Health is something that isn't nearly as simple as almost everyone seems to love to believe. The truth, based on current medical evidence, is that something like 60% of "obese" people are by all metrics besides BMI perfectly "healthy", while something like 60% of the people who are part of the epidemic of diabetes and afflicted with massive amounts of cardiovascular disease are people of normal body weight who everyone assumes are "healthy" solely due to their "normal" BMI. It just plain isn't that simple.

Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease have been proven in recent decades to not be nearly as well linked as almost everyone still believes. Getting the obese to lose weight with pills therefore will not necessarily result in a strict increase in overall "health" of our society. In fact most of the pills that help promote weight loss have been shown to cause rather extreme negative side effects. Such as fatal heart attacks.

Everyone still believes that you must stay away from saturated fats and cholesterol, even though it's been shown over and over again that increasing or decreasing "dietary" fats and cholesterols has almost no link whatsoever to increasing or decreasing levels of fats and cholesterol in the body and blood, most of which is created by your own liver. In fact, if I'm quoting Dr. Lustig correctly, the link between the ingestion of the fructose molecule and bad blood glucose, fat, cholesterol and triglyceride levels is about 50 times better than the link between those things and the ingestion of any kind of dietary fats. Yes, fructose. According to Dr. Lustig's research, fructose, and its close relative ethanol, may be the root cause of metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes and the explosion of cardiovascular disease. Not starches or dietary fats.

Also quoting Dr. Lustig, evidence indicates that approximately 99% of human beings cannot maintain any form of weight loss for more than a few years, if they even succeed in losing any weight the first place, which most people don't. Thus, no matter how long everyone continues to insist that obesity is a personal willpower problem that should be solved by the individual... THIS. WILL. NEVER. SOLVE. THE. PROBLEM.

EVER.

If we really want to solve the societal pandemic of obesity we need to completely discard the idea that it's caused by some personal moral failing (of the lower classes, no less). We went from 10% to 60% obesity over the last 40 years. If we keep relying on the magic pixie dust of "personal responsibility", 90% of our grandchildren's generation will be obese and 90% will have diabetes starting from early childhood regardless of body weight. There is a systemic problem in the modern diet that is causing this explosion of obesity and diabetes, and we need to find PRACTICAL solutions that fix it on a society-wide basis.

Linky:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lustig+sugar&sm=3

That. Is. Certifiably. Insane.

I believe there is a step coming up shortly in this descent into madness where we will all be forced to pluck out our eyes, cut out our tongues, puncture our eardrums, surgically remove our genitalia and chop off our hands.

You know, to make the world safe.

For the children.

I think you meant to say, "Really, Internet?"

See, the Internet can be very helpful.

I think there's something wrong... with my head.

I read the tag as "SuperMangoTit" and was going to look it up on KnowYourMeme.com.

Don't worry, I figured it out before it went that far.

Side note: I like the way other sites use underscores to replace spaces in tags. Makes tags much more readable.

I've said it before and I'll say it forever: If you're important enough to be talking on the phone while driving, you're important enough to have a chauffeur to drive you so you don't have to talk on the phone while driving.

Unless you're making some kind of emergency call there is no valid excuse for driving one-handed with your cellphone glued to your ear. NO VALID EXCUSE.

Yeah, I had the silly impression all this time that the entire purpose of the Internet Archive was to archive the goddamn Internet precisely so that people couldn't pull this kind of retroactive erasure "cleansing of history" bullshit and get away with it.

What a dope I am. It's amazing how inadequately we are protecting our freedoms and our history these days. If we don't do something much more drastic our grandchildren will end up being slaves to some theocratic corporatocracy and they'll have no idea that the world was ever any different.

Lately I think Orwell was overly optimistic.

Ha ha funny, but no. Get with the times. Google doesn't allow Safe Search to be disabled anymore. It's always on. They changed the policy like a year ago. You will only see NSFW search results now for search terms that are obviously adult-related. Vague innuendo doesn't qualify, apparently.

