Why Save PBS?

How To Make Oatmeal Unhealthy (Brought To You By McDonald's)

This is just unbelievable. Eating healthy is as difficult as one's ability to discern ingredients. Oatmeal is oatmeal. Fruit is fruit. Honey, anyone? Read this article by Mark Bittman called, "How to Make Oatmeal...Wrong". And here is a small snippet:

The aspect one cannot argue is nutrition: Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

Obesity is not a wonder. Diabetes (type two, that is) can be a result of decisions, bad ones, made time after time. Look at the ingredients. Or, better, buy things that are the ingredients (i.e. oats, tomatoes, cherries, potatoes, etc.). That's it.

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Arguing For A Robust Public Media

There's been much threatening from the political right in Senate on cutting everything they can (save, of course, for the massive and unrivaled amount set aside for wars, secret and reported, reasoned and industrially motivated). They would love to cut anything too high brow, say education and the arts, and while they are at it, PBS and NPR. This comparably small sum given over to these organizations (in relation to the aforementioned sum for sanctioned murder) should not be taken away. Who wants to live in a world without Sesame Street or All Things Considered? NPR is a bright light in the increasingly dim world of news. They have journalists all over the world, reporting on events as they happen, without surrounding each item in a cultural and political aura based on any particular bias. This cannot be said for many other sources, and one in particular. Read this article out of The Atlantic concerning this very issue. Here is a segment:

There are jobs where people are mainly motivated by the hope of big money. (Finance in general.) There are jobs where the main motivation is job-security. And there is a category of jobs where, as absolutely everyone recognizes, it makes a tremendous difference that "employees" care about something beyond pay, hours, and security. Teachers. Soldiers. Doctors and nurses. Judges and police. Political leaders, if they want to be more than hacks. And, people in news organizations.

Comment away.

Unhealthy, Unsafe and Unsustainable

Our food system in America. What do we do about it? Well, Mark Bittman writing for the New York Times has a few good ideas. Here are a couple:

• Tax the marketing and sale of unhealthful foods. Another budget booster. This isn’t nanny-state paternalism but an accepted role of government: public health. If you support seat-belt, tobacco and alcohol laws, sewer systems and traffic lights, you should support legislation curbing the relentless marketing of soda and other foods that are hazardous to our health — including the sacred cheeseburger and fries.

• Mandate truth in labeling. Nearly everything labeled “healthy” or “natural” is not. It’s probably too much to ask that “vitamin water” be called “sugar water with vitamins,” but that’s precisely what real truth in labeling would mean.

Now, go read the rest.