My good friend and frequent co-author, Bailey Norwood, has - for years - been working on a book of historical fiction. The book has finally been released for sale, and at a price of $0.99, how could you pass it up? If you're looking for some entertainment and education (you'll get to learn about agriculture and serfdom in pre-Soviet Russia along with some nice economic lessons), I highly recommend it.
Blog
Obesity Myths
Last week, I gave a talk at the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. It turns out that several of the folks I met with published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine a day after my talk entitled, "Myths, Presumptions, and Facts about Obesity." Here is an expert from the coverage at New York Times, in interviews with the team leader, David Allison:
His first thought was that, of course, weighing oneself daily helped control weight. He checked for the conclusive studies he knew must exist. They did not.
“My goodness, after 50-plus years of studying obesity in earnest and all the public wringing of hands, why don’t we know this answer?” Dr. Allison asked. “What’s striking is how easy it would be to check. Take a couple of thousand people and randomly assign them to weigh themselves every day or not.”
Yet it has not been done.
Instead, people often rely on weak studies that get repeated ad infinitum. It is commonly thought, for example, that people who eat breakfast are thinner. But that notion is based on studies of people who happened to eat breakfast. Researchers then asked if they were fatter or thinner than people who happened not to eat breakfast — and found an association between eating breakfast and being thinner. But such studies can be misleading because the two groups might be different in other ways that cause the breakfast eaters to be thinner. But no one has randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not, which could cinch the argument.
As their study shows, there are no easy "quick fixes" to the state of obesity in America.
Meet Your Meat
I just returned from giving at talk at the International Production and Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta. According to the organizers, there were over 25,000 people in attendance from all aspects of the livestock, poultry, and egg production and processing industries. I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration (in fact it may be an under-estimation) to say that there were two football field sized halls full of exhibits.
While the expo was filled with lots of folks involved in livestock and meat production, I wish the "average" food consumer could have walked through the place (you can get a brief glance by checking out the video at the bottom of this page). What they would have seen is an overwhelming number of technological marvels designed to make meat and eggs safer, tastier, healthier, and less expensive. There were new insulated boxes to make shipping safer and more convenient, egg production facilities that were larger and provided more amenities for hens, automated technologies that keep workers from having to engage in some of the more unpleasant parts of the slaughter process, new medicines to improve animal health, technologies to improve worker health, new spices and flavors to improve taste, and on and on.
There are those who seem to want agribusiness and large farms out of agriculture. But, where do they think improvements in health, safety, and quality originate? I hear a lot about the need to improve transparency in agriculture. My advice to the event organizers for next year? Give out a slew of tickets to the general public. If the general public is more troubled than comforted by what they see, the meat industry really is doomed.
PETA has a video and exhibition featuring Paul McCartney called "glass walls." McCartney claims that if meat processing facilities had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. There are thousands of years of human experience (during which the typical person was "closer" to animal agriculture) that would seem to contradict McCartney's claim. Although I could be wrong, I think a visit to something like the IPPE (and making the walls glass) would have exactly the opposite effect McCartney claims.
Summer School on Experimental Auctions
Pardon the public service announcement, but I wanted to let readers know that applications are now being accepted for a summer school I've co-taught on Experimental Auctions for the past 2 years in Italy. Experimental auctions are a technique used to measure consumer willingness-to-pay for new food products, which in turn is used to project demand, market share, and benefits/costs of public policies. We've had a fantastic time the past two years and I'm looking forward to the third, which was just approved for credit hours by the University of Bologna. The content is mainly targeted toward graduate students or early career professionals (or marketing researchers interested in learning about a new technique). You can find out more here and register here.
For a little enticement, here are some pictures of the previous years' classes.
Howard Stern and me
Below is an article in which it is the first (and likely last) time some of my research was associated with Howard Stern. The article appeared in MeatingPlace and discusses some research I conducted on Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) with Glynn Tonsor, Ted Schroeder, and Mykel Taylor at K-State (thus the mention of the Kansas State University Study).
Stern's comments are interesting. So objectifying women and running a show celebrating transvestite hookers - ok. Eating bacon - not ok?
Where do my co-authors and I go from here? Maybe an interview on MCOOL with Jerry Springer?