The driver was probably referring to a multi-ball trailer hitch that has all three trailer ball sizes (1-7/8", 2", 2-5/16") attached. You pull it out of the hitch receiver and rotate it to use a different ball, so you don't have to carry around 75 lbs of separate single-ball trailer hitches. It's quite handy if you have multiple trailers with different hitch sizes, or you want to be able to borrow a trailer without needing to know what size hitch it takes. There are also hitches with interchangeable balls, but they typically quickly become useless from rust making it impossible to remove the ball, so hitches with separate balls are popular due to being more reliable.

Google "three ball trailer hitch" or "triple ball trailer hitch" to get a better idea what I'm referring to. You'll notice some are quite bulky and elaborate height-adjustable affairs and many also have a nasty sharp hook on the fourth side, I guess for use with a tow line. I wouldn't want to run over even the most benign model in a low-clearance sports car at highway speeds. A multi-ball hitch will always have something sticking up maybe as much as 5" to 8" off the road surface, where a single-ball hitch will usually be laying on its side and be at most 2-1/2" high. I can easily see a multi-ball hitch catching on something, popping up and doing major damage to the underside of pretty much any vehicle with less than 8" of road clearance. Which includes nearly all non-lifted passenger vehicles with normal sized tires on the road today.

Source: Recently bought a boat trailer and spent a lot of time learning about trailer hitches.

Yeah, I love a good warm fire as much as anyone. Spent my fair share of my childhood years throwing wood in the back of a pickup or stacking wood in the shed and warming up by a hot fireplace on cold winter mornings and evenings. It's a very efficient and inexpensive way to heat a home. There is a lot of emotion attached to it, and for good reason. But there are a ton of people out there who are still using stupidly inefficient wood fireplaces that were already outclassed by fireplaces invented over a hundred years ago, including completely open fireplaces which waste ridiculous amounts of heat and burn too cool to properly burn wood cleanly.

My father became a dealer for a line of fireplaces back in the mid-80s. These things were amazing. You start it, let it get hot for a few minutes then seal the door, damp the flu and turn down the incoming air and then you could watch the smoke recirculate and reburn inside. It put out massive amounts of heat for several hours on just two quarters of a log, and when you walked outside the only thing that gave away that the fireplace was in operation were the telltale heat waves coming out of the chimney. No visible smoke whatsoever after it got started. And these highly efficient and clean-burning stoves were available in the 80s and probably much earlier.

Contrast that with walking around the neighborhood or driving around my small town in Alaska on a cool morning or evening. The whole place is full of wood smoke from obviously inefficient wood-burning fireplaces. And because of downdrafts and inversions it tends to stay very low and hang around. We often have smoke coming in our house from houses blocks away whenever we open the window for some "fresh" air. There's really no excuse for this when I could have a stove decades ago that basically had zero detectable particulate output when it was running properly. Plus it made the wood last a lot longer.

Burning wood is air pollution no matter how you slice it, and people need to be strongly encouraged to do it as efficiently as possible. Just like vehicle regulations this only applies to newly manufactured stoves, and all those rural conspiracy theory fruit loops ranting about EPA SWAT teams coming to break down their door and take away their fireplace are just that; fruit loops. This is really much ado about not very much.

It's used as marketing, but it's still true. But you're missing the point which is that sucrose and HFCS are both EQUALLY BAD. Replacing HFCS with sucrose has no measurable benefit, so talking about banning HFCS is pointless and distracts from the primary health issue which is the presence of the fructose molecule. Far better to replace both HFCS and sucrose with some non-nutritive sweetener like sucralose or stevia which contain no fructose. The link you gave supports this fact. Sucrose is quickly separated into glucose and fructose, becoming identical to HFCS.

And it's called "high-fructose" only because it has more fructose than unprocessed corn syrup, which is about 95% glucose. Enzymes are used to create different concentrations of fructose. The HFCS that is usually used to replace sucrose is 45% glucose, 55% fructose, but there are other concentrations used in the food industry, some of which have lower fructose concentrations than the 50/50 glucose/fructose concentrations in sucrose. It is not called "high-fructose" corn syrup due to any relationship with sucrose.

