Jane Brody is a liar

Updated.

I'll put up a more detailed debunking of NYT health shaman Jane Brody's article on the purported risks of eating red meat, probably on Sunday or Monday at GNXP.com, with lots more graphs over broader time periods. In the opening paragraph, the better to frighten everyone, she claims that "Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United States in the last 50 years." Since the article is about the dangers of red meat, the reader is left to infer that this doubling refers to the allegedly dangerous red meat.

Sure it has, you dingbat. That's all I see today -- people gorging themselves on steaks, ground beef, veal, and lamb. She cites no source at all for this claim -- I mean, she's only a journalist.

Turning to reality, here is a look at how consumption of red meat (beef) vs. white meat (chicken) has changed from 1985 to 2006, the most intense phase of the anti-fat hysteria:


Beef consumption dropped from 75 pounds per year per capita in 1985 to 63 pounds in 2006, a decline of 16% in only 20 years. This is actual consumption, not just supply. There are data for all red meat and all poultry, but the change in their values are almost entirely due to changes in the specific foods of beef and chicken (hardly anyone was eating lamb or veal in 1985 to begin with). I pieced the data together from several editions of the USDA's annual Agricultural Statistics, and so could you if you had a free afternoon.

There are also data on supply going back to 1909. These come from a single spreadsheet, one of many that are freely available at the USDA website. Here is the graph:


"In the last 50 years," there has been an increase and then a decrease, as opposed to what Brody implies as a steady increase when she refers to a "doubling." Even there, she is wrong. Starting 50 years ago, in 1959, the retail availability per capita per year of red meat was 134 pounds, vs. 117 pounds in 2007, a decline of 13%. But if we ignore the meaningless time period of "the last 50 years" and instead focus on the period of mainstream anti-fat hysteria, we find a 22% decline from the peak in 1971 of 150 pounds to 117 pounds in 2007.

In short, Jane Brody is a bald-faced liar who couldn't be bothered to spend a single afternoon to check her facts using these bewildering new technologies called the internet and Microsoft Excel. Even worse is that she lacks any common sense, which should have set off her bullshit detector after hearing from some other moron that red meat consumption has "more than doubled" ever since President Eisenhower's heart attacks scared everyone into abandoning red meat.

How lazy, gullible, and innumerate do you have to be to get a lifelong appointment as a health & nutrition gossip at the newspaper of record?

Update: it occurs to me that Brody is one of those people who don't understand rates. Like, maybe meat consumption is going up just because there are a lot more people in the US now than 50 years ago. Obviously the useful statistic is per capita consumption. Still, here is the total availability of red meat, not the per capita availability:


Even here she is wrong. To count the 2007 value as "double" the value of a past year, you have to go back to 1942, not 1959 -- off by 17 years. The increase in total availability from 1959 to 2007 is only 49% -- it increased by half, not by 2.

A commenter suggests that she was referring to all meat, not just red meat, and total rather than per capita consumption. If we use the USDA's data on all meat -- red meat plus chicken -- and use total rather than per capita values, then there was a doubling from 1962 to 2007. So, it's a lie by omission -- the headline and the content of the article are about the alleged dangers of red meat, not simply of meat. "Oh, did I forget to mention I was referring to total consumption of all meat? What would have ever made you think I was talking about how much red meat the average person eats?" She also lies by omission in not saying what the pattern for red meat, the relevant meat for her article, looks like -- a sharp decline.

Jane Brody got a B.S. in biochemistry from Cornell in 1962, before the anti-fat hysteria. Since then, her starving agricultural peasant diet has clearly robbed her of whatever reasoning faculties she had as a young girl. It sure hasn't helped her cholesterol levels -- see here, and a funnier response here.

How the skag stole Halloween

Back before parents began panicking about their children existing in an unsupervised state, Halloween was mainly a kids' holiday -- at least back to the 1940s when trick-or-treating had become pretty common in the US. My brothers and I went trick-or-treating every Halloween when we were kids, and so did every other pre-pubescent kid in the neighborhood. Furthermore, we started late, around 7:30 or 8, and stayed out awhile, getting back well after dark. With so much time, we traveled all over, to parts of the neighborhood we'd never normally visit.

