This is a real cookie with the nutritional facts printed in edible ink. Too bad all cookies aren’t like this one. If they were, I imagine most people might think twice about throwing them back by the handful. This particular one contains 35 grams of carb, which is the equivalent of almost a quarter of a cup of pure sugar. It makes my insulin skyrocket just looking at the picture.
Link (Hat tip: Boingboing.net)
The official website of Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, low carb pioneers and authors of Protein Power.
Almost all packaging in Canada has a nutrition label just like that one. If there is also French on the package, it was probably packaged for Canada.
George–
All foods packaged in the US have this exact label (with different numbers, of course). The point is that this isn’t a packaged food; this is a cookie with the nutritional label printed in edible ink right on the icing of the cookie. It’s not in a package. In this case you would eat the label as you eat the cookie.
Cheers–
MRE
Pretty clever, I wish all sugar-ladden things would come with the carb count printed right on them.
Speaking of a quarter cup of sugar, I watched a pregnant co-worker fix herself a large helping of oatmeal for breakfast last week in one of those pyrex mixing bowls. The firm has one of those glass sugar dispensers with a pour spout on the lid and she upended it over her oatmeal and mixed in what easily had to be a 1/3-1/2 cup of sugar. All I could think was that poor baby is already getting a good hit of suger and s/he isn’t even born yet. But hey, at least it was low-fat!
If she is in the first trimester is was definitely affecting the development of the fetal pancreas, making it more prone to lead to insulin resistance later on. I hate to see things like that happening.
MRE
35 g of carbs per cookie? Egads! And who eats just one cookie at a sitting?
That’s my point. If I saw those numbers staring me in the face I would be hard put to down the thing.
MRE
If you don’t eat the icing around the Carbohydrates numbers, does it make it a carb free meal?
Good idea! Let’s give it a try.
Cheers–
MRE
I didn’t even notice at first that everything was printed on the cookie itself!!
I’ve seen cookie packages here (NC) that appear to be a single serving….4-6 cookies per pack. And the serving size is 1 cookie. In that case, I suspect the serving size is due to transfat content.
I think it is much more insidious than could be imagined. Eat the cookie, and all the nutritional information is lost forever. A big zero. Perfect marketing… out of sight, out of mind!
Imagine having an actual label to refer back to? Oops! It’s gone… we’ll just fugetaboutit.
Marketing genius at work. Make the label disappear (in a fun way to boot), and the food becomes a zero. Forgotten about in a few minutes.
Very insidious…
I never thought of it that way. No empty wrapper with the nutritional facts of your debauch staring you in the face. Perhaps it is marketing genius at work. And, no one can ever question whether the label was accurate or not.
Cheers–
MRE
Paul B. says:
April 24th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
35 g of carbs per cookie? Egads! And who eats just one cookie at a sitting?
That’s my point. If I saw those numbers staring me in the face I would be hard put to down the thing.
MRE
But how much sadder that most people would be hard put to put the thing down!
Madeline Mason
Sad but true.
On a marginally related topic:
Was hoping for some discussion of the farm bill as it sets nations food priorities, especially towards low income people.
Mike Pollan (of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame) wrote an interesting piece in the Times’ Magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=21a1c58f763d5c1d&ex=1178164800&emc=eta1
Curious to your comments, particularly on the first half of page 1.
Hi Max–
I was hoping to post on that very topic. I read the article when it came out on Sunday and planned to post on it, but I spend so much time dealing with the endless comments I get that I don’t have time because I do have a life and other things to do besides deal with this blog.
I spent over three hours yesterday dealing with comments; got up this morning and have worked the last two and a half hours dealing with comments and still have half a dozen left to go.
I’m either going to have to quit answering comments, which seems to be what most other bloggers do. They are comments, after all, on what I’ve written. But, for whatever reason, I feel compelled to come up with some kind of answer because most of the comments are written as questions.
Got any solutions?
Cheers–
MRE
I suppose I can stop writing long comments 😉
Or maybe an email link for questions.
FWIW – Even though I just dumped an OT Q in this one, maybe not answering questions off topic.
At any rate, if you drop comment response, probably comments will drop. Right now, it’s free info, so demand will be unlimited. That said, fewer comment responses might = fewer readers. As an occasional blogger (max-leads-on.blogspot.com being my current non-interesting project), I know that’s never the goal.
It is, in the words of the King of Siam, a puzzlement.
Hi Max–
It is indeed a puzzlement.
