Words Matter

The internet is full of questionable jokes. Gay is a generic negative adjective, in gaming circles rape is used as a term for defeating your opponent, and many people enjoy some sexist and otherwise disparaging humor.

When people, especially moderators, step up and try to ask to skip these phrases, they are generally met with dismissive reactions. Can’t they take a joke? No one’s being hurt, it’s their fault if someone is offended – after all, it’s just words, right?

Sadly, that’s grossly underestimating the power of language and interaction.

Requiring Calorie Labels in Restaurants

A positive caloric energy balance is the main driving factor of obesity, and therefore a direct cause of one of the leading preventable causes of death (Barness et.al. 2007). A recurring question for policy makers then is, how can we help people make better decisions as to their own diets. Calorie labels are widely available on food items in grocery stores, but most restaurants do not provide calorie information for their foods. The question now is, would implementing a law to require such calorie labels in restaurants improve the situation, and if so, in what way?

Assessing the Threat of Cyber Terrorism

A while back, the notorious terrorist organization Al Qaeda called for an “electronic jihad” against the United States. This video is almost unheard of in the European Union outside of the UK, but it seems to have caused quite some fear in the United States. The worries range from a general low-key anxiety to full-out fear that the end of civilization is close. So, what’s the true threat of “Cyber Terrorism”?

Energy Expenditure: Activity and Exercise (Weight Series Part 4)

Photo by familymwr on flickr

A large amount of scientific evidence supports positive effects of exercise,[1] and the recommendations of doing more exercise are pervasive. Yet a lot of people, and especially a number of dieters, do little to nothing. The question as to why that is the case is part of the central problem of figuring out why so many people are becoming overweight.

As we know, weight and body fat solely depend on the energy balance, that is, how many calories we take in as opposed to how many we expend.[2] While the last post in this series looked at the intake part of the equation,[3] this post will take a closer look at the benefits, myths and approaches to increasing energy expenditure.

Energy Intake: Food, Diets and Nutrition (Weight Series Part 3)

Weight gain, maintenance and loss are solely dependent on whether we take in more energy than we expend.[1] This begs two questions: How do reduce the amount we take in, and how do we increase the amount we expend? This post will try to answer the first—that is, what kind of foods we should eat, and how much.

While a lot has been written on the topic and a lot of people are trying to make money with various diets, the common problem is that “under free-living conditions, the main determinant of long-term fat loss seems to be how well you stick to a diet, not which diet you choose.”[2] Hence, any look at diets should keep in mind that it will not be used in a clinical, fully-controlled environment, but by normal people out there who have a life and other things on their mind than to constantly worry about their food.

The Energy Balance (Weight Series Part 2)

The question of how to lose fat is hotly debated. We have lots of answers, but they contradict each other, and it seems they are rarely based on actual scientific understanding. This is not surprising, as the human metabolism is extremely complex. Still, we do know enough to have at least some good ideas on how to do it.

Do You Have a Weight Problem? (Weight Series Part 1)

Obesity is quickly becoming a very prevalent condition in most western countries, and brings with it severe negative effects on health.[1] Consequently, health organizations are regularly recommending people to slim down. This in turn has made slimming down a whole business unto itself, with many groups trying to profit from it. The craze about slimming down has got us to a situation where advertisers post-process human pictures to depict them unnaturally slim, giving us unhealthy role models. There is even a problem with anorexia nervosa,[2] where people have such a fear of gaining weight that they reach extremely unhealthy low body weights.

All of this craze is accompanied by a lot of bad information repeated all over the internet. It does not help that the human metabolism is still only barely understood, so that accurate and good information is hard to come by, if it exists at all.

The true extent of the problem became apparent to me when even my doctor recommended to me a diet not backed by scientific data, and where the basic premises are simply wrong. This is a series on weight-related information I have found.

Artificial Sweeteners

Artificial sweeteners are a topic of extreme misunderstandings and myths. Combine this with the typical effect of the internet, where myths that sounded good can easily get multiplied a thousandfold, you end up with a very tricky jungle of facts, fiction, myths and ideologies. A small attempt at fixing this.

Here, dearest internet, my own contribution to the wealth of badly-cited claims regarding food, as I didn't actually read all of those studies myself, but simply believed those who cited them. Thanks especially to Wikipedia for many pointers.