When I dressed up to hand out candy in high school, mid-late-1990s, kids had basically stopped going out like that. Only a few would show up, none in big groups of friends -- just accompanied (all the way to the door) by their parents -- and they started very early, around 4 or 5pm, and were done before dark. And these were only the kids within a roughly 3 or 4-block radius. None of this has changed since.

Because our culture has become steadily more geared to adults, rather than children or adolescents, it was only a matter of time before adults decided to take Halloween for themselves, as a sort of Carnival. This was underfoot at least as early as 1994, when the Halloween episode of My So-Called Life featured the two Baby Boomer parents renting pirate and sexy princess costumes, which helps them re-invigorate their flaccid sex life. The streets are still filled with little kids, though, so this must have been a transition year.

To put some numbers on how much things have changed, I did a Google search for "halloween costumes" and went through the first page of results. Five sites had numbers available. Here is a table of the number of costumes available for boys, girls, men, and women, followed by a list of the adult : young ratio and the female : male ratio.

site	boy	girl	man	woman
buycostumes	767	719	1109	1556
halloweenexpress	358	330	597	648
halloweencostumes	252	196	329	433
costumes4less	974	813	1762	2577
incostume	121	145	120	315

Adult : Young

1.79
1.81
1.70
2.43
1.64

Female : Male
1.21
1.02
1.08
1.24
1.91

No matter which high-traffic site we look at, adult women are by far the target audience for Halloween costumes. Regardless of age, females are buying more than males -- "look at meee!" -- but age is a much stronger predictor, and not in the direction you'd think, i.e., exhibitionistic youth. You might argue that it's just a return to the masked ball tradition, but those men didn't look like queers, nor the women like skanks. No, this is just old people annoyingly and embarrassingly clinging to the spotlight for attention when they should bow out and go where they'll do well (politics, running a business, etc.).

It's yet another example of how young people today are in many ways more mature than the irresponsible adults. For instance, STDs among young people have plummeted in recent years, while among the middle-aged they have shot up. Of course, all we hear from the morons with megaphones is how kids these days don't want to grow up, and if only they behaved as responsibly as we do. Given how few privileges and how little opportunities for fun kids have today, and given how many entertainment and leisure outlets are geared toward adults, there has never been any time in history when young people have wanted so badly to become adults -- so they can have something to do.

I'd melt my eyeballs before I took a long look at the typical over-25 woman in a barely-there costume. Almost every woman that age is too old to have much worth showing off, especially in the legs (which is why they abandon short-shorts around 25). By then their skin's succumbed to too much sun exposure, and their collagen has been zapped to hell by all the glycation that their high-carb diet has brought about. And sorry, but no one with an increasingly masculine face can pretend to be Snow White.

But at least the high schoolers still get dressed up for Halloween. If only you could freeze them at 17, like this one from the teen dance club (who I mentioned here). Now that'll put lead in yer pencil.

Why did eggs partially survive the anti-fat witch hunt?

Let's turn from data on the availability of certain foods to actual consumption patterns, which I've pieced together from various years of the USDA's Agricultural Statistics. We all know that sometime in the late 1970s or early '80s, the anti-fat hysteria took off. Some foods show a steady decline from the mid-1980s up through 2006, and I'll show those not too surprising graphs later. But take a look at how egg consumption has changed since 1985 (the earliest year of the data):


At first, there's the predictable decline. Then in the early '90s, it creeps slowly upward, and shoots up from 1999 to 2004, with a modest decline afterward. This is not like other foods that were targeted as evil by the fat-haters. What's going on?

It's true that eggs may have enjoyed a rebirth (or whatever it's called when they were never born in the first place), due to the fashion for low-carb diets during this time period. Here is a graph of the NYT's coverage of the Atkins Diet and low-carb things:


Still, if that's the reason, why didn't any of the other low-carb / high-protein / high-fat foods also see a reversal of their declines? There's no upsurge during this time for whole milk, beef, or animal fats (butter, lard, etc.). The first two decline steadily, while the third stays pretty flat (at a low level) from 1985 to 2006. There's something funny about eggs.

