Parents Eat More Saturated Fat Than People With No Kids, Says Study [Health]

A study from the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one of the first to examine the eating habits of adults at different stages of parenthood, has found that the first seven years are the most difficult for parents to remain conscious of establishing nutritional boundaries and staples for themselves and their child. The reasons for this are pretty intuitive: every day is suddenly more chaotic, according to one mother interviewed. She had maintained a healthy diet and exercise plan before she had a child, but slipped after her daughter arrived, saying "Admittedly, I just wanted to hang out with [her.]"

Additionally, harried new parents are more likely to bring into the house what the study's author, Dr. Helena Laroche, refers to as "convenience foods," high in saturated fat. She says that her study's results clearly indicate that a little time needs to be taken to plan a healthy eating regimen. "Parenting is the great teachable moment when you can make sure the whole family eats well, because kids do want to eat what you eat," says Laroche.

For her part, the mother cited at the beginning downloaded an app that adds only nutritional staples to her grocery list in an attempt to avoid junk food and now shops at a farmer's market. But for parents to whom neither apps or farmers markets are readily available, it's somewhat more difficult to come by these easy solutions—something that may be worth its own study.

'New parent? Watch the saturated fat' [CNN]

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Saturday Night Social: Why Do We Care About These People? [Video]

Aug 11, 2012 6:30 PM  

"No. Oh, no, no, no..."

"Just a bunch of people, on drugs and steroids..."

"Oh my God, they're violent too?"

"That's not nice."

"This is so confusing, I don't even know what I'm watching."

—an assortment of dismayed baby boomers were taped to a chair, eyelids peeled open a la Clockwork Orange and shown clips of MTV's Jersey Shore, and this is what happened.

Have a good Saturday evening!

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Self-Conscious People Are Thoroughly Reviled Just for Being Self-Conscious, Which Doesn't Help Things [Paranoia]

In case you weren't awkward enough in the myriad of social situations you're violently tossed into throughout your daily routine, a new study from the London Business School into how people gossip about other people behind their backs will confirm all of your paranoid fantasies about your co-workers all conspiring to not invite you to Wednesday cookie cake night. Demonstrating a healthy, measured interest in what people are saying about you is fine, — advantageous, even — but if you're extremely self-conscious, your peers will think it's weird and talk about how weirdly self-conscious you are behind your back.

The study, which sports the pithy title "Do I want to know? How the motivation to acquire relationship-threatening information in groups contributes to paranoid thought, suspicion behavior and social rejection," figured out that nosy people really do lose their noses if they start fixating on what other people are saying about them. Lead researcher Jennifer Mason Carr and her colleagues found that, while gathering information reduces uncertainty and "gives people a greater sense of control and predictability over their environments," too zealous a search for information can be off-putting, prompting people who weren't gossiping about a colleague before to start gossiping about that person's obvious paranoia.

Researchers identified two types of information gatherers — "blunters," who avoid gathering information at all costs by putting their hands to their ears and humming "Flight of the Valkyries" at an unreasonable decibel, and "monitors," who root out information with the tenacity of pigs sniffing for truffles. Monitors are more likely, during their search for information about what other people are saying about them, to become paranoid and, as a result, incorrectly assess social situations. In bungling those social interactions, say the researchers, monitors often precipitate the very negative situations they're desperately trying to avoid. "Just like Oedipus!" exclaims Sigmund Freud, twirling a cigar from beyond the grave. The study authors explained that a monitor's paranoid thinking often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Drawing from theories of motivated social cognition and symbolic interactionism, we hypothesize that this motivation is associated with paranoid thought patterns and suspicion behaviors that can anger other group members and lead them to reject those who actively search for evidence that others are secretly trying to harm them.

