apply a tax in a way that doesn’t take money out of people’s pockets?
I think "all of the above". In theory we already compensate poor people for the GST, we have a whole heap of compensation and distortion within the ideal of a "simple and fair tax system", it's not as if adding one more is going to destroy the purity of the ideal. As a paid-up member of the green-left inner city elite{tm} I obviously prefer that we simply give people enough money that no-one lives in poverty except that tiny fraction who choose to (Christians, for example). I suspect you don't count that as "state acting directly". So:
Or are there environments where it’s acceptable for the state to act directly?
Yep. I think there's a case for a limit on sugar in specific things. We limit caffeine, the "on principle" argument has been lost. So restrict soft drinks to, say, the daily added sugar allowance for a 30kg child, per 300ml or container (not per "serving", that mythical magic number so beloved of food industry lawyers). Do the same for other specific problem foods, like breakfast cereal and "healthy snacks" (and, I think, require labelling of the rest as per cigarette packets, just so there's no confusion. "20% of front of wrapper to contain text "unhealthy snack" in red on white... make it 20% of area per serving if you really want to piss people off - some of those "snack bars" contain 2.8 servings. Ahem).
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Lilith __,
The dose makes the poison ... As it says in the article I’ve linked .
It sort of does, yes. It's buried well down in the article, though. I am quite sick of misleading headlines and ledes on science articles.
A sugar tax would be tricky, exactly because it's both common and necessary. It would be even more tricky to avoid nasty side-effects from trying to target the "bad" sugars. Honey, for example, can be used as a sweetener to excess, but it's commonly sold as almost pure sugar... should it be taxed like white sugar, or like fruit juice, or as a "natural food"? If the latter, what's to stop someone making a "honey juice" drink (you can buy "cane sugar" drinks in Oz and many pacific islands). It's also a great example of a natural, organic, food that can be bad for you. Tautologically, of course, in the "too much is bad" sense :)
The goal, as I understand it, of a sugar tax is to use pricing to nudge people away from bad food choices. In a country like NZ with a legal fine print level objection to poverty it would be necessary to make at least a token effort to offset that by either giving money to poor people, or giving money to the "good food" people. Much as I am not a fan of the complexities of the Australian GST, taking GST off fresh food would be one mechanism for that. Even though the benefits from doing that would be disproportionately enjoyed by those rich enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The simpler approach would just be to recycle the tax into benefits or low income tax cuts, but those are equally easily cut later (if, somehow, we elected a government inclined to do that).