Poisonous Fruit

Well now way back in the Bible

Temptations always come along

There's always somebody tempting

Somebody into doing something they know is wrong

They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple

But man I ain't going for that 

                    Bruce Springsteen 1984

 

Fruit is Sugar Corn Pops.  When I was a kid watching the Saturday morning cartoons, it seemed like every commercial for the sweet cereals would say they were “fortified with 10 essential vitamins".  I was only about 6 or 7, but even I knew that was a crock.  I knew that stuff was bad for you; that's why my mom told me to eat my vegetables and not to "eat your Sugar Corn Pops and Peanut Butter Captain Crunch”.

 

         The difference is fruit is horrible for you, but no one seems to have figured this out.  All the focus has been on the good things that fruit has in it, like antioxidants and vitamins.  While this is true, that is far outweighed by the fact that fruit is sky high in sugars and carbohydrates.  Basically, you’re going to get fat loading up on fruit, and then you’ll have far greater problems than whether you get enough antioxidants in your system.

         The numbers aren't pretty.  A banana will cost you about 30 carbs, a pear 25, an apple 20.  The carbs are almost all sugar.  If juice is your thing, it raises your blood sugar even faster than the same solid food does (please don't ask me the science on why).  I can't think of a faster way to get sugar in your blood stream, unless you want to go Breaking Bad and inject it.

         Somehow fruit and vegetables have gotten lumped in together in the national consciousness, as if both are equally healthy.  If I could point to one major factor as to why we have an obesity and diabetes epidemic in this country, it would be this.  People are starting out their mornings downing almost 100 carbs, feeling physically great for about 30 minutes because they're on a sugar high, and feeling psychologically great because they think they just ate a healthy breakfast.  Let's keep this simple: vegetables are great for you and most of them are low-carb, while fruit is the opposite. 

         Someone told me that the Weight Watchers meal plan calls for an unlimited amount of fruit.  If this is true, you're going to have a lot of fat dieters.  Let's keep this simple part two: all sugars spike your blood sugar and are bad for you, whether fruit sugar, cane sugar, etc.  Until people start understanding the difference between fruit and vegetables, our health problems in this country will continue to get worse.

         Have a good night everyone.

         JR

The Only Diet That Works

In touch with the ground
I'm on the hunt I'm after you
Smell like I sound I'm lost in a crowd.
And I'm hungry like the wolf.
Straddle the line in discord and rhyme
I'm on the hunt I'm after you.
Mouth is alive with juices like wine
And I'm hungry like the wolf

           Duran Duran 1982

I can't seem to get away from thoughts of food. I grew up in a household where my parents ate healthy and exercised consistently. When I got older I dialed that up a few obsessive levels, working out like a fiend and maybe eating a little too clean. And then I married a professional dietitian. What can you do?

Between the lifestyle and reading a ton on the subject the last 30 years, I've come to a few conclusions. The most important one is that for weight loss, nothing works except low carbs. The good news is that makes it simple, because you can ignore all the other indicators, like fat, calories, etc. The bad news is it’s not an easy diet; I like eating dead animal as much as the next guy, but what I really want is pizza, ice cream, and as much kid’s birthday cake as I can get my hands on.

          The science is pretty simple. When you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar spikes, and insulin is produced to lower the sugar levels. The insulin converts into fat in your body. The evidence is overwhelming that as our carbohydrate/sugar level has increased, obesity has skyrocketed.  Diabetes was virtually nonexistent 100 years ago, prior to the prevalence of processed carb-loaded foods and the increase in sugar consumption.  Even mainstream dieticians, with whom I have very little nice things to say about, are starting to push a slightly less carb dominated diet.

          When the Atkins craze caught fire in the 90s, I thought this was the one diet that would stick because, well, it works. It didn't and I think there are three main reasons for this. 1^st, as I said before, carbs, especially the sweet ones, just taste better than protein. 2^nd, the diet is totally counterintuitive to most people. It logically make sense that if you lower your intake of fat you will be less fat, and if you eat foods high in fat you will get fat, right? Except for the fact that it's not true.

Lastly, people misunderstood the diet. They just assumed that it required a permanent state of not eating any carbs, when it really called for a very short period of no carbs and a permanent state of reduced carbs. Not eating any carbohydratess for long stretches is impossible. If you want to see something funny, watch a bodybuilder right before a contest, after they've done three days of what they call “carb depleting”. They're basically incoherent. Please don't ask me how I know this.