In order to figure out how MARTI ("motivation to acquire relationship threatening information") affects people, researchers told 102 study participants to perform a certain task, suggesting that some members of the group were doing a better job or were in a "more advantageous position than other members. The participants were then asked if they wanted to exclude certain people from their imaginary endeavor. Anyone who possessed high MARTI qualities was, on average, 3.63 times more likely to be excluded, because nobody wants to hang around a grouchy old group-member like Pierce Hawthorne, who spends all his time recording conversations and thinking of ways to outsmart the very people whom he purportedly cooperates with.

If You Think Your Coworkers Are Talking About You, They Probably Are [Business Insider]

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Hoarders Are Just Extremely Indecisive People [Hoarders]

A new study led by Yale University School of Medicine's David Tolin has discovered that those maddeningly oblivious hoarders we gape at on TLC aren't especially keen on collecting as many lawn gnome limbs or paper towel rolls — they just can't decide which of their many worldly possessions they really want to get rid of.

In an effort to figure out how a hoarder's brain may differ from the brain of an otherwise healthy adult (or someone with OCD), Tolin and his fellow colleagues shrunk their magic school bus to the size of a neuron and entered the brains of 43 adults diagnosed with hoarding disorder. Or that's what they would have done if life was actually the whimsical children's cartoon we all wish it was — Tolin & co. gathered 43 hoarders, 31 adults with OCD and 33 healthy control adults to undergo fMRI brain scans. The subjects also had to bring in stacks of 50 miscellaneous papers (newspapers, grocery lists, unfinished lists of things to discard) from their homes, which were intermingled with 50 random objects provided by the researchers. Objects were projected into each subject's field of view in the fMRI machine and subjects were asked whether they wanted to keep or discard the projected object (the objects were later destroyed for real, just so the researchers could see some genuine tears).

Controls discarded an average of 40 objects, while subjects with OCD discarded an average 37 objects. Subjects with hoarding disorder only discarded an average of 29 items, which isn't all that surprising, but Tolin and his team did notice that it took hoarding subjects longer than healthy controls (2.8 seconds compared to 2.3 seconds) to make a decisions about discarding objects. The hoarding subjects also demonstrated significantly more anxiety, indecisiveness and sadness in trying to choose items for scientific sacrifice than either the controls or the subjects with OCD.

When deciding whether or not to discarded someone else's items, hoarders registered relatively low activity in both the anterior cingulate cortex (associated with detecting mistakes during uncertain conditions), as well as the mid- to anterior insula (linked to risk assessment, importance of stimuli and emotional decisions). However, hoarding subjects showed much higher activity in both of those areas than controls or OCD subjects when deciding on their own objects. Tolin and his team have suggested, therefore, that hoarders are not really interested in accumulating a whole bunch of crap — they just can't decide what to keep and what to get rid of because they attach an inordinate amount of importance to seemingly inconsequential decisions. Getting rid of an object, to someone with hoarding disorder, carries with it a risk that is simply too overpowering to ignore. So, instead of purging their closets, cabinets and underbeds of all the bleach-splotched clothes, cracked crockery and monsters like the rest of us, they just keep accumulating possessions out of indecision. "The slower decision-making," note Tolin and the super science squad, "may be a central feature of impaired decision making in hoarding."

So, just remember — if you find yourself slowly accumulating New Yorker magazines because you're planning to make a timeline of your New Yorker-reading career and absolutely cannot abide leaving out a single cover, it's probably time to burn all of your New Yorkers in a druidic bonfire. Invite your neighbors, buy some marshmallows. It'll be a gas. Otherwise, you might end up as that one effete hoarder on TLC talking sententiously to the audience about John Cheever.

