Alcohol « Avyaya - Tech Rants

The Top Ten Most Ridiculous Diets

People will do almost anything to lose weight. While the most logical, sustainable means of doing so hasn’t really changed—eat less and exercise—every day it seems there are a host of new and outlandish methods to lose those love handles. Most of these ill-fated regimes will help you lose pounds, at least in the short term, but sometimes it’s at the expense of an organ or your sanity. Here are a few of my favorites:

Dr. Siegal’s® Cookie Diet™
Make no mistake, you’re not going to be eating Pepperidge Farm Milanos, or Oreos, or Mrs. Fields’ White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookies on this diet. No, you’re going to be eating the concoctions of Dr. Siegal, a physician who specializes in hypothyroidism and obesity, and who also likes to sell weight loss books and snacks. However, his proprietary hunger-controlling cookies are a diet-deceiving indulgence; they look like bricks of fiber-coated oats sweetened with prunes. Although they may make you less hungry, the doctor also advises combining them with a restricted calorie diet, which, as we all know, is the main way you’re going to lose weight. I also like how he has trademarked the term “Let’s face it: hunger wrecks diets™.” Uh, so do cookies.

The Subway Diet
Ever since I worked in a building where the women’s restroom abutted a Subway sandwich shop, I have had an almost Pavlovian reaction to thought of eating one of their subs. It reminds me of the toilet, and makes me want to gag. So although I know many people like Subway, eating them twice a day for a year, like Jared Fogel, the guy on the Subway commercials who lost 245 pounds, seems inconceivable. And it seems like I could save a whole lot of money by just making my own sandwiches, and maybe going for a jog now and again.

The Cereal Diet
This is similar to the Subway diet in that you’re supposed to supplant two meals a day with the same thing—in this case cereal. From Special K to Raisin Bran, many cereal boxes now claim you can “lose six in two”— that is lose six pounds in two weeks. Of course, the premise is the same: when people have to measure the amount they are eating, they end up eating fewer calories, so they lose weight. And it’s not like these cereals are health food or anything. The third ingredient in Special K is sugar; it’s the second ingredient in All-Bran. And the last thing you want to be eating too much of is All-Bran—it’s not weight you’d lose, but the contents of your bowels.

For more: Brie Cadman

March 23, 2008 Posted by avyaya | Education, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Style, Technology | Alcohol, Diet, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Technology | 1 Comment

The Top Ten Most Ridiculous Diets

People will do almost anything to lose weight. While the most logical, sustainable means of doing so hasn’t really changed—eat less and exercise—every day it seems there are a host of new and outlandish methods to lose those love handles. Most of these ill-fated regimes will help you lose pounds, at least in the short term, but sometimes it’s at the expense of an organ or your sanity. Here are a few of my favorites:

Dr. Siegal’s® Cookie Diet™
Make no mistake, you’re not going to be eating Pepperidge Farm Milanos, or Oreos, or Mrs. Fields’ White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookies on this diet. No, you’re going to be eating the concoctions of Dr. Siegal, a physician who specializes in hypothyroidism and obesity, and who also likes to sell weight loss books and snacks. However, his proprietary hunger-controlling cookies are a diet-deceiving indulgence; they look like bricks of fiber-coated oats sweetened with prunes. Although they may make you less hungry, the doctor also advises combining them with a restricted calorie diet, which, as we all know, is the main way you’re going to lose weight. I also like how he has trademarked the term “Let’s face it: hunger wrecks diets™.” Uh, so do cookies.

The Subway Diet
Ever since I worked in a building where the women’s restroom abutted a Subway sandwich shop, I have had an almost Pavlovian reaction to thought of eating one of their subs. It reminds me of the toilet, and makes me want to gag. So although I know many people like Subway, eating them twice a day for a year, like Jared Fogel, the guy on the Subway commercials who lost 245 pounds, seems inconceivable. And it seems like I could save a whole lot of money by just making my own sandwiches, and maybe going for a jog now and again.

