Posts by BenWilson
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"Getting cars off roads" doesn't seem like the best way to sell the CRL, since it might not happen. What will happen is increased capacity. More trips per hour into the city will be possible than before. How long the trips take is still dependent on how many trips people make, which is a function of many things the go far beyond just how long the average length of the trips are. We could build the link and yet still have steadily increasing traffic density. But we'd also have fat pipe capable of delivering an extra 15,000 people per hour, which is the equivalent of 6 motorway lanes. It's like building an entirely new motorway out to everywhere that the trains already go, without having to find somewhere to park all the cars that could drive on it. That's well worth the money.
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Nationally, we don’t elect a president and a parliament of FPP MPs who might or might not have confidence in that president.
Which is both a good and a bad thing. It means that the most powerful person and the most powerful party are aligned, giving far more power to the leadership. We're fond of having the no division between executive and legislative bodies. but it's not the only way things can be done, and it's not without disadvantages. The obvious one being that it has way more power to do wrong as well as more power to do right. It also means that the most powerful person in the country may not be the person wanted by even a plurality - particularly if the head position changes between elections.
I'm pretty sure I don't want a mayor who would be chosen by the current council.
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to George Darroch,
Can someone near to Phil Goff get him to promise free pools across the city?
I'd find it hard to believe, even if he did promise it, especially coming from him.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Emma Hart,
If it was as simple as ‘energy in, energy out’, then everybody’s results would be the same.
Sort of. It is that simple, but finding how much energy went in and how much went out is very difficult and inaccurate, particularly in short term calculations.
Also, of course, there's way, way more to health than weight. So we have to factor in those other concerns. Of course you'll lose weight really fast if you starve yourself. That's also extremely unhealthy. Even if you have a "healthy" weight that you maintain you could still have a very unhealthy diet, and could have very poor cardiovascular health too. But given that one wants to do something about one's weight, of course the energy equation is important.
It’s very difficult to lose weight through exercise alone.
Yes, food makes up the lion's share of the energy equation. We can eat far more than we can exercise, easily. We're evolved that way, probably because there's huge survival advantage in it. We're damned efficient animals, part
But perhaps we could all go out and enjoy the sunshine today.
I'm gonna whale on my quads and abs, personally. It's indicative of your prior point that the total energy burn of an hour of doing that, with all the muscle soreness that will follow, is worth about 1 muesli bar. I exercise to be healthy. For weight loss, I control my diet. Others can do as they please, but
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Danielle,
Most of your post drives me nuts because it assumes that if you’re obese you can’t, by definition, be fit or healthy.
Yes, I already write at far too great a length to have to reiterate points like that I reject that assumption constantly. I'm just moving ahead there with "Given the assumption that you want to reduce obesity". It's not necessarily true, and I lead in with that on the thread, but one can discuss how one might do that on the conditional assumption that it's true. That could be a productive discussion. Note, even in the post you're criticizing I end with the very condition you are stating that I make as an assumption:
if we come to an earnest conclusion that something must be done (which I think is still not settled, nor ever will be).
Reframing the discussion as "What can be done to get people healthier, wrt to their exercise and eating habits" is also worthwhile. The thread kind of presumes we're in agreement that getting the Government's Childhood Obesity plan working better is the topic of discussion, but sure, challenging that presumption doesn't hurt.
It also assumes that ALL obese people are fat because they eat a lot. That’s also bullshit.
It is. The line between too much and not enough is wafer thin. To maintain an exact weight, you have to keep adjusting, more if you're below, less if you're above. And you only have to be a little above for a sustained period for the cumulative gains to build. Which is extremely hard to judge, because there's massive variability bewteen individuals in how much is absorbed from a quantity of food, and how much is output in a quantity of exercise, and their BMR. For people that eat identical food, the weight they will reach can vary hugely.
None of which refutes the point that the amount you eat affects your weight. It just means that comparing between individuals is not robust.
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I actually tried sardines on wholegrain toast last night, for a laugh, just to see if it measured up to fish and chips. I had forgotten how tasteless sardines are, and how stinky. I think I'd have to mix them up with something like tomato or chopped onions to actually enjoy them. Or probably I'd pay the extra 20 cents and have fish I like more, salmon and/or tuna, pre-mixed. On the flipside I don't personally like fish and chips that much. The enjoyment is more about a cultural touchstone than because this is food I think is boss. It's basically too rich, and at the same time too unsatisfying, so I tend to eat too much of it, feel sick, and wonder why I did it.
Afterwards, I had misgivings about teasing Katherine, and feel like apologizing. Everyone was being obtuse all round and it derailed a thread on a real issue. Mind you, I don't think the thread had much legs until it got all het up anyway, which goes to the sorry state of a lot of internet discussion.
Katherine's had her first team beating courtesy of PAS. I feel a bit dirty. I don't want to relitigate any of the fight.
Can we reboot back 24 hours? Megan had a bunch of suggestions that were alternatives to using the tax man to attempt population wide dietary regulation. I thought: Yes, they're alternatives, and and no, they probably won't have any really effect either. Not on obesity, that is, although all of them would lead to improved quality of life for a lot of people.
To me, getting people to actually eat better is a mystery. Being in control of at least 2 other human being's food intake (my children), it's clear that there is quite a wide variability in what can be acheived by any measures. They are raised in the same house with the same parents with the same rules and the same food. But they have completely different eating habits.