My guess is that since eggs come from chickens, they are protected by the halo of saintliness that we've bestowed on chickens -- what with their negligible fat, once skinned, their white meat, and so on. Chicken consumption has steadily increased from 1985 onward. On the other hand, milk and common animal fats come from cows, and that's where all that fat and saturated fat comes from -- we all know that stuff is going to kill you. (Just like it regularly killed off the Masai of Kenya, whose traditional diet consisted of red meat, whole milk, and cow's blood.) Because we've made a demon of the cow -- ironic, considering how India-emulating a lot of the anti-fat fruitcakes are -- its many dairy by-products are tainted by association.

As a final sidenote, for those who are somewhat lactose intolerant like me, and certainly if you're OK with dairy, I suggest junking yoghurt and using heavy whipping cream instead. Even the full-fat, unsweetened Greek yoghurt contains 7 g of sugars per serving. That's not a lot, but it's enough for me to notice a small spike in my insulin levels -- judging by the fatigue I've gotten while trying yoghurt again. I used to wake up rarin' to go after just 6 or 7 hours of sleep, while on yoghurt I easily slept 9, 10, or at worst 12 hours.

Heavy whipping cream is so rich that you won't need to use very much to cover a small portion of berries. It has less than 0.5 g of sugars per tablespoon, yet it has 6 g of fat, 4 g of which is saturated. Yum yum. The lactose content is a bit above cheese and a bit below yoghurt, so if you can have yoghurt, you can surely substitute this for it. It's been almost 3 hours since I had some, and I've had no problems. Next on my to-do list: Devon cream or clotted cream. I'll have to use a low-carb bread / muffin / scone, and fruit instead of jam to keep the sugar count down, but the pictures I've seen of cream tea have made me drool.

Movie data: women decay faster than men in seeking thrills

Steve Sailer recently asked people who can count to analyze movie statistics. I've done some of this already -- see here for analyses showing that under-18 girls, compared to older women, are more likely to dig Alfred Hitchcock, to love good horror movies, and to hate stupid chick flicks.

Now, instead of comparing females of various ages, I'll compare males and females of the same age to figure out the male - female gap in tastes, and then compare this gap across young vs. old age groups. This will provide evidence for what many guys already suspect -- that, while men and women both get more boring as they age, women become dull at a much faster rate.

At age 15 or 20, a girl is just slightly less enthusiastic about going for a ride on the bumper cars than a guy. But at age 45 or 50, the woman will resolutely refuse, while the guy after some arm-twisting will say, "OK, what the heck!" Also, a 45 or 50 y.o. father will happily be athletic with his son -- tossing around the football, or whatever -- while the 45 to 50 y.o. mother will wimp out when her daughter wants a partner to practice cheerleading. (Except for those psycho "cheer moms.")

The data come from the IMDb top ranking horror movies, since appreciating these is a good sign of your willingness to have fun, even if it means getting scared. (Same with athletics -- you're having fun at the risk of getting winded, spraining something, etc.) I simply took the difference between the average male rating and average female rating, for both the under-18 and the 45+ age groups. I only used a movie if each age/sex group had at least 40 votes, as a rough guard against small sample sizes. This left 25 of the original 50 -- there are lots of movies that rank highly due to a small-yet-big-enough minority hyping them up. Quite a few obscure Japanese and Chinese ones, or US ones from the 30s or 40s, for example, and yet no Nightmare on Elm Street?

Anyway, here are the distributions of male-female gaps, first for the under-18 group and then for the 45+ group. For those who failed the data analysis questions on the SAT, positive values here mean males liked it more than females, while negative values mean females like it more. I've made the bins in sizes of 10, and each is labeled with the mid-point. So, the bar for an M-F gap of "5" includes any M-F gap from 0 to 9, "15" includes any gap from 10 to 19, etc. Update: to clarify, all of the original scores have been multiplied by 10 in order to get rid of decimal points, so that the new scale is 0 to 100. Thus, a difference of 5 here is a difference of 0.5 on the original 0 to 10 scale.


