Aren Cambre's Blog

Organic shoppers think they are doing the earth a favor with their organic purchases. The Organic Trade Association even says: “Organic agricultural production benefits the environment by using earth-friendly agricultural methods and practices” followed by a litany of environmental plusses like less greenhouse gas, nicer to animals, etc. (source)

However, a lengthy UK study found that organic methods can hugely increase land usage, energy consumption, and environmental impact. For example, organic tomatoes use 642% more land, organic milk produces almost 100% more soil and water pollutants, and organic chickens cause 341% more resource depletion.

Like I mentioned in an earlier article, organic methods would be cheaper if they were really more “earth-friendly.” This isn’t a stretch; major inputs to food prices are energy, labor, and land. If you use more, you have to charge more. Organic products are 10% to 40% more expensive simply because they use that much more energy, land, and resources than conventionally-farmed materials.

Want to do the earth a favor? Stop buying resource-intensive versions of conventionally-produced products.

(Props to the Dallas Observer blog article that clued me in to the subject!)

I just dug up a 10 year old medical checkup form. Despite significant muscle mass gains, I am 15 pounds lighter than 10 years ago! Here are the rules that helped me lose weight and maintain the weight loss:

1. Don’t eat when not hungry. We eat a lot of food because of craving, not hunger. How do you tell the difference? Think of how you feel if you have eaten nothing in 8 hours. It’s a grinding feeling. Craving is just a dull, psychological feeling. If your digestive track is normal, like virtually everyone else on the world, then it will signal true hunger when you need food. (Actually, it signals true hunger even when you don’t need food. More below.)
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   …or eat fresh produce. If I cannot resist the craving, I eat unprocessed fresh fruit or vegetable. That doesn’t fully satisfy my craving, gradually retraining it. Additionally, fresh produce is much better for me than junk food snacks.

3. It’s OK to feel hunger. In nature, animals eat all they can find because they don’t know where the next meal comes from. That’s why my dog is constantly starving. She forages all the time. If I fed her all she wanted, she would be a blimp. Humans share that same evolutionary programming. However, I am better than my dog; I can choose not to eat and feel hunger before meals. I don’t have to quench it with a snack.
4. Many “healthy” foods are really junk foods. Anything packed with calories with relatively minimal nutritional value a junk food. This includes:
   • Fruit juice is junk food, even non-sweetened fruit juice. They are so packed with calories that you’re better off with sugary soft drinks. The same goes for smoothies. The average “original” size Jamba Juice smoothie is a 480 calorie bomb! That’s about three and a half soft drinks! My kid isn’t a blubber butt partly because he drinks no fruit juice. His only eats whole fruits.
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     Stuff with trans fats are junk foods. Trans fats’ peculiar harm is more than just weight gain. Still, most foods chock full of trans fats aren’t good for you even without the trans fats. You don’t need the Twinkies, Oreos, fries, pastries, donuts, cake frosting, etc. regardless of trans fat content.

   • “Healthier” junk food is still junk food. It’s just marginally less deadly. Wendy’s removed the trans fats from its fries, but they still make you fat and clog your arteries and do other nasty things. Remember when Snackwell cookies and other low fat products first came out? People started eating them as if they are healthy. In fact, most “healthier” products, like the Snackwell cookies, make you just as fat as the originals.
5. “Healthier” junk foods have a high opportunity cost. “Healthier” potato chips, popcorn, crackers, or other junk foods provide virtually no health benefit and offset better foods, ones with actual nutritional qualities. In high school, I knew kids who had a bag of potato chips with every lunch. That is a travesty; those potato chips offset something healthier like fresh fruits or vegetables.
6. Exercise. Diet and exercise go hand and hand. While only one of the two is better than neither, you have to do both to get best results.
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   Quit blaming the dog. This is euphemistic for society’s tendency to blame others for our own failings. Two common bogus reasons weight problems are “those restaurants are feeding me too much” or “it runs in the family.” Whatever. I take personal responsibility for my dietary choices.