The Cereal Diet
This is similar to the Subway diet in that you’re supposed to supplant two meals a day with the same thing—in this case cereal. From Special K to Raisin Bran, many cereal boxes now claim you can “lose six in two”— that is lose six pounds in two weeks. Of course, the premise is the same: when people have to measure the amount they are eating, they end up eating fewer calories, so they lose weight. And it’s not like these cereals are health food or anything. The third ingredient in Special K is sugar; it’s the second ingredient in All-Bran. And the last thing you want to be eating too much of is All-Bran—it’s not weight you’d lose, but the contents of your bowels.

For more: Brie Cadman

March 23, 2008 Posted by avyaya | Education, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Style, Technology | Alcohol, Diet, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Technology | 2 Comments

Alcohol:Just How much do you consume?

If 2-3 glasses everyday, then this page is particularly for you. Read on and Find what even doctors do not know. Do let me know what you think about alcoholism?

Just How Many Drinks A Day Is Bad?

Is a glass or two of wine a day good for you? You would think this would be an easy question to answer, but it’s not, and that’s because of this:
How many glasses of wine are in a bottle?

If you answered 4-5, continue reading. Because guess what? Apparently the answer is eight. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, they are serious. Unplug your monitor and ram it into your skull as hard as you can.

“Doctors don’t know. They pretend to know. Because they have a rectal thermometer in their pocket. As if it were an appeal to a higher authority.”– Lewis Black

Many are frustrated with medicine’s changing and often contradictory stance on health– first fat is bad, then carbohydrates are bad, etc. Part of the reason is we (doctors) don’t know, but the main reason is that policies are set in advance of knowledge. And these policies are not prioritized. Everything is “bad”– nothing is “worse.” For example, should you quit drinking vodka or quit smoking? Should you eat less or exercise more? “Do both” is not the answer, because not only will people not do both, but will probably be so turned off to the whole thing they won’t do either.

So, too, psychiatry’s near charismatic fervor for medications and biology. Concerta is great. I get it. Anybody tried naps? “You have to recommend both.” Well, are you going to monitor the naps with the same energy as the Concerta? Because it appears as if you think Concerta is the main treatment.

So, too, alcohol. “Two drinks a day.” What’s a drink? Are the health benefits/risks of whisky and wine identical? Then why lump them together? And if the answer is, “well, we don’t know enough yet” then why are you making recommendations with the authority of medical certainty?

The reason wine’s benefits/risks seem confusing is that no one tells you how big they think a drink is.

A “drink” is defined as 10g alcohol– using math, that’s 1/8 of a bottle of wine.

The numbers people use are useless. Many reference guides, in an attempt to make things simple to understand (if you’re drunk, maybe) use 10g/drink as a standard. There are 750ml in a bottle of wine. If the bottle is 13% alcohol by volume, then there is 98ml alcohol per bottle. Alcohol’s specific gravity is .79, so there are 77g alcohol in a bottle. That means that there are 7-8 “drinks” in a bottle of wine, which, if I may editorialize, is so preposterous as to hardly merit comment.

Similarly, for 5% beer, there is 0.05 x355ml x 0.79= so 14g per 12 oz can. Is a beer a drink and a half?

Alcohol content varies greatly among wines and beers:

Also, each wine has a different alcohol content– 12.5% is the typical French ideal, and most wines are built (i.e. alcohol osmotically removed) to stay under 14% because the tariff increases above that. There is a leeway of 1.5% in the listing, so 12.5% could be 11% or 14%. That’s a 2 “drink”/bottle difference.

In the past few years, and especially with California wines, Syrahs, Zinfandels, places with hot climates, the trend has been towards using higher Brix (sugar content) grapes. (Riper means more sugar, which means more alcohol.) About 55% of the sugar ferments to alcohol, and the common 25 Brix grapes convert to a 13.75% wine. Plus you lose some water in the wine making process, so it may be even higher than that (15%).

To complicate things further, each policy group advocates different safe drinking levels that are nearly incomprehensible to the layman, unless you convert them to some common measure (here, I convert to grams): The U.S. government says no more than 2 (14g each) drinks/d (28g.) France says no more than 5 (12g each) per day (60g). Britain says 3-4 “units” (8g each)–each unit being 1/2 pint beer or 1/11th of a bottle of wine. A British study (in Scots) found that people generally pour out two, not one, unit per drink. It’s no wonder people are confused.

A better conversion is this: there is 77g alcohol in a 13% bottle of wine. That’s equivalent to almost a six pack. Go.