As you can see, among teenagers the most typical sex gap is actually one that favors females, and each degree of male-favoring gap is less and less likely. The median gap value is 0 -- i.e., no sex difference. Although they may not be as likely to manifest their drives violently, teenage girls are about as thrill-seeking as boys. This is no surprise to anyone who has spent time supervising them, especially those who they have tried to seduce. However, among 45+ women, the most likely gap is one that favors males, and the median M-F gap is 4.

You can see the distribution shift to the right as you go from under-18 to 45+, which suggests that the M-F gap widens (becomes more positive) at later ages. To show this, I've taken the difference in the age gaps for the older vs. the younger groups, one data-point for each movie. So, for The Exorcist, the M-F gap is 0 among teenagers and 5 among the middle-aged, so the change of 5 shows that the M-F gap widened at later ages. On the other hand, for Dawn of the Dead, the M-F gap is 22 among teenagers but only 10 among the middle-aged, so the change of -12 shows that the M-F gap actually narrowed at later ages. Here is the distribution of all of these age-related changes in the M-F gap:


Again, the most common change in the gap is positive, and the median is 4. Indeed, only 5 of the 25 movies showed a narrowing of the sex gap at later ages -- most showed women becoming even more of a wet blanket at later ages.

This supports what every guy suspects -- that women turn boring faster than men -- but it may not be something they thought was true. After all, the media portray middle age as a time when women are so eager to do fun and exciting things, while the guy is just laying around on the couch spoiling her attempt at fun. Of course, there's nothing fun about zooming off to Crate & Barrel to stare for three hours at napkins, or spending an evening in some overhyped ristorante in a vain attempt to look sophisticated and authentic.

Anything that actually gets the blood going -- athletics, amusement games or rides, fucking -- will only get a response of, "Ohhhh no, I don't have any time for that." When she was younger, she would've jumped up and shouted, "i mean, omigod, i thought you'd never ask!" So, now that the weather's getting better, there's no better time to find someone incredibly younger than you to get the most out of things. True -- both young and old females come with their share of inanity, but I sure know which type of silliness I'd rather be subjected to.

What kind of toxic environment?

All those new cases of Type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, ADD, etc. -- everyone knows that's due to our high-fat Western diet, right? If only we could bully the corporate overlords into providing low-fat alternatives to their consumer-wards, we'd see these afflictions disappear nearly overnight!

I plan on showing how things have changed in food availability and consumption, probably at GNXP.com, to get better exposure. But consider just one example -- whole milk vs. low-fat or skim milk. According to USDA data, here's how the availability of the two types have changed from 1910 to 2007:


The less fat that milk contains, the more it becomes made up of sugars (lactose), since the protein amount isn't different. And we all know that sugar is a health food, unlike that artery-clogging saturated fat found in whole milk. So, after heaving all that saturated fat overboard and feasting only on rejuvenating sugar, how have we been doing healthwise?

The faggy nineties: environmentalist propaganda directed at kids

Although I wish I could have been 15 to 24 during the 1980s to experience the coolness of roughly 1983 to 1987, I'm very glad that I wasn't -- being born in 1980, I was spared the generalized hysteria that peaked in 1991 - 1992. (It had begun around 1989, and lasted into 1994). The next generalized hysteria will happen sometime in the middle of the next decade -- there are roughly 22 - 23-year stretches between hysterias -- and by then, I'll be in my early-mid-30s, and my social radar won't give a shit about whatever foolishness the college sophomores and grad students will be up to.

It may seem obvious that below a certain age, you aren't affected by the epidemic of craziness, but I thought I'd provide four examples of attempted environmentalist brainwashing directed not at teenagers or 20-somethings, but at kids my age, during the height of the early '90s hysteria.

1) The well received cartoon Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which ran from 1990 to 1992. Read the Wikipedia entry -- it really was as propagandistic as it sounds. The heroes are from all races, while the villains are all white, although some are part-swine or part-rat. Seriously. The heroes are balanced for sex, while all but one of the villains is male -- and even the female was made to be the scientific genius, just to sneak in some feminist nutjobbery for good measure. And of course all the heroes are young (although under the guidance of a hippie elder), while the villains are mean old grown-ups.