8. Don’t gorge at restaurants or special events. The solution is simple: lay off the chips and salsa, order smaller meals, and slow down the pace. It’s OK to be be satiated without being stuffed, and you’ll save money to boot!
9. Don’t buy into stupid alternative medicine crap like detoxification, coffee enemas, grapefruit diets, or whatever. They’re bunk, and even if they don’t harm you, they’re a distraction from good nutrition. You’re too valuable to be a living pseudo-science experiment.
10. Stop pampering yourself. Modern “pamper yourself” marketing and mindsets make me sick. They are a flimsy excuse to do stupid, selfish stuff. Nobody ever accomplished anything great by pampering themselves.

Your skeptical side may suspect I am preaching but not practicing. You’re partly correct. I don’t follow these rules perfectly all the time.

I shared a half gallon of Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream with my son over the past week and a half.

I have lightly salted almonds at my desk at work, and I shovel several into my mouth each day.

But I am following enough of the rules enough of the time to go somewhere, and I am improving a little bit each month.

I didn’t stuff myself at Thanksgiving.

I didn’t clean my plate the last time I was at a Tex Mex restaurant.

I only ate one ice cream cone (instead of 2) the last time I was at Dickey’s.

I want to lose another 10-15 lbs to get rid of belly fat. (I may have ab muscles underneath them?) I’ll have to crank down these rules further. I think it’s an attainable goal, but we’ll see!

I am changing my workout.

For the past 13 months–and off and on in the 9 years before that–my weightlifting routine was a single set of up to 12 repetitions on each of about 8 machines. I then repeated that circuit three times.

It has served me fairly well. Between summer 2005 and now–the time period where I have been most serious–I have made great improvements. For example, I have doubled my capabilities on the machine where you press your extended arms together (fly).

My routine concentrated on the upper body with the lower body left for improvements through jogging.

This routine has two problems:

1. I haven’t regularly jogged in over 2 years.
2. Multiple circuit training is not beneficial.

That’s right: the crux of my routine, which is where I repeat the circuit thrice, isn’t doing me any good. The Mayo Clinic has an article about a 1998 study that found that you should just do one workout per machine. As long as the weights are sufficient that you fatigue by the 12th repetition, you get the maximum benefit.

Starting tomorrow, I am taking that advice. That will leave me more time to do multiple machines, so I will start a full body workout.

My exercise routine has sucked this year. My Adonis complex is getting really hungry.

After a week of off time around Christmas (the entire campus closes down), I had a February disaster: in six weeks, I got a terrible stomach virus (first time I had ever been stuck on the bathroom floor), a bad cold, and 3 minor colds.

I resumed workouts in mid-March. I got a whopping 4 workouts done before I pulled a muscle in my back by allowing my body to flop too low on a dip machine. (Did you know that a "muscle pull" is actually a small rip in a muscle?)

I gave it just over a week to heal, went back to the gym, and pulled the same muscle!

I took two and a half weeks off that time, which lead me up to a trip to out of town.

May was pretty good. I started over with 30-40 fewer pounds per exercise to build myself back up.

June was a total bust. Two major trips, too many after hours commitments, and a mild stomach virus stole my schedule.

Tomorrow is July 3. I will finally work out, but it will be the first time in 30 days.

I don’t see any major upcoming commitments, so hopefully I am starting another long run of workouts, like last fall.

All my life I have wanted to develop a better looking physique. Now I am well on my way.

Last summer, I probably looked like any other pasty computer nerd. Mediocre muscle tone, no particular strengths. Since then, I have regularly worked out at the SMU gym 3 times a week, concentrating on upper body exercises.

In that time, I have made considerable improvements on increasing my lower back strength. I can use all 190 pounds of weights on a torso rotation machine, and I can push 180 pounds of weight by extending my back on another machine.

I have also dramatically increased my arm strength; I can now do a few pull ups unassisted. (These are much harder than chin ups: palms facing away instead of towards your head.) I can also do several dips unassisted. I haven’t been able to do this since my undergraduate years when I held a marching baritone, the most difficult instrument to keep upright!

In the fall semester, I consistently worked out 3 times a week. I haven’t been able to maintain that schedule this spring.

For one, I caught 5 colds and a stomach virus in the 6 weeks following February 1. (Thanks, Alec!)

I also pulled a muscle in my back two weeks ago by allowing myself to go too low on the dip machine. I tried working out on Monday (10 days after pulling the muscle), but I only re-aggravated the muscle. This time I am sitting out for at least two weeks, and when I return, I will start with lower weights and build back up to where I was. Pulling muscles is a major problem because they take weeks to heal.