          Why does reducing the consumption of carbs drop the pounds? Who knows? The most logical answer that I've heard is that early humans were hunter/gatherers, spending their time eating protein-rich animals and fish that they killed. Evolution took care of the rest, and over time this diet became the most efficient one. Whatever the reason, it works.

          Have a good night everyone. I'm gonna go grab a steak.

           JR

 

 

 

 

The College Tuition Disease

I been doing my homework now for a long time
And everything that I look for I know I will one day find
I'm a fool so I'm told I get left in the cold
Cause I will search the world for that fool’s gold 

                    Graham Parker 1976

$42,000 a year! That's what a friend recently told me it cost to go to Indiana University, my alma mater.  I had a great time there, and it's a pretty good school, but if you think your kid will be able to pay back $168,000 before they turn 35 with an IU degree, you're dealing thin.  The same could be said of just about any school in the country.

Skyrocketing college tuition has become a hot topic, with Time magazine recently devoting their front cover to it.  Many private schools have blown past $20,000 and $30,000, and are now in the 40s and 50s.  The average debt a student has after school is above $25,000, and for plenty of them it’s over six figures. The strange thing is that most articles that discuss the price don't even talk about the reason that it's going up, just the hardship.  It's as if somebody had a killer disease and all the doctors were only concerned with treating the symptoms, without figuring out what caused the problem in the first place.

Hopefully the following example will explain why prices are rising and how to quickly cure the disease:

Let's say you start a business that makes widgets.  You decide to charge $10 for each one. Unfortunately, you find out that the huge majority of your customers can't afford this price.  You quickly realize that you're going out of business unless you lower the price.  Just as you're about to do so, a man named Fast Freddie comes to town. 

Freddie's a great guy; all he wants to do is help people.  He starts loaning all your customers money so that they can afford the $10 widget.  You're thrilled, as now you don’t have to lower prices.  As time goes on you decide to test how nice a guy Freddie really is. You raise your prices to $15.  Obviously no one can afford it.  But Freddie steps in and lends even more money to your customers, so they can cover the $15.  You, being the sharp businessman that you are, keep raising prices because you, like everyone else, like money.  Before you know it, the widget that should be about $5 costs $50.  There's no end in sight.  As long as Fast Freddie keeps lending your customers virtually unlimited amounts of money, you're going to keep raising prices.

          You get this, right? Over 90% of college loans are now paid for by Fast Freddie, oh I mean the government. This has completely and totally distorted the free market, to the point that we have runaway inflation in college tuition. 

          The solution is simple. Get the government out of the moneylending business for college, and watch costs plummet.  But this is not going to happen. Why? Politics, like virtually everything else it seems nowadays.  No politician can get up and tell the truth.  He would immediately be criticized as a coldhearted, out of touch snob who is especially biased against the poor and middle class, who can least afford the sky high cost of college tuition. The sad thing? The current system hurts the poor more than anyone.  The rich guy or gal can either pay for tuition or have to borrow very little, so their kid doesn’t graduate with an oppressive debt load.  It's the poor and middle class that are now getting out of school as indentured servants.

          Go ask your father or grandfather what college cost before the government got involved. 

          Have a good night everyone.

 JR

Moral Dilemma

            This indecisions bugging me

If you don’t want me, set me free

Exactly whom I’m supposed to be

Don’t you know which clothes even fit me?

         The Clash 1981

 

Heading into the upcoming presidential election, I have a moral dilemma. This is one that I'm guessing a lot of people have before elections. Do you vote for the candidate that is better for you personally, or better for the country? In a perfect world the two are the same, but we don't live in a perfect world.

This time, it's about money. With Obama as president, it is ridiculously easy to make money on your investments. (I won't bore you with the details, but regular readers know what I'm talking about). This does not mean that you can’t make money with Romney in office, it's just that you have to do a little more homework. Actually a lot more. The problem is, overall Obama's economic policies are disastrous for the country. We're tipping back into recession (I actually think we're already there); if you think the last 4 years were bad, my friend, you ain't seen nothing yet.

So what would you do if you were in this type of situation? I first think what I would do if my profession were at stake. I make money representing injured workers. Let's say God woke me up one night and said that within 24 hours, if I voted yes, there would be no more workplace accidents in America. The catch is, of course, that within 24 hours I would be out of business. To me, this is an easy one. I've seen firsthand the devastation that physical pain can have on people and their families. I would vote to end the accidents in a heartbeat; I don't think I or anyone I know could live with themselves if they chose the opposite. Similarly, I would assume that all oncologists would quickly vote to immediately end all cancer if they could.