No one gave a shit about recycling who watched the program -- it was just cool to see good guys fight bad guys. The just-maturing boys were more interested in banging Gaia than saving the planet.

2) The Jesse Spano character in the immensely popular sit-com Saved by the Bell. In the earlier episodes, filmed in the late 1980s, there wasn't so much emphasis on feminism, environmentalism, political correctness, etc. But during the 1990 and 1991 episodes, Jesse was written into a much more loud-mouthed activist shrew. Every other one-liner in every episode was about women's rights, the environment, bla bla bla. There was even an entire episode where the writers, haunted by the ghosts of muckrackers past, decided that oil would be found at the high school, everyone would be ecstatic except for environmentalist Jesse, but that in the end there would be an oil spill that killed the cute little animals in the school's pond -- complete with a visual of a duck covered in oil.

All I remember about this crap was, "Why doesn't Jesse shut up and move out of the way of Kelly Kapowski?" The show was syndicated well into my adolescence, and still is, and that never changed. By the time I was susceptible to freaking out about what ideas I should have to fit in, I knew that the looniness of the show wasn't au courant -- just as I wouldn't have suspected flaming racial tensions by watching All in the Family.

I recently bought the DVDs of the show, and it's fascinating how abruptly the focus shifted from the things teenagers really care about -- romantic rivalries, outfoxing the authority figures, etc. -- to all that preachy Generation X bullshit, within only two years (1989 vs. 1991).

3) The 1991 line of toys, not terribly successful, called The Trash Bag Bunch. It's more or less like Captain Planet -- there's a host of polluting villains who must be stopped by a holy army of trash-picker-uppers. Read the toy company's incredibly gay press release here.

Too bad none of the kids knew that back story -- again, to an 11 year-old boy, all that matters is that there are good guys and bad guys, and that each has a badass weapon to kill the others. This had zero impact on our development. In fact, what boys born in my cohort thought was the supreme pinnacle of radicalness was Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, which glorified filth and degradation -- something that will always appeal to boys more than cleaning up and being conscientious stewards of Mother Earth. Not surprisingly, Garbage Pail Kids ran from 1985 to 1988 in the U.S., before the hysteria hit.

4) The video game Zen: the Intergalactic Ninja released for the Nintendo and Game Boy in 1993. The plot is the same as Captain Planet again: you're a ninja who must stop the polluting villain Lord Contaminous.

I don't remember it being popular, and I never played it, but it was common enough for me to remember the title 16 years later. If you played it at all, it was probably something you rented from Blockbuster for the weekend and didn't touch again.

In sum, none of these propaganda campaigns managed to influence us at all, even though we were glued to the TV when Captain Planet and Saved by the Bell came on. Pre-pubescent kids just don't have to obsess over all the details of fitting in with their peers the way that adolescents do, so these efforts were doomed to fail. Now, if I were 15 or 16 when Saved by the Bell was on, I would've taken careful mental notes of what was verboten and been sure to avoid doing that in real life. Thankfully, I came of age after most of that insanity had died down.

Looking back, what really would have been a good way to get kids more into preserving the environment is playing into kids' love of outdoor play. Some of the things I most looked forward to then -- and which supply some of my fondest memories now -- are going to the beach, playing mini golf in a mock-highlands setting like the Magic Mountain courses in Ohio, climbing through the network of branches in a group of trees, playing hide-and-seek in garden mazes, and having enough field space and wooded area to fly kites, toss the football around, and play capture the flag. (Not to knock to fun of pavement-based games like four square and butt's up.)

The PR wizards and genius executives who hatched the above list of eco-friendly balderdash should have realized that kids don't care about one-upping each other in some dopey moralistic status competition -- I have no memories of my friends saying to me:

Oh, your Nerf Turbo isn't made from organic biodegradable foam? Oh no, nothing wrong with that... I guess I just thought that you didn't want to turn our community into a landfill before we finish fifth grade.

Kids like playing in primitive, unspoiled outdoor settings. Play to that, and they'll be much more likely as adults to oppose razing a mini golf course in order to put up a townhouse complex for yuppies and welfare addicts.