Scans of Hoarders' Brains Reveal Why They Never De-Clutter [Scientific American]

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I Know You're Mad at Chick-fil-A, But Stop Taking It Out on Fat People [Chick-Fil-A]

If you're like me, you're probably pretty mad at Chick-Fil-A for being a bunch of bigoted medieval anti-gay dickheads. And rightfully so. I mean, what geological epoch is this? What kind of a fucking petrified, exhumed garbage pharaoh do you have to be to maintain the drive and energy to hate gay people in 2012—let alone have the expansive, drooping ballsack to do it in public? Gay people are hella mainstream these days. Gay people are human beings and citizens and artists and doctors and parents and children and assholes and firemen and people just like the rest of us. Among forward-thinking, socially responsible folks, this is some antiquated, unacceptable shit. But you know what apparently isn't some antiquated, unacceptable shit? Sticking up for gay people by abusing fat people. Great job, guys.

This week I started to see this image floating around Facebook and Twitter. It's a photo of a fat woman, from behind, head cropped, ass crowding the frame, sitting on a tiny chair with the Chick-Fil-A logo stuck on the back. The caption reads:

Welcome to Chick-Fil-A, where obesity is "genetic" but being gay is a "lifestyle choice."

Har har, said good liberals all across the internet. Har har. Good one.

Yesterday I came across a Facebook post from someone I really respect—a writer, a smart, liberal woman. She shared that old photo of Mike Huckabee's family—you know, the one where they had the gall to let their fat bodies be photographed (Existing While Fat in the First Degree!)—and captioned it:

Mike Huckabee telling people to eat at Chick-Fil-A is just a way to support his family's unhealthy alternative lifestyle.

Yes. Because when it comes to unrepentant bigot Mike Huckabee—a man who believes that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape or incest, who supports the death penalty and believes we should build more prisons, who opposes gun control and stem cell research, who thinks intelligent design should be taught in schools, who has called homosexuality "an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle" and a "dangerous public health risk," and who thinks that AIDS patients should be put in fucking internment camps—the most despicable thing about him is obviously his love of deep-fried sandwiches.

A quick search on Twitter revealed hundreds of tweets sidelining politics to decry Chick-Fil-A supporters for their gigantic asses.

To all the fat bigots who stood in line taking a stand for Chick-fil-A: I'm on to you. You were not enraged, you were just bored and hungry.

— Paula Pell (@perlapell) August 2, 2012

I guess Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day had a much nicer ring to it than Fat Bigot Day.

— Scott Huff (@nycHuff) August 2, 2012

Chubby Right Wingers gathered at Chick-fil-A today to eat fried fat and show support for the spread of diabetes. They called it “Wednesday".

— Fisher97X (@TheFisherShow) August 1, 2012

I laugh at people who say "I'm not stopping Chick-fil-A; their chicken is soo good!" Well, then, you're a big fat stupid pig Oink-Oink-Oink!

— Tom Kidd (@FabulousThomasJ) July 26, 2012

And so on.

This whole Chick-Fil-A debacle, it seems, is all fat people's fault. This might be a great week to be a chicken, but it's the fucking worst week to be a fat gay guy.

In case it's not overwhelmingly apparent, FAT PEOPLE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. There are fat conservatives, yes. But there are also fat liberals. There are fat gay people. There are thin conservatives. There are thin fast food consumers. There are bigoted athletes. There are gay chickens. Whatever.

You guys. Just be mad at the thing you're mad at.

Maybe you're telling yourself, "Well, they're not being civil, so why should I be civil?" Is that a real question? Because that's a staggeringly effective way to get nothing done.

Or maybe you're telling yourself, "Well, I just believe in personal responsibility, and people make choices in their lives, and if they make the wrong choices—unhealthy choices—then they deserve to face the consequences in the court of public opinion. That's my argument." Except no, wait. It's not. That's THEIR argument. That's the conservative bigot's argument about gay people.

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but people. PEOPLE. It is possible to be outraged about something without taking your rage out on something else. It is possible to protest the victimization of one vulnerable group without victimizing another vulnerable group. It is possible to be kind to everyone. Or, at least, it is possible to try.