But yet, my gut tells me that when it comes to voting for the country’s financial well-being versus mine, I would choose mine. I'm not exactly sure why; I struggle to find the difference between this and the workplace example. Maybe I can hide behind the fact that I'm just one vote that realistically won't make any difference. Maybe if I had the only vote it would be different. Or maybe it's the fact that while I love America, I love me and my family more.

Whatever it is, I started thinking about it, and at least for me it's a tough decision. I would guess that this type of choice has to regularly be made by a lot of people in the workplace. Although in this particular example it won't make a bit of difference as to who is ultimately elected, I think it goes to the core of a person’s heart; are you someone whose interests lie primarily with yourself and those close to you, or with the greater good?

Have a good night everyone.

JR

 

Real Olympic Sports

              Take off your uniform
              They see what they want to see
          You should have never been born
          You’d better stay with me

          John Hiatt 1979

I am proud to say that I took my Olympic watching this year to an entirely new level of obsessiveness. First midnight, then 1:00 A.M., and by the end I was going to bed at about the same time my wife wakes up in the morning. Watching the Olympics on TV should itself be an Olympic sport. Which brings me to my topic tonight: if I was King, which sports would be eliminated from the Olympics. 

I've come up with a quick, easy system to determine this: 

1)       Any sport where the winner is determined 100% of the time by a referee's opinion has got to be cut. If there is no objective way to determine who won or lost (like points scored, fastest time, weight lifted, height vaulted, etc.), it has to go. So say goodbye to diving (sort of interesting, actually), synchronized swimming (still hilarious, even after all these years), and gymnastics (the older I get the more I can't stand this sport. I realize I'm a minority here).  

We’ll still keep the sports that can go to a judge's decision, but don't have to, like boxing. You can always knock the guy unconscious and not leave it up to a judge. There's always that.  

2)       You can’t have any sport in the Olympics that is a young kids’ game. Did you know that trampoline is an Olympic sport? No, seriously. There's a reason that the Olympics got rid of tug-of-war, which in the early 1900s was an Olympic sport (I'm not kidding, look it up).  

3)       We’re only going to keep sports in which the athletes have to excel in at least one of the following traits: Speed, jumping, or strength. The latter allows us to keep weightlifting, even if most of the athletes appear to be clinically obese. The corollary to this is we will only keep sports in which you actually sweat. Say goodbye to equestrian (beautiful, but give me a break), archery (actually cool looking, did you get a chance to see what a modern day bow looks like?), and air rifle. 

As an aside, you know a quick way to make the last two sports the top-rated in the Olympics? Combine the two, let loose a totally random animal for each competitor, and call the sport “hunting". Come on, you know you would watch this.  

(Please, no hate mail, I'm just kidding. Did I mention that I go to the zoo with my kids every month?)  

So there are the rules. This does not mean that the sports eliminated are not fun, cool, or interesting. My favorite show of all time was “O” by Cirque de Soleil in Las Vegas. I think this type of venue is more appropriate for the sports that did not make the cut. Similarly, I would love to go watch the best archer in the world and predict whether she's a better shot than the girl from Hunger Games. Just don't call it an Olympic sport.  

But since I'm not king, I guess we'll just get more of this. 

Have a good night everyone.  

JR

Minimum Wage Laws

 Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretchin' 'round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin' in their cars in the Southwest
No home no job no peace no rest
The highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad
                                           Bruce Springsteen 1995


          In the last five years, the term “living wage” has made its way into the political babbling. It’s generally used to justify minimum wage laws, with the idea being that all people have to be paid enough money for the work they do to live on. This therefore justifies the government involving itself in a financial transaction between employer and employee. The logic of paying someone a living wage at first glance seems compelling: you gotta eat, don't you?  

But dig a little deeper, and the logic breaks down. Let's look at it from both the perspective of the employer and the employee. The goal of businesses is to make money. Therefore almost by definition an employer will never pay an employee an amount of money that will cause him to lose money on the deal. In other words, employees are only hired because they bring more value to the company than what their wages are.  

For example, let's assume that an employer has to pay $10 an hour in wages and taxes to a particular worker. If that worker's labor brings $11 of revenue to the employer, he will hire the person. If that same worker’s labor only brings in $9 of revenue, obviously he won’t get hired; the employer would be losing money every hour.