Older people cling more desperately to bad fashions

One function of clothes is to serve as markers for ethnic groups, broadly construed -- not just Mexicans vs. WASPs, but also emos vs. jocks. When the social world is most chaotic, there is no time to figure out who belongs to what group -- you have to be able to tell right away, both to find other members of your group, and to warn members of other groups that they shouldn't approach you.

Abercrombie & Fitch created the younger-oriented Hollister because they found out that college kids were turned off by all the logos at A&F, which were there to attract teenagers. Hollister then would emblazon logos all over their stuff and draw the teenage customers into their own store, leaving the college kids to breathe free at A&F with no more high schoolers hanging around.

The teenagers' greater hunger for logos follows from their greater obsession with easily identifying members of different groups. College kids' social world isn't quite as crazy, so they're not as hot about logos. And full adults, whose social lives have pretty much settled down, would think it tacky to wear a logo shirt. This also extends to broadcasting your musical tastes through clothing: middle and high school kids love t-shirts with the name or graphic of their favorite bands, while college kids try to dress less like groupies and more like the performers, and full adults don't bother at all to signal their musical tastes through clothing.

On the surface, then, adults would seem to dress better -- no logos, no annoying statements about what music you listen to, etc. But this all stems from adults not being as in touch with the rapid pace of fashion -- they are slower to recover after being infected by a passing fad. And this weaker strength of their social immune system can itself wreck the adult's appearance for a much longer time, compared to the resilient youngster.

Even though teenagers have long abandoned them, I'll bet you still see the occasional woman over 25 (and I've seen some over 55) who still wears low-rise jeans and a belly-baring top that she's constantly pulling down in the back. Search this blog for "thong" to see the sales data showing that since roughly 2004, that whole low-rise jeans, thong underwear, exposed mid-riff look has been dying or dead.

Maybe a picture will help. Here's one from an NYT article on teens cutting their shopping budgets during the recession (click to enlarge):


It's hard to tell how old the woman on the left is, since we can't see much of her body, but I'd guess she's at least in her late 20s, possibly in her 30s or even 50s. Her physical signals aren't really what made me notice (except for the veiny hands) -- it was the pink tracksuit pants with a graphic on the butt. No self-respecting teenager has worn those for at least four or five years -- a lifetime in adolescent years.

The girl next to her is obviously a lot younger, probably 14 or a skinny-for-her-age 15 year-old. Note the lack of overly processed hair, the glowing skin, and absence of veins. But the real giveaway, even if you couldn't see any of the rest of her, is the double-layer tops -- one long enough to entirely cover her lower back / upper ass area, and another one to contrast with that. If, like the woman to her left, she went to school in an outfit that was trying to keep the skanky look of 2004 alive, she'd get laughed at by everyone all day -- and her embarrassed friends would be the first to pillory her, just to distance themselves from the freak.

The younger girl's modest look may catch on among older women, and they might dress that way long after it's cool, but then returning to normal adult clothing wouldn't be so great of a change. It's when older women get infected by the more provocative clothing of young girls that things really turn to shit. Then they not only embarrass themselves like the mom from Mean Girls, while the trend is still hot, but they prolong their pitiableness by hanging on to it for years after it's done.

Once I'm elected dictator, I will mandate modest uniforms for all females over 25, for their own good. Only healthy young girls with social immune systems that are quick to recover will be allowed to horse around in the playpen of fashion.

Lots of food stuff

* Turtle Mountain has expanded its coconut milk product line to include -- milk! I've only tried the unsweetened kind, since the others have too much sugar for something you'll drink regularly. As expected, it tastes pretty bland, but not offensive, just like unsweetened soy milk, unsweetened almond milk, etc. But because it has more fat (5 g per serving, and all of it saturated), it has a richer feel. You can sprinkle a tiny bit of splenda in, and it'll be fine -- even better with a tablespoon and a half of unsweetened cocoa powder.

It's great for a quick energy boost -- it goes down much easier than my old habit of eating a tablespoon of solid coconut oil.