We live in a culture where bullying is both socially acceptable and state-sanctioned. And it's that fucked-up aspect of our culture that makes Chick-Fil-A's anti-gay bullying a legitimate political stance rather than just the ramblings of some wacko fringe pariah. Our permissiveness around bullying is what's fueling this entire "debate." So to fight those bullies with bullying of our own isn't just counterintuitive—it contributes directly to the climate that keeps bigots like Chick-Fil-A above water.

Fat activist Marilyn Wann wrote the following on Facebook about that "lifestyle choice" meme:

It photoshops the Chick-Fil-A logo onto a photo that's long been used for fat-hate purposes and then attempts to oppose gay bashing by fat bashing. Fancy. It also demonstrates some of the beliefs by which people justify their weight bigotry: being fat is a choice; being thin is a choice; anyone who chooses to be fat deserves to be reviled and punished; anyone who chooses to be thin deserves to be praised and privileged; only fat people eat fried food or fast food; eating the wrong foods causes people to be fat; only fat people are homophobes, racists; only fat people destroy the environment and only thin people care about the environment; only southerners are fat; weight prejudice is a good kind of prejudice and something to be proud of; finger pointing and yelling, "Fat!" is a good way to make a convincing argument on totally unrelated issues but especially issues of social justice or the environment.

And that's the crux of it: No matter what you do with your life, if you are fat, people will only see fat. No matter how generous, kind, and productive you are; no matter how much you contribute to society or take care of other people; you're just some fucking fatass whose physical laziness is only outstripped by your mental laziness. As if your butt size has some direct correlation with your moral fiber.

Really, socially responsible liberals? Is that really the message you want to align yourselves with in the name of equality?

The owners and supporters of Chick-Fil-A are people who want to strip your friends and family members of their humanity. These are proud adulterers, self-righteous divorcés, self-loathing closet-cases, and unrepentant hypocrites who want to tear families apart in the name of "preserving" families. They want to stop grieving partners from saying goodbye to their dying loved ones. They're contributing to and vehemently defending a culture in which gay children are dying. And they're proud of it.

And after all that, the most potent criticism you can come up with is that they're fat? Do they have cooties, too? Come on. Try harder. I thought you guys were in it to win it.

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Facebook Is a Great Place to Network with People Who Don't Exist [Facebook]

The other week, I got a random Facebook friend request from a suspiciously modelesque shirtless dude who sent me a message that read "I wish to accept friendship." We had no friends in common. My coworker Dodai got a similar request with the same message but from a totally different person. Were we among the chosen few humans who were among the first to be contacted by a small race of self-aware robots who existed only as Facebook pages? Nope— turns out, fake Facebook profiles are incredibly common. How common? Try 83 million common.

According to The Guardian, today, Facebook admitted that four score million and three million of the massive social network's users aren't actually people — that's 8.7% of the site's entire user base. Fake profiles belong to people's pets, duplicate profiles that paranoid people maintain in case a future employer asks for their social networking password, miscategorized pages for businesses and other non-human entities, and 14 million accounts that exist solely to spam people. The surprisingly unsurprising numbers were revealed in the company's first quarterly report to investors. Its stock is currently worth about 20 bucks a pop on the market, down from a $38 initial offering price. Buy buy buy! (That's a joke joke joke).

So the next time you get a weird rando friend request from someone hoping to give you TRIPLE FRIENDSHIP HAPPINESS, just ignore it. They just want to phish information from your account and blitz your inbox with offers for f R$ee vIa g r @.

[Guardian]

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If You Want To Succeed, Start Lying to Yourself [Games People Play]

My first impressions are always right. I never regret my decisions. I don't care what people think. Humans lie to ourselves all day long. You know the old saying: fake it 'til you make it. And, as Sue Shellenbarger writes for The Wall Street Journal, self-deception has its benefits.

Researchers have found that children as young as three have a "positivity bias" — a subconscious tendency to see themselves in the best possible light and conveniently forget about some negative traits.