It seems that the comments that take the longest to deal with are the ones I receive whenever I post anything of a political nature. Even things that I would never imagine people would take issue with (the one about the Muslim cleric describing the best way to beat one’s wife, for instance) inspire long comments in the form of arguments about my commenting in the post about my take on the subject. My first impulse was to simply post the comment and be done with it without any commentary on my part. Then I figured that since I do comment on most comments, that the absence of a comment would imply that I considered my arguments overwhelmed by those of the commenter, and that I couldn’t mount a counter argument. I would then comment on the comment, and, sure enough, here would come an even longer comment the finer points of my counter argument. Then I would counter and, as the King of Siam said, “and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.” I would end up finding myself in a long-winded debate over something in which I have no real expertise (I’m a nutrition expert, not a policy wonk) with someone else whom I suspect has as little expertise as I. It’s all opinion. And pretty heated opinion, at that.
Perhaps the best strategy is to simply post all the comments to any political issue without a counter post and reply or comment on the ones that are of a nutritional nature where what I have to say has some value. Or maybe I can append to each comment on a political post something along the lines of: Here’s your comment. You’re obviously a moron. I don’t have time to answer;)
Right now, for example, I have three loooong comments queued up. It took each of the commenters as long to think about them and write them as it will take me to think about them and answer them. Difference is, they have to do this once; I have to do it three times (or more). Meanwhile good blog fodder such as the Michael Pollen article in the Times stacks up unposted on because I have only so much time in the day to devote to this blog.
BTW, I checked out your blog and was crushed to discover that I wasn’t on your blogroll and that when you described the
I was not included;)
Thanks for at least thinking about my conundrum.
Cheers–
MRE
So, I had a solution that came to me about your blog time management problem. I should mention, I’m reading (and finishing) Getting Things Done by David Allen. And his thing is always focusing on the next action.
So, new system: First, the goals:
Generate more conversation on topics of interest to Mike Eades.
When you sit down to work on the blog: first thing: write your new post. Then, handle comments.
On comments: You could pick one day a week to make sure you have cleaned out all the comments and given responses as you feel necessary.
Additionally: You can post your own comments as a separate comment, rather than a specific comment response. So, instead of answering all the people who commented on the Arab woman who doesn’t want to cover her face, answer the ones with the more piquant comments en masse.
Last thing: on my leadership blog that is of interest to few other than me, I wrote the mutually enhancing, I wasn’t a regular reader/commenter here. Only once a week or so. I will correct the blogroll oversight immediately, though.
Hi Max–
I read David Allen’s book myself years ago, but alas I only followed its advice for a few weeks before falling back into my old habits.
I plan on posting first, then answering comments. I answer way too many comments than I need to. Many are just that: comments. They don’t require an answer. I’ve started just posting them and plan to continue.
Your idea is a good one about answering the comments in masse instead of individual comments on the same issue. Problem is that someone posts a comment on a subject, and I answer it. Then someone else posts a comment on the same thing. Then another, and another. By that time I’ve answered them all.
I’ve noticed among blog readers that there are comment readers and there are readers who never read the comments. I fall into the latter category in the blogs I read regularly. I’ll look at the comments once in a blue moon, but not very often. I read the blog to see what the blogger has to say, not what his (or her) readers have to say about what the blogger has said. I’m sure there are many readers of my blog that do the same thing. When I don’t come up with fresh material because I’m mired in dealing with comments, they lose out. And I suspect that many people read the blog, and look for their own comment to be posted, yet don’t read the other comments posted previously, otherwise they would see that their question had already been answered a half dozen times.
Ah, what to do, what to do?
At least thanks for thinking of me.
Cheers–
MRE
Interesting comment about Twinkies and the farm bill. This is from the blog called The Volokh Conspiracy.
“[Todd Zywicki, April 27, 2007 at 2:27pm] Trackbacks
Obesity and Farm Subsidies:
I just came across this article that argues that one cause of rising obesity, especially among lower-income families, is farm subsidies. The key, it seems, is that the nature of farm subsidies has changed over time. They were once designed to keep prices artificially high, which of course, would have made food more expensive. The article says that today, by contrast, farm subsidies are tied to production, thus subsidizing increased output. The result is to drive down the price of the least healthful foods relative to others:
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.
Rather than the many silly ideas for combatting obesity that we often hear today, one would think that getting rid of farm subsidies for less-healthy foods would make sense, not to mention the budget savings. But I’m not holding my breath.
(When I initially posted this I had a grammatical glitch in the final paragraph which I have tried to remedy).”
Hi Marjorie–
The article in question was by Michael Pollan, and was in last week’s New York Times Magazine.
Cheers–
MRE