In other families with children that we know, there is variability too. It could be tempting to tut-tut at the obese Samoan mum whose daughter was my eldest's best friend when he started school, and has steadily got more and more chubby as the years since kindergarten have passed. But none of her other kids are like that. There's just the one. Having spent a lot of time with them, it seems to me like there's no real problem with the type of food offered. The problem is just that this one child likes to eat a lot more than the others, and it's available. For her, the problem isn't what she's eating, it really is how much.
I don't know how you control that - it's not a problem I've faced, for me it's been the opposite problem all along.
Perhaps some of it is a lack of any genuine will to do anything about it anyway. All of the women in the family that I've seen so far have been overweight to obese. Perhaps they would choke on the hypocrisy of trying to keep food under lock and key so that the little one can't overeat? Perhaps they don't even think being overweight is a bad thing, perhaps it's cultural? I don't think so, it's just a perhaps. From overheard comments, most of the women would prefer not to be fat. But it might not be a high priority. If so, there's a huge cultural momentum to shift, if we come to an earnest conclusion that something must be done (which I think is still not settled, nor ever will be).
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
There’s a good documentary, (I think it’s called) Supersize Me. Watch it.
It's a doco about what happens if you eat so much McDonalds every day, for every meal, that you feel sick, but you force it down anyway, because you want to deliberately damage your health. I'm pretty sure that McDonalds never claimed that doing that would be a good idea. It would also happen if you ate only sardines for every meal and forced it down until you were on the verge of actually vomiting, the way that guy did. I mean we're talking about an upsized McDonalds combo worth of sardines 3 times a day. That's going to be something like 10 cans per sitting. I think you'd probably last longer on the McDonalds.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Sacha,
heck – where? #cheap
Out here in da hood, where us poor folk live :-). I didn't actually weigh the chips to be sure the serving was 400g, but it wouldn't have been far off - it was about the size of 2 cups. The whole package would have been about a liter, densely packed, maybe 800g of food.
Since I've been calorie counting (well actually kJ counting), I've come to realize that things like hot chips contain ridiculous amounts of energy. Not much else, but they're definitely energy dense. It's by no means a food that's a good idea to eat daily, even if you do burn a lot of energy in your job - exercise demands a lot more protein or you get muscle wastage. 1000 calories is like an hour and a half of cycling to burn off. Just in the chips - which is only the padding in a fish-and-chips meal.
Of course I'm not suggesting it should be eaten every day. That's a bad idea and a good recipe for obesity, and/or other serious health issues - I'll give Katherine that. Where I differ is not in thinking it's a bad idea as a primary food source, but in what to do about that. Rising obesity is a problem. I don't think we really understand why at a deep level - obviously at a superficial level we understand it perfectly well - people eat more than they burn. But why do they? Why is this changing? What's different? What public measures have been effective in kerbing obesity around the world? At what cost? Is that cost acceptable to us, here?
To me, it's an extraordinarily wrongheaded idea that increasing the cost of unhealthy foods will have much effect, to the point of outweighing the damage that it could do. Of the two social ills we could have, obesity or malnutrition, I think I would prefer a society that had obesity, frankly.
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I'm just doing the maths here. On the links Katherine gave, a serving of chips (which cost me exactly $1 about 40 minutes ago) contains nearly a thousand calories, whereas the sardine can contains nearly 200. So we get 5 times as much calories in the chips, for 20c less. You could probably make up the difference with 9 slices of bread, but I don't think a standard loaf has 36 slices in it. You'd need 2. Presumably the toast has some kind of spread, perhaps butter, margarine, or maybe blood squeezed from a local stone. Better factor in how much of that you spread on 36 slices of bread - then we've got a valid comparison in cost to the chips pile. There's about 20 minutes of preparation in all of that too - even with my 4-at-a-time toaster. Most of my own time would be spent buttering the toast, and stretching the 10grams of fish across each slice.
I'm being a bit silly, of course. I'm sure the idea wasn't to eat the equivalent in nutrition to the fish and chips, but to eat less. Which is why it's also less fattening. It's probably more like 2 slices of bread each, for a grand total of maybe 500 calories apiece, at a cost of around $2 each if you really take all the monetary costs into account and don't count your own efforts as a cost.
Of course I didn't buy only the chips - $1 chips each is far too much. That was $1 chips in total. I also got chicken nuggets, deep fried wings and wontons. A fair hit of protein there, and admittedly a lot of fat. Total cost: $8.80. There would be upwards of 2000 calories in that pile. It could have fed all of us. But it didn't because I personally had some other stuff (I don't like deep fried food myself much, if I buy from a takeaway shop it's usually a burger). There was leftovers, which we ditched into the bokashi. I actually had garlic prawns that I made myself from fresh chili and garlic out of the garden, and about $2 worth of frozen prawns.
The little one didn't really eat much - he never does. The chicken nuggets, a couple of chips, 3 little chicken wings. The older child ate a massive amount. One could think I'm a terrible dad for being bloody glad he ate so much, but considering that he's spent most of his life underweight, and only in the last year has he finally begun to converge from below on normal in size and strength, I think I can be forgiven for trying to fatten him up and would feel quite bitter to be taxed on it. His strength gains have been tremendous this year.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Someone referred to fizzy drink as food.
Indeed. Even my children know that is actually a drink.
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