For decades, counting calories was seen as the key to staying fit. There are a few—actually a trillion—little problems with that.
More than 120 years ago, a scientist named Wilbur Atwater launched what would become an enduring dieting trend: He started meticulously counting calories. In a series of experiments, Atwater set fire to hundreds of foods and measured the released energy. In another experiment, he and his team planted a grad student in an airtight “room calorimeter” and passed him portions of bread and beans and determined how much heat, carbon dioxide, and waste he generated. To this day, when the food industry lists calories on labels, as required by federal law, it often relies on Atwater’s calculations.
Atwater’s work helped give rise to the nutritional dogma that your body weight is governed by whether you burn off all the calories you eat. Just ask chips-and-soda giant PepsiCo. When “the amount of calories you take in equals the amount of calories you burn,” the company insists on its website, “you maintain your body weight.” Excess calories will stick around as “body fat and weight gain,” warns the Department of Agriculture’s Weight Management webpage. This is true whether they “come from protein, fat, carbohydrate, or alcohol.”
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Food + Health / Global Warning - Why Project 2025 is an environmental catastrophe in the making
When President Joe Biden took office, Democrats held a slim majority in the House of Representatives and a single-vote edge in the Senate. Despite the monumental odds, he has presided over the most productive presidential term for climate action in American history. Under Biden’s direction, the federal government took up the arduous task of incorporating climate considerations into scores of administrative operations and procedures. The epa cracked down on superpollutants and issued stricter emissions regulations for passenger vehicles. The Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate spending bill Congress has ever passed, brings the nation closer to its goal of slashing carbon emissions in half by 2030.
Trumpnesia - To get a second chance, Trump needs voters to forget his disastrous presidency.
One of the most oft-quoted sentences ever penned by a philosopher is George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 2024, this aphorism is practically a campaign slogan. Donald Trump, seeking to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after being voted out of the job, has waged war on remembrance. In fact, he’s depending on tens of millions of voters forgetting the recent past. This election is an experiment in how powerful a memory hole can be.
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