Daniel Lubetzky

A recent study with pregnant female rats indicated that the pups of those rats who were offered junk food ended up opting for junk food at far higher rates than the pups of moms that were under a regular chow regime. 

…pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

And:

For most of our evolutionary past, the problem has been avoiding starvation. An environment awash with sugars and fats is, therefore, an evolutionary novelty: in hundreds of millions of years of evolution, this is the first time such foods have been abundant. Giant quantities of fats and sugars have not, historically, been available to a developing fetus, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they do have a harmful impact.

If this is right, it raises the alarming possibility that the obesity epidemic has a built-in snowball effect. If children born to obese mothers are, owing to the environment in the womb, predisposed to obesity, they may find staying thin especially hard. Reversing the epidemic may thus rest on helping women to lose weight before they conceive and helping them to eat a balanced, non-junk-food diet while they are pregnant. The well-being of the next generation may depend on it.

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Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.

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Here is an amusingly observative piece from Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NYT editorial page about how smart-phones are taking over the human race and turning us into weirdly asocial beings…

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A study from Cornell University demonstrates a correlation between junk/unhealthful food and energy costs.  Artificial stuff, junk food and red meat all require more energy and natural resources to produce than fruits, nuts, veggies, etc.  So by eating real foods, you are not just helping your health – you are also helping reduce greenhouse emissions.

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Some will criticize this as Shimon Peres’s much-discounted "New Middle East" vision, but I love it, and I am confident that if Israelis and Palestinians get their act together and accept the historical compromises necessary to a comprehensive permanent agreement, this will only be the beginning. Check out this vision for the future of the Arava, intersecting Israel, Jordan and Palestine.  It fits nicely within OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Project.

Before you could type the lyrics to a song and find what you were looking for through google.  Now check out this very cool site: www.midomi.com.

Even for out of tune people who can’t sing, like me, you humm a song and the site helps you find what you were looking for.

When the site got a different song from what I tried to humm, I tapped to hear what it sounded like, and it actually sounded closer to what I ended up singing.

If you feel the need to refer to mobile phones, computer games, or digital cameras, you’re probably a ‘digital immigrant.’ To the natives [including most of those born in the 90s], these are simply phones, games and cameras.

- Julian Baggini, paraphrasing Mark Prensky’s concept of ‘Digital
Natives’, in a Financial Times review of Susan Greenfield’s article
Id: The quest for identity in the 21st Century, about the
commodification of human identity or ‘Nobodies’ who are hypnotized by a steady stream of stimulating but undemanding electronic noises and images.

Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos

Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts.  I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family – minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried.  But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts.  Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.

  But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous.  It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications.  It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.

The line may be blurry on this one.

Japan, Seeking Trim Waists, Measures Millions - an effort to prevent diabetes and obesity from the Japanese government by strictly imposing waistline limits on the population, with penalties for corporations and local governments that do not meet guideposts…

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It is not news that our bodies rely on bacteria to perform many functions, such as the bacteria in our digestive system that help deconstruct and process food. 

But what is fascinating according to a story in Genome Research reported by The New York Times, is the sheer volume of such relations, to the point that:

…bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.

Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.