You would do well to step back and refine your understanding of this issue. Look for Dr. Lustig's lectures on sugar on YouTube. They're even more illuminating than (and represent a refinement on) Gary Taubes' theories.

Huh. I'm usually the dummy in the room*, but this particular time I thought the purpose of the helium was patently obvious. Lower density molecules = less drag. At the speeds and sizes of the components involved, it's like replacing 30-weight oil with 5-weight oil.

I must have retained that bit of knowledge from back when they were writing articles years ago about the future possibility of doing this. Pretty cool that it's finally happening.

* At least here on /..

I have been a satisfied Apple user for over a decade now, but I came in here to say that Apple's discussion forum censorship is for reals one of the worst things about the company. But then I read a few posts like yours. Your post is a prime example of why I keep coming back to Slashdot despite the dupes and terrible editing and clickbait content. Instead of having my biases reinforced, I often have my mind expanded and my thoughts provoked by reading interesting alternative viewpoints here.

Thanks, man. *brofist*

Wow. Full of yourself much? You just called tens of millions of people retards for daring to buy a computer brand you don't approve of.

It is an oversimplification to simply state that Apple uses many of the same components as PCs. They do, but they also have a lot of custom engineering that goes into their products, good quality control, and their demonstrably lower incidence of returns and repairs puts the lie to your idea that there is no measureable difference between Macs and PCs just because they contain some of the same components. Apple has not been at the top of all the consumer satisfaction and quality surveys for the last decade merely because people like the company logo.

You are welcome to your own opinion about the relative worth of any particular brand of computers, but get your facts straight or you just make yourself look silly and hateful. Just because other people have different criteria for buying computers does not make them all idiots buying $100 burgers. Apple's machines are more like the $18 burger from a local restaurant with great ambiance versus a $8 burger from a national chain restaurant with fluorescent lighting and plastic bench seating. Priced higher, perhaps even overpriced, but it all depends on your criteria and what you're looking for. But pretending there is no value in paying a bit more for nice ambiance is idiocy. The burger and the dining experience are both part of the price.

Maybe. If progeria were literally "premature temporal aging". But it isn't. It's just a genetic disorder that causes certain symptoms that appear similar to premature temporal aging. Nobody on Earth has ever actually "aged" faster or slower than anyone else. A 35-year-old person with a full head of prematurely gray hair is still the same actual age as all other 35-year-old people. He or she just has premature graying; a specific symptom of a very specific biological system, which resembles a symptom of general aging. But the gray hair does not mean the person has actually aged 90 years while the rest of us have aged 35 years. It just means that some metabolic process has reacted differently at a different time on the biological clock. Now we have to figure out what triggers all of the other independent metabolic systems to react in certain ways when they read certain timestamps from the biological clock.

What the result regarding progeria cells tells us is that this biological clock quite literally tells time, i.e. the actual temporal age of the organism. Like tree rings. Which is interesting in and of itself. If this clock is accurate enough we might finally have a way to test whether those people who are supposedly 120 or 130 or 140 years old are really as old as they think they are or whether they're just misremembering what decade they were born.

Uh... Since the dawn of time itself? Plants eat each other's bio-nutrients in an endless cycle. The decay of carbon-rich plant matter creates fertilized soil for new plants.

This post is a good example of how disconnected humanity has become to the way nature actually works.

Better yet, outfit these places with urine-diverting toilets and combine the urine with the pure carbon charcoal, maybe mixed with the fully composted solid waste and you'll end up with not just plant crack but plant super-crack. It creates a carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer that's just as good if not better than the most expensive commercially-produced fertilizers, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Essentially, free.

If you think I'm just making things up you'll find if you do some research that many places are already using this process both to reduce dependence on commercial fertilizers and to reduce the energy and money required to process waste. Not just on small scales or undeveloped countries either. I'm now wondering how well this gasification process can scale up.