          Therefore, from the perspective of the employer, he will continuously decrease the amount of employees that he hires as the minimum wage is increased. The federal and state governments can enact all the minimum wage laws they want, but it won’t affect how much value to the company the worker can bring to the table,  With the current federal minimum wage being $7.25, if the employee’s skills are only worth $7 to the employer, he will stay unemployed. 

From the perspective of the employee, I always find these living wage arguments kind of condescending to them. Now granted, the people making minimum wage are on the low and of either skills, education, or brains in our society. Or all three. As a workers’ compensation attorney for almost 20 years, I know these people well. I deal with them every day. But nobody is dumb enough to take a job that doesn't benefit them. If the wages do not provide enough for them to live on, such as for food, shelter, clothing, etc., they simply won't take the job. No one is putting a gun to their head to work for any amount of money. If there were no minimum wage laws an employer would love to offer the employee $1 an hour, as he’d make a lot more money. But the employee won’t take it, because it wouldn’t be worth his time.  

Some of the employees might choose to take a job less than the minimum wage to gain skills in order to later on make more money. Because of the minimum wage laws they don’t have this option. Others might realize that their limited education and skills are such that they cannot bring enough value to a company to justify even getting the minimum wage. Those people will stay unemployed regardless of whether they want to work for less, because of these laws.  The bottom line is, minimum wage laws cost jobs, in a predictable pattern.  

So what do you do for that small minority that genuinely don't have the ability to work? As we said, you gotta eat. Even someone like me, a believer in a radically reduced size of government, thinks we need some limited social programs, such as food stamps. It's much better to have a humane, charitable country that takes care of its poor than it is to distort the laws of classical economics. The latter never works anyway. 

Have a good night everyone. 

JR

Facebook 10 Commandments

Don't you know that no one alive can always be an angel

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good

Oh Lord please don't let me be misunderstood

I've got my faults just like anyone

Sometimes I lie awake long regretting

Some foolish thing, some sinful thing I've done 

                              Elvis Costello 1986

You've probably heard by now that archaeologists in Jerusalem recently dug up a second 10 Commandments, this one dealing exclusively with Facebook.  The following are my thoughts on whether I can obey or not.  Remember, these are God's rules, not mine.

1)    Thou shalt not post any comments about poop, pee, projectile vomiting, or any other bodily fluids coming from your sick child - Look, we’re parents, it's our job to take care of this stuff.  Let's just keep this a secret between us, okay?

2)    Thou shalt not have an extended Facebook posting conversation with your spouse - Come on, she’s sitting next to you on the couch, quit playing up for the fans.

3)    Thou shalt not announce when you are going on a trip - I guess God doesn't want you to get robbed.  I don't know though, are any of your Facebook friends really gonna rob you? I think it's also interesting knowing where people are traveling.  Which brings me to Commandment number…

4)    Thou shalt post pictures and comments of cool places and events you just got back from - Hey, at some point in my life when I have time I plan on traveling again, and I trust a friend’s opinion more than a travel blog.

5)    Thou shalt post cute comments your young children make – Personally, I'm not into them, but I get the feeling I'm the definite minority here.  I just either find them not so cute or don't really believe the kid said it.  The only logical conclusion is I'm a mean, cold person who hates children.

6)    Thou shalt post pictures of your happy children - Seeing pictures of kids smiling makes me optimistic for the future. The only logical conclusion is I'm a nice, warm person who loves children.

7)    Thou shalt not post more than twice a day - Obviously God is more lenient than I was here.

8)    Thou shalt occasionally tell your spouse that you love them, but shall not post constant PDAs - Should I say it?  Thinking, thinking… maybe not… still thinking… Oh, what the hell, it's just a blog; For reasons I think I understand but won’t comment on, my friends that have posted the most consistently and syrupy about their spouses have gotten divorced.  Just sayin’.

9)    Thou shalt tell everyone when you get fired – Huh? Where did this one come from? I've seen a lot of friends do this, and now that I think about it actually makes sense.  Most jobs come from referrals, and what better, more efficient way to get a new job than have the people that actually care about you looking.  Also, maybe it's just me, but I'm always hopeful that after they’re let go a buddy will go for broke, start their own business, and be rollin’ in it within 3 years.

10) Thou shalt post frequent, lengthy comments about events that you are at right now – YES!  There is a God, this is all the proof you need.  This cracks me up every single time.  There is nothing funnier than someone showing you how great a time they're having, by interrupting it to write about what a great time they're having.  Maybe it's me, but this kills me.  Whoever's doing this, please don't stop, my doctor says I need to laugh more. 

God I enjoy Facebook.

Have a good night everyone.

JR