The only thing missing from my workout regimen is aerobic exercises. I need to get back into jogging. That is how I had planned to exercise my lower body. It’s difficult to make the time to jog with two classes and other commitments, but I look forward to resuming jogging once this semester ends and I gain back at least 12 hours a week.

I am at the best physical shape I have ever been in my life. I am beginning to get improved muscle tone. The only thing holding me back is a little pooge around my waist.

Now don’t misunderstand how I look. I am no He-Man, and I do not look anything like the Governator, and neither is my goal. Regardless, my newfound Adonis complex has propelled me well beyond where I used to be.

What is the nastiest thing done by otherwise reasonable people? They spit on everyone else’s food.

I don’t mean literally ejecting a wad of spit. It’s more insidious.

I used to attend a church that had an annual ice cream supper. This was great—as long as you were in front of a particular lady. She used her fingers to pull ice cream off the spoon and then thoroughly slurped her fingers between scooping each flavor. Now that I think of it, she did this with almost any wet food, not just ice cream. Yuck!

People who should know better spit on your food all the time. They lick fingers while cooking or serving, they put utensils in their mouth and then use them on community foods (such as using a personal spoon to scoop ice cream or repeatedly sampling foods with the same utensil while cooking), they redip items into queso or salsa, they place half eaten foods back into shared food sources, they cycle between scooping icing off an uncut cake with a finger then licking said finger, etc. Gross!

I see people doing nasty stuff like this all the time at salad bars and buffet restaurants like Golden Corral and Barnhill’s. Ever wonder why the serving spoons get sticky? Now you know.

For the sake of courtesy and disease prevention (all sorts of diseases are transmitted through saliva), please keep your spit to yourself. Wash your hands if they have been in your mouth, and only use clean utensils on shared food.

I believe that organic foods and gardening products are a silly and hypocritical fad.

According to Consumer Reports, “There is no definitive proof that organic produce offers a nutritional advantage over conventionally grown fruit and vegetables. Nor is it known how much risk is entailed in consuming the tiny quantities of pesticides on food over a lifetime.” (link to article)

Consumer Reports is a bastion for all causes liberal. If any wacko left wing group wants it, Consumer Reports is trumpeting it. As a case in point, Consumer Reports was an outspoken advocate of single payer socialized medicine in the ‘90s. It’s especially poignant that Consumer Reports says this about organic products.

In the absence of hard proof, how do you justify paying the steep premium for organic products? You use junk science or concoct junk theories. A common premise is that everything synthetic is poison. Go read Howard Garrett’s Dallas Morning News gardening column. He squeals like a girl when anyone mentions synthetic stuff.

Everything synthetic is poison? I’d hate to live in a world without modern medicine, much of which uses synthetic products.

Everything organic is good? Go make some tea out of the cyanide that my (now gone) Carolina laurel cherry produced. Or talk to the residents of Greece , Corsica, and Turkey who use naturally available tremolite to white wash their homes. Tremolite is full of asbestos, another naturally occuring substance. Or go check out the environmental impact of organic chemicals like rotenone, sabadilla, or even soap. (Want to know a good way to kill a tank of fish? Add soap. Read this link.)

Even more humorous, “A study by the Southwest Research Institute found that the amount of produce containing detectable levels of pesticide residue dropped by half with washed samples. Where residue remained, levels were reduced by 29 to 98 percent.” This is again from Consumer Reports. (link to article) This puts the pesticide levels of washed produce on par with organic products, which themselves contain a certain amount of background pesticide levels.

OK, so that argument fails. Aren’t carcinogenic synthetic pesticides and fertilizers causing cancer rates to rise? Not according to the American Cancer Society.

Well, aren’t organic products more environmentally sensitive? Not at all!

A mantra of the green movement is “use less.” Use less food, use less gasoline, use less paper, use less of everything. Inconvenient fact: organic products cost substantially more than traditional foods. It’s in large part because organic farming is substantially less productive than contemporary farming methods. Ultimately the increased price reflects the increased resource consumption required to produce the organic product.