Shellenbarger reports:

When people are asked to choose the most accurate photo of themselves from an array of images that are either accurate, or altered to make them look up to 50% more or less attractive, most choose the photo that looks 20% better than reality, research shows.

And!

In an unpublished study earlier this year, young women were asked to stand in front of a sheet of brown paper and sketch outlines of their bodies. Some were then asked to read a story about dating to put them in a romantic mood. The others were asked to read about buildings and architecture, says Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who led the research.

When the women were asked later to outline their bodies again, those who had read about dating sketched themselves as slimmer, with narrower waists, compared with their earlier drawings, reflecting an effort to "block out any negative information about their bodies" and succeed at the dating game, Dr. Keating says. The women who read about buildings didn't much change their sketches.

Harmlessly deceiving yourself to get ahead — believing that you are a great public speaker, telling yourself you have a real shot at the gold medal — can make you seem confident, assured, influential, powerful. Shellenbarger writes: "Benefits tend to come, research shows, when people simply block out negative thoughts, envision themselves enjoying future successes or take an optimistic view of their abilities — all of which tend to improve performance or persuasive ability." (Apparently it works in love, too.)

Since I do this all the time, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites:

I have good instincts.No one cares what I'm wearing.I know what I'm doing.

But letting it get out of hand is dangerous. There are limits. Confidence is great; losing track of the truth is not. As Dr. Michael Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School puts it, "a little bit of self-deception isn't an unhealthy thing, a lot is an extremely unhealthy thing."

The Case for Lying to Yourself [WSJ]

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Embryos Before Hoes Advocates Want Supreme Court to Declare that Fertilized Eggs are People [Roe V World]

It's really too bad that the word FAIL emblazoned across a picture of something failing miserably has become a cliche, because America's floundering but tenacious Personhood movement is perfectly suited to be meme-ified. In 2008 and 2010, voters in Colorado rejected a Personhood amendment that would have defined human life as starting at the moment of conception and given all rights pertaining to human life to single-celled zygotes. In 2011, voters in Mississippi also said thanks, but no thanks to a similar measure. In Ohio, a Personhood amendment failed to get the necessary number of signatures to appear on this fall's ballot, and in Oklahoma, the state Supreme Court unanimously declared that personhood amendments are really, terribly fucking stupid (at least, that's the technical legal term). But Personhood advocates are undaunted! They're going to keep fighting for the microscopic babies we may all be pregnant with right now all the way to the Yoo-nighted States Supreme Court.

To review: Personhood is a terribly stupid idea that would outlaw all abortion and threaten the legality of many forms of birth control and some fertility treatments. It would give fetuses more rights than pregnant women, as it would prioritize rights of non-sentient bundles of cells over the rights of women not to have other people living inside of them after they have sex. It treats the penis like a magic wand that makes life happen and the female body like a passive baby holder.

The right wing yokels who run the state government in Oklahoma are mostly in support of a measure that would force women who become pregnant to stay that way, but the State Supreme Court didn't agree, as the measure was "clearly unconstitutional." But proponents of Personhood want to take this to Washington. Says Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, via press release:

The proponents of this measure have made explicit the ultimate objective of the anti-reproductive rights movement: to strip all Americans of their constitutional right to make their own decisions about whether and when to have children.

The scope of the fundamental rights and longstanding court precedents under attack by the opponents of reproductive rights is stunning.

In other words — the goal of the Personhood movement is to bring America back to the dark ages, from coast to coast.

No need to get your Fallopian Tubes in a twist just yet, though — it's highly unlikely that the High Court will even agree to hear Oklahoma's goofy argument, and even if they do, the only way they'd win is if Justice Scalia clones himself 4 times and disguises the clones as Justices Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, Kagan, Sotomayor and somehow knocks the real Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, Kagan, and Sotomayor out for a few days, which is way too Scooby Doo dastardly even for a guy who goes hunting with Dick Cheney.

[CRR]

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