I think the recent explosion of coconut oil / milk products is going to be the wedge that allows people to eat lots of fat, especially saturated fat, without worrying about what a bunch of know-nothing experts tell them. I mean, it's from a coconut, and if you're against coconuts, you're just some kind of anti-fruit-and-vegetable, anti-tropical racist. It's silly that we can't get people to eat more fat by promoting butter, which has less saturated fat than coconut oil, but butter is from an animal and made by evil white people. Hey, whatever works now, works now.

The entire side of the milk carton explains why the fats in coconut milk are good -- actually, it refers to them as medium-chain fatty acids and the sterile acronym MCFAs, which don't sound as harmful as the plain word "fat." When have you ever seen a low-fat or non-fat product refer to specific fatty acids like a biochem textbook would, and list their benefits? The carton's design is eye-catching, so hopefully people will be intrigued enough to give it a look and be somewhat deprogrammed of their anti-fat prejudice.

Turtle Mountain has also released a bunch of coconut milk yoghurt flavors. I didn't bother trying any because they've got around 17 g of sugar per little container -- if I want that much sugar, I'll buy some of their ice cream instead.

* Speaking of yoghurt, despite being lactose-intolerant, I took a risk and bought some cow's milk yoghurt, since I read that it isn't so bad. I went with the super-fat Greek yoghurt by Fage, the only type that had any fat at all. (At least frosting has sugar and fat -- non-fat yoghurt is worse than frosting.) I had two big bowls in one day, both yesterday and today, and I've had zero problems. Thank fucking god.

And just as I noticed when I started eating cheese again, I had a zipper-bursting boner for hours last night, and my libido's been on turbo today as well, like I'm right back in high school. This suggests that there's something in milk that's responsible, not just in cheese. High dairy consumption is probably responsible for French and Swedish guys having the biggest dicks in Europe, and the English having nearly the smallest, as well as for East Asians having notoriously small ones. They need to eat more dead animals and animal products instead of all those damned vegetables and grains, and they might one day produce a porn star.

* The Freshman 15 has become an area of academic research -- search PubMed for "freshman 15." First, it shouldn't surprise me, but it's astonishing how socially retarded researchers are -- they actually took the phrase literally and decided to test whether or not the "gain 15 pounds" idea was truth or fiction.

Goddamit, the word "fifteen" was chosen because we don't want numbers that don't end in 0 or 5, and for prosody and plausibility. "Freshman 5" doesn't sound plausible to us -- the very perceptible changes seem greater to us. Plus it sounds like a superhero group, or a bad boy band. And "freshman 50" is too implausible. 25, 35, etc., don't roll off the tongue like 15 does. What is it about geeks and interpreting everything literally? "Freshman 15" simply means "gaining a noticeable amount of weight or body fat during your freshman year."

And all of these studies do show that, if not 15 pounds. It's probably between 5 to 10 pounds, but that's still about what we've gained on average during the obesity epidemic -- and a decent change in the mean will have even more pronounced effects in the tails, where we're looking at the real tubbos. Moreover, some of the abstracts show that less than half of the students weighed at the beginning followed through at the end of the year -- I wonder what quality these drop-outs may have had. Obviously the ones who bloated out during the year are more embarrassed to be weighed again, so in such cases, the weight gain is an underestimate.

Also, when the studies' abstracts compare college students' weight gain to weight gain in other adult groups, they always say it's much greater. So, just as everyone suspected, there's something particular to college life that makes you huge. Therefore, the freshman 15 is not a myth -- it was totally obvious.

Just browsing through the abstracts, none of the studies bothered to measure whether macronutrient intake affected weight gain -- for example, did higher carb consumption predict greater body fat? However, here's a nice anecdote from an NYT article on the freshman 15:

And a few students do gain more than 15 pounds. Zoe Hall, Ms. Oz's best friend from childhood, gained 20 pounds during her first year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville because her class schedule conflicted with the opening hours of the university dining hall and she subsisted mostly on candy, frosted animal crackers, bagels and also late-night pizza delivered to her dorm room, she said.

You get one guess about what the boldfaced foods have in common, foods that caused a girl in the bloom of youth to gain 20 pounds in 9 months.