Organic products have no health benefit and are less environmentally friendly. Why do people buy them? I suspect it’s in large part a fad and a social statement. The social statement aspect is severely misguided, like buying a SUV to give the appearance of being in touch with nature.

Trilia made some interesting comments on my fruit juice diatribe:

As someone who has been paying a lot of attention to healthy foods in recent days, I have to disagree with this assertion. Soft drinks generally do contain less calories per ounce than an equal amount of fruit juice, but as you show, the difference is about 50-100 calories. This amount can easily be compensated for with about 20 minutes of moderate exercise.

Also, soft drinks provide no nutritional benefit, carbonated drinks can make acid reflux and fluid retention worse, and their added caffeine has been linked to bone loss (possibly by not allowing calcium absorption). Juices, although stripped of a majority of the fruit’s nutritional content, still contain vitamins and aren’t going to bloat you like the Goodyear Blimp. I’m not saying skip the fruit for a juice, but if I have a choice between Coke and orange juice, I’ll take the juice.

It is true that fruit juices contain nutrients that soft drinks don’t, but these nutrients come with problems. If you eat reasonably, you already get “enough” nutrients and do not need supplements. So by adding fruit juices to your diet, you may be getting “too many” nutrients. I have yet to see convincing data suggesting that the average person benefits from more than “enough.” In fact, studies pop up here and there saying that more than “enough” can harm you.

Trilia suggested you can exercise an extra “20 minutes” (a day?) to counteract the fruit juices. Suppose you normally exercise 30 minutes a day, every day. That mean the first 20 minutes has no net benefit; it just counteracts fruit juice. Why not quit drinking fruit juices, thereby making all 30 minutes of exercise a productive effort?

I guess I wasn’t clear on one point. The absolute best hydrating substance for almost every situation is plain water. My point in comparing fruit juices to soft drinks is to show that fruit juices make you fatter than a form of junk food.

Edited on 1-31-06: Old article links is broken (thanks, CNN!), added new article link.

A highly ignorant belief is that fruit juice is better for you than soft drinks. Consider the following chart, showing how many calories are stuffed into a 12 oz serving of each kind of drink:

(Figures from http://www.nutritiondata.com/. Note that 12 oz is the size of a traditional can of soda.)

The trend is obvious: fruit juices are packed with far more empty calories than soft drinks.

Some people justify fruit juices because they are supposedly full of vitamins. In fact, fruit juices’ vitamin concentration can be inferior to that of whole fruits. But suppose it isn’t inferior? Believe it or not, there is such a thing as “enough.” If you get “enough” vitamins, additional vitamins aren’t any help. Fruit juices are an unnecessary vitamin source because you can get more than “enough” vitamins from a reasonable diet.

Another common justification of fruit juices is that they are “natural.” Well, guess what, smarty pants? A calorie of fruit sugar makes you just as fat as a calorie of refined sugar.

Fruit juices are clearly not a healthy alternative to soft drinks unless your health goal is to maximize your waist size.

Except for the rare time that I give my toddler some juice, I haven’t regularly stocked any kind of fruit juice in my house in years. We just eat whole fruits. I already have a hard enough time controlling my weight without juices.

Recently Texas started reducing soft drink availability at schools. Unfortunately, Texas politicians still pretend that fruit juice is good for you, so fruit juice remains as available as ever.

Recent CNN article about fat preschoolers and fruit juice.

Newer CBS article about sweet drinks, including fruit juices, and flabby kids

I have two problems with the way I eat.

The first problem is I have huge cravings for sweets. It usually hits around 9 or 10 every night, but I will go through phases where it hits me in the afternoons at work. I want ice cream, cake, cookies, candy. Mostly sweets and carbohydrates with fats mixed in for flavor.

I don’t want this because of any need. I almost always eat enough food at lunch and supper. I just want it because of craving.

The second problem is that when I go out I tend to order a lot and eat everything on my plate. For example, I get the 12 oz. steak instead of the 8 oz., and I totally clean my plate. This habit can get me really burned out on restaurants on vacations, and I usually feel bad after wards.

I know I’m not alone. I see these problems happening in other people all the time.

How will these excess calories will impact my long-term health?

There’s no time for any more thinking right now. I have a big piece of lemon cake from my wife’s grandmother waiting for me in the refrigerator.