The Carb-Sane Asylum

image link Percentages are Often Meaningless    Summary: You can reduce the percentage of one item by increasing the total amount of all items.  This can give the illusion that you've reduced the amount of the item in question, but is just that ... an illusion. That previous post on this was inspired by yet another round of Fun with Numbers, this time courtesy of David Ludwig and Dariush Mozaffarian in JAMA ... and now the NYT    (I'm beginning to see a pattern here.  NYT is the publicity outlet for all JAMA editorial nonsense, much like Time is the outlet for BMJ's Open Season on Science Heart journal.)

I posted something like this on my Facebook page a while back.  Rather than find it, I've decided to recreate it here. Let's say that I take home $4000 per month.  Let's say my "basic" living expenses for home and car including all operating costs, insurances and whatnot are $2500 leaving me $1500 to live on.  Of that I spend $600 on food and clothing, $600 on entertainment and save $300.    My entertainment budget is currently 15% of my take home income. At my annual visit to the financial planner tax person, I'm told that I really ought to cut back on my entertainment expenses so that I can put away more for retirement.  A somewhat dramatic one-third cut from current entertainment expenses is suggested.  This would amount to 5% of my current income and bring entertainment down to 10% of the total.    Then I had a brilliant idea, I would buy a new car and move to a more expensive home in a more expensive neighborhood so that my...

Nina Teicholz is fond of portraying the modern American diet as "near-vegetarian", and that we need to "return" to our meat eating ways of a century ago.  But even her most exaggerated statistic lists meat intake at 200 lbs per year.   [200 lbs/year]  * [16 ounces/lb] ÷ [365 days/year] =  8.77 ounces/day  or 0.55 pounds or 250 grams of meat per day Now to pick a fatty meat ... Prime Rib This works out to just under 800 fat calories and just over 200 protein calories, roughly 75% fat, 25% protein.  Now you have around 1000 of your daily calories.  What else was on the plate to provide the additional 1000 to 1500 or 2000 if the men from the Minnesota Starvation Study intakes are used for reference?

I have long been troubled by the "they ate nose to tail", and all of the fatty organs.  By FAR, the most common organ mentioned is the liver.  Ahem.  The liver is not supposed to be fatty, and I don't think these people are really so hypocritical as to eat foie gras and claim that's what they mean.  Well .... As the fauxtrage over the not-yet-released 2015 Dietary Guidelines rages on over on Marion Nestle's blog , George carries the fatty offal flag in to blame American health issues on our Orwellian fear of the fat in organ meats ... at the hands of the DGAC.  Yeah, if by that he means we've been avoiding tongue, tripe and brains (classic American fare!), I guess he has a point.  Actually, as you'll see, many of these meet the DGAC's definition of "lean" (< 10 grams per 100 grams weight), but are not "low fat" by percentage.    So just a little sampling of some specialty/organ meats.  You can click, resize in browser, ...

The announcement for updating the labeling of nutritional info came out a little while ago, and there was some discussion in social media, etc.  But I thought I'd make a few comments here on the blog.   So here are the current and proposed labels: I think the new labeling would be a definite improvement, but I think we can do better.