Here's another good NYT article on how much cereal college students eat. Most of their milk will be skim, and thus have lots of sugar and hardly any fat. And the cereal itself is of course empty carbs, both the grain base and the sugar coating. If you ever doubted that high carb consumption causes cellular starvation and a craving for more, look at the accompanying picture:


That's not counting the gallons of fruit juice, soda, bagels, bread, pasta, fries, the cornucopia of deserts, etc. You don't see college students tearing into a marbled steak, then salmon or tuna drowned in butter, followed by a plate of eggs with melted cheese on top, all washed down with whole milk or water. Obviously fat has nothing to do with the freshman 15 because they're hardly getting any of it, aside from the odd bowl of ice cream.

If you think back to before you left for college, you probably wanted as much sugar and carbs as any other teenager, but you at least had one meal prepared by your parents that had a decent amount of fat and protein. The junk you ate for breakfast, the froo-froo school lunches, and whatever you snacked on after school until bedtime was bad, but there was a respite during dinner: some kind of dead animal, a butter dish, few fruits, lots of vegetables, and a bit of starch (say, one dinner roll). Milk, water, or unsweetened iced tea to drink, not soda -- and definitely no alcohol, and hence no beer belly.

As girlfriend material, college girls are a huge let-down compared to teenagers in many ways, and this is yet another. However poor their diet may be in high school, it just goes to shit in college, and their appearance and behavior show it right away. Their face looks puffy, their eyes look smaller, they get thunder thighs, not to mention getting moodier and bitchier. It only gets worse when they go off meal plan -- then they definitely aren't getting any protein or fat, since preparing meat or fish is something they aren't interested in. They're basically living off of microwave pizza, starchy soups, chips, ice cream, candy or cookies, and soda. If they're well-to-do, they may be buying the organic version of this trailer trash food, but still.

This protective effect of living with your parents, as a youngster, shows up in binge drinking too: commuter students who live at home are less likely to drink, and drink less when they do, compared to students who live in dorms, even after adjusting for just about any demographic variable. Parents don't need to be breathing down their kid's neck -- the kid just senses that home isn't the place where they should try all sorts of risky behavior. These barriers of course make doing it so much more exciting -- having to orchestrate a party when someone's parents are gone, or stealing away in your car to make out, rather than hosting danger-free dorm parties or unceremoniously leaving a rubber band on your doorknob to tell your roommate that he's being sexiled tonight.

Getting more fun out of getting into less trouble -- another reason to make your kids live at home when they're in college.

Women aren't interested in things

The 2008 version of the General Social Survey is available, and one of the new series of questions focuses on what news topics people are interested in. Women follow the news less than men, but what about for particular topics?

No time to make lots of graphs today, but you can see for yourself. Go here, open the tab near the bottom called "2008 Variables," then the one within that one called "Interest in News Issues." In the box in the main area that says "column," type sex. Then click on each of the news issues, and click the box in the upper left that says "Copy to: Row." Hit enter.

Men are much more interested in international issues (that's why there are few female politicians), farm issues (although more feminizing than hunting, agriculture still requires a guy to run things), new scientific discoveries (Larry Summers was right), economic issues (the only glass ceiling is a woman's own lack of interest), technologies (Larry Summers again), space exploration (Larry Summers for the third time), and military policy (someone has to think of something more workable than "give peace a chance").

Men and women are equally interested in environmental issues -- grow a pair, guys. The only issues that women are much more interested in are medical discoveries and local school issues -- that is, in healing and nurturing.

The reason that the feminist whackjobs of the Women in Science and Engineering programs (or Women in Law, or Whatever) will never bring about parity is that women simply aren't as interested in their world. They'd rather become a nurse or schoolteacher than invent stuff, decide whether or not to bomb someone, or negotiate with foreign leaders.

The activists come to realize this very quickly, and devote most of their time, resources, and effort into badgering the poor undergrad girls in the student union. "Don't you want to show the boys that you can do math too? Oh, you're a nursing major... well, I mean, you don't want your potential future husband to think you're just a silly airhead, do you?" Once they're free of the peer-pressure of the activists, most such women leave to do what they truly want to do. Of course, feminists refer to this as female science majors or grad students "leaking out of the pipeline" -- when it is more like a P.O.W. breaking loose from their internment camp.