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July 7, 2009

Say No to Raw Cookie Dough

Eating raw cake or cookie dough has long been a guilty pleasure, but now it turns out that Grandma was right to snatch the bowl away.

At least 69 people have become violently ill — 34 of them hospitalized — after eating uncooked Nestlé’s Toll House cookie dough. At least nine of those victims suffered kidney failure, as a result of a virulent form of E. coli. Nestlé USA has recalled more than 300,000 cases of the product since, even after cooking, the E. coli could remain on hands or survive in softer, undercooked cookies.

Coming after problems with tainted tomatoes, peanuts and pistachios, this is another warning about the weakness of the nation’s food safety system and why Congress needs to fix it. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently approved an excellent bill that would strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s powers. The full House and the Senate — with White House support — need to move this package forward.

That House bill gives the F.D.A. more money and authority, including the much-needed power to recall products quickly instead of waiting for the manufacturer to do so voluntarily. It would also make it easier for the agency’s inspectors to see a company’s food safety records or consumer complaints.

Nestlé voluntarily recalled its dough after the F.D.A. found E. coli at its Danville, Va., plant. But Nestlé, like other companies, routinely refuses to share safety data with inspectors since it is not required to by law. In the recent salmonella outbreak at the Peanut Corporation of America in Georgia, the F.D.A. was forced to use its antiterrorism powers to get data.

Even the improvements envisioned in the House bill will never make the food supply 100 percent germ-free. And the F.D.A. is warning once again that E. coli can appear in unexpected places. Dr. David Acheson, the agency’s associate commissioner for foods, warned consumers — especially those preparing for summertime picnics — to follow the rules for handling all food safely. That includes such basic advice as keeping cold food cold, hot food hot and eating nothing raw that should be cooked.

via nytimes.com

bummer

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June 23, 2009

How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains

By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: June 22, 2009

As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents and battled Congress and Big Tobacco. But the Harvard-educated pediatrician discovered he was helpless against the forces of a chocolate chip cookie.

In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn’t plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.

“Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?” Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. “Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain? I spent seven years trying to figure out the answer.”

The result of Dr. Kessler’s quest is a fascinating new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” (Rodale).

During his time at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Kessler maintained a high profile, streamlining the agency, pushing for faster approval of drugs and overseeing the creation of the standardized nutrition label on food packaging. But Dr. Kessler is perhaps best known for his efforts to investigate and regulate the tobacco industry, and his accusation that cigarette makers intentionally manipulated nicotine content to make their products more addictive.

In “The End of Overeating,” Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.

via nytimes.com

So...my chocolate chip cookie obsession is explained. It's not my fault.

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May 23, 2009

The Power of Distraction

Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, writes about Walter Mischel's studies of successful people and predictions that can be made in childhood. Forget willpower, it's about distracting yourself.

Walter Mischel at Columbia University is probably best known for the marshmallow task. It's a very simple experiment he did at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University between 1968 and 1972, where you bring a four-year-old into the experimental room, and he'd say, "Kid, you can have one marshmallow right now, or if you can wait for about 15 minutes while I run an errand, you can have a second marshmallow." And he offered the kids marshmallows or cookies, pretzel sticks, and what he found was that there's tremendous variation in terms of how long kids can wait; every kid wants the second marshmallow or the second cookie, but some kids will eat the marshmallows before the scientist leaves the room. Some kids will wait two minutes. The average waiting time is about two and a half minutes, and some kids can wait the full 15 minutes.

The question is, what allowed some kids to wait? And it wasn't that these kids wanted the marshmallow any less or that these kids had more willpower. It's that these kids knew how to distract themselves. These are the kids who would cover their eyes, turn their back, sing songs from Sesame Street, pretend to fall asleep.

