Daniel Lubetzky

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has sent a report to the FDA charging several food and beverage manufacturers with mislabeling their products. CSPI also recommends reforming package labeling format, especially the nutrition information and ingredient lists.

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The Nutrition Twins recommend KIND on Good Morning America’s Resolutions Solutions segment as a great way to curb cravings. KIND bars are a favorite “good snack” of the twins!

Nutritionist Althea Zanecosky of CBS News in Philadelphia had a segment discussing healthful eating trends for 2010 and closed the segment with an endorsement of KIND Bars as satiating nutritionally rich fruit and nut bars made with simple ingredients you can see and pronounce. 

The Nutrition Twins on FOX News recommended KIND Fruit & Nut Bars as a low-sodium heart-healthy solution to get back in shape in 2010. 

A study recently found that children on Medicaid are given antipsychotic drugs at a rate 4 times higher than those on private health insurance.

The implications for health and justice are deep. Antipsychotic drugs are severely overprescribed – and their long-term damage to society has not yet been registered.

The article posits this trend among the poor may be related to short- sighted measures to "efficiently" control problem children.

A more serious and systemic problem is the abuse by the pharmaceutical industry of government programs – and their undue influence over certain segments of the medical community.

These are scary developments that seem to get scarier with time. A serious and systemic response is necessary.

I was surfing through TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Everything of 2009 list. While many of their choices seem random and uninspired at best, some gems hidden among their finds included their choice of Adam Lambert’s "Mad World" among their top songs. I read the lyrics several times, pasted below, and listened also to the original Tears for Fears performance (also below). 

When I was a kid in San Antonio, Texas, newly arrived from a sheltered upbringing in Mexico City, I enjoyed the song but didn’t relate to it – or understand why it resonated so much among American kids who "had it all." 

In Mexico City, in every corner on popular streets there was an indigent kid begging for alms and struggling to survive, so kids that had a home and a family didn’t generally question their lot.  Why then, would kids who could eat American cereals for breakfast and go to Malibu Grand Prix feel deprived? 

In retrospect, this song hits such a chord with the alienation and loss of meaning that many feel in modern society, primarily in the developed world.  Serious challenges of course are faced every day by struggling kids. But much of it also has to do with the framing of those challenges.  "How bad do I have it relative to the 30,000 children who literally starve to death every day?" 

The search for depth and meaning, and reaffirmation of our special fortune amidst so much wealth and excess, and of our role and duty to find our own way to make this a better world for others, are critical to the health and happiness of future generations.

In very real ways, thinking of others and kinding others (ie, doing conscious acts of kindness for others) gives us meaning and fulfillment.

Mad World lyrics
Songwriters: Orzabal, Roland;

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Goin’ nowhere, goin’ nowhere
Their tears are fillin’ up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
Children waitin’ for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sits and listen, sits and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
A raunchy young world
Mad world
© ROLAND ORZABAL LIMITED;

Very much in OneVoice, and very much with a sentiment like that of the KIND Movement, Starbucks bested all videos I got this season with this awesome compilation (which I received from Jason Alexander): musicians and ordinary citizens across the world joined on the same day at the same time to sing the same song:

Among all of KIND’s retail partners, Starbucks certainly ranks among the classiest, most professional and most sincerely committed to truly make this a better world.  In this case the above is part of a partnership with Project RED to fight AIDS.

Natasha Singer wrote a very compelling piece here about the way the pharmaceutical industry aims to turn all of our ordinary weaknesses and human frailties into pathologies in need of a pharmacological cure. 

“PE” or premature ejaculation may be a rite for passage for young people who discover their passion for someone, yet for the drug companies this too can be fixed – for a price. 

The biggest danger, though, beyond trying to turn us all into robots who are sedated and desensitized, is that pop culture and humor would also die with a “cure” for PE.  How else will the next generation otherwise be able to enjoy such risqué gems as this one from Saturday Night Live’s mock video of Boy Bands?

Here is an interesting article that scientifically confirms one of the underlying assumptions of the KINDED Movement and the KIND philosophy: that doing good onto others actually feels good and benefits the one doing the KINDING as much as the person being KINDED.

These are my favorite responses to Michael Pollan’s NYTimes blog request for readers’ rules about eating:

• From my Romanian grandmother: “Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.”
  - Irina A. Dumitrescu
• “Never eat something that’s pretending to be something else…no textured vegetable protein or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no ‘low fat’ sour cream, no turkey bacon, no ‘chocolate flavor sauce’ tat doesn’t contain chocolate…If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.” - Sonya Legg
• “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.” – Kirk Westphal
• “One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite. This helps me slow down, savor the first bites,stop eating sooner. It also helps get plenty of variety in my diet because this rule also makes a meal of small plates more enticing: 3 bites of 5 plates versus 15 bites of 1 will maximize satisfaction and nutritional variety.” – Laura Kelley
• “When drinking tea, just drink tea.”  I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, when I’m also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.  I believe that it’s so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food.  Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.  (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him this aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper.  When confronted, the teacher said, “When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!”) – Michelle Poirot