My favorite kid is a boy with neatly parted hair, and he chose the Oreo cookies, and you can watch him. He's just really struggling with it. It's an agonizing, agonizing wait, and he carefully surreptitiously looks around to make sure no one's watching him. There's a large one-way mirror right to his left that he conveniently ignores. He picks up the Oreo cookie, carefully unspools it, licks off the white cream filling, puts it back together, puts it on the table, and then he could wait 15 minutes, no problem. Mischel notes that the kids who can wait what they’re better at is the strategic allocation of attention. They know that my willpower's weak and if I'm thinking about this yummy, delicious marshmallow, I'm going to eat it. What I have to do is not think about it; I need to distract myself.

Then you do this longitudinal study, and you find that the kids who could wait at the age of four — and this is the most predictive test you can give a four-year-old, much more predictive than an IQ test — it predicts their behavior in school, how likely they'll do drugs, their body mass index. The SAT score of a kid who can wait is 210 points higher than the SAT score of a kid who can't wait. It's an incredibly predictive test. Here's this very simple experiment, this very simple protocol you give to four-year-olds, and it turns out to explain a lot about their behavior as teenagers, adolescents.

Mischel and his collaborators are now flying 55 of these kids out to Palo Alto — they're now in their 40s — to put them in brain scans, and to see the different brain areas that underlie this ability to exert willpower, but the larger lesson is that what we think about willpower is actually completely wrong.

People think about willpower as gritting your teeth, but willpower actually is profoundly weak; no one can really resist a marshmallow if you're thinking about how sweet the marshmallow is. What these people are better at is — and this is how the scientists describe it — is the ability to control their thoughts, to control the contents of working memory.

Some people are much better at that, and that's a crucial life skill that allows you to — my favorite television show's on, but I need to study for the SAT, I need to do homework. How can I resist this temptation? It allows you to control your temper, to not lose your temper when someone calls you a name. It really is a very, very important life skill, and that's what Mischel was able to measure at the age of four.

I've been thinking a lot about that, and now Mischel 's trying to go back into the schools to see if he can teach this to kids. Once kids leave kindergarden, we stop thinking about them in terms of character, in terms of these personality traits, but it turns out these are crucial things, and schools shouldn't just be in the business of teaching algebra, of teaching literacy, teaching spelling.

They have to be in the business of teaching kids how to think, teaching them these metacognitive rules. Teach kids how to structure their thoughts, how to do a better job of controlling their mind, and that's going to have a huge payoff in terms of academic skills later on. I've been thinking a lot about that. Mischel's just a magnificent and very meticulous scientist.

via edge.org


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May 9, 2009

The Stream Pool is Java-Free again

For the umpteenth time in my adult life, I have stopped drinking coffee. Though I do not recommend it, I went cold turkey and have been on the wagon for about two weeks now. Candidly, the espresso machine came down with the small appliance equivalent of atherosclerosis and it just seemed like another sign that it was time to move on (again).

Our most recent liaison ran about two years and at the high (low) point, I was gulping down a quad espresso, staring back at the curious and judgmental faces of those around me and giving them my best Cheney-sneering "What?!"

Recently, I talked my non-coffee drinking mother into tasting a straight up espresso. After taking a tiny sip, she gagged, nearly spit it out, made a terrible face and then exclaimed "ick, it tastes like dirt!"

In that same spirit, people will sometimes ask, "why do you like coffee?"  My standard flip answer: "Other than causing brown teeth, bad breath and headaches when you stop drinking it, what's not to like?"

I suppose that defensive response deflects from the deeper truth that I have no idea why I like it. Why do we lay out in the sun, keep our money in banks, talk on the cell phone while driving, eat french fries or watch The Hills?

So will this breakup last? Who knows. Last time I kicked, I pretty much stayed clear of arabicas for three or four years before the shiny new (supposedly self-cleaning) espresso machine lured me back to regular and possibly excessive consumption of...ok...dirt juice.

In the meantime, it looks like the interim official drink of the Stream Pool is now our old standby...Green Tea. Antioxidants, you know.

 

 

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