Atkins Cuts Back on Saturated Fat

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

The New York Times reports that Atkins Nutritionals is now recommending that people on their diet limit saturated fat to 20% of their calories. They’re trying to play this off as a clarification, but it sounds like a revision to me :-/.

Responding to years of criticism from scientists that the Atkins version of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat regimen might lead to heart disease and other health problems, the director of research and education for Atkins Nutritionals, Colette Heimowitz, is telling health professionals in seminars around the country that only 20 percent of a dieter’s calories should come from saturated fat. Atkins Nutritionals was set up by Dr. Robert C. Atkins to sell Atkins products and promote the diet. […]

Revision or otherwise, I view this as a positive move as many had dismissed the diet due to its lack of restrictions on saturated fat. For those already on the diet (which doesn’t include me), I was curious about how much saturated fat that would allow in a day…

Supposing a caloric intake of 1500 Calories, 20% would be 300 Calories from saturated fat. And, with 9 Calories/gram, 300 Calories would be about 33g saturated fat. So, to keep within 33g, you could eat:

But, don’t let the numbers fool you — those calculations are for an entire day’s worth of fat. For instance, if you were to have three bratwurst, that would leave virtually no fat for the rest of the day. But, you can mix-and-match to evenly distribute your saturated fat allowance (which works out to about 10-11g saturated fat per meal).

And, if you’re on Atkins, you can stay under your limits by eating other sources of protein such as chicken or fish. Just checking my freezer downstairs, I see that trimmed boneless/skinless chicken breast has less than 1g saturated fat per serving. Likewise, canned tuna also has less than 1g saturated fat. Mayo has about 1.5g/TBsp, so a tuna salad could work also.

“No Safety Net for Programmers”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Free trade seems to be moving forward, but the government hedges its bets — under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers can get benefits if their jobs have been moved overseas. Unless you’re a programmer:

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers whose jobs have moved overseas can be eligible for a battery of extra assistance, including income support, job training, tax credits for health insurance, and job search and relocation allowances. Some older workers can even receive a temporary income subsidy, a form of “wage insurance,” which helps cushion the financial blow when a new job pays much less than the old one. For instance, if you go from writing code for computers at $50 an hour to selling them retail at a computer superstore for $10 an hour.

But Fusco and his fellow IBM employees who petitioned for the benefits were repeatedly denied. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration determined that programmers like Fusco do not qualify, because of the nature of what they’d produced on their old jobs: software. The government cited commerce and trade rules that classify software as a “service” and “not a tangible commodity,” rather than an “article” as the trade act stipulates. […]

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, I have sympathy for workers whose jobs were offshored, but wouldn’t they be eligibile for unemployment benefits anyhow? That aside, I do find it a bit odd that programming is considered a service rather than a product — I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion :-/.

Low Carb Doritos Coming in May

Ashley Bischoff59 Comments

Well, we've just about seen it all now — low-carb beer, low-carb bread, low-carb cookies and now low-carb chips. Frito-Lay announced in a press release that they’ll be introducing low-carb Doritos and low-carb Tostitos in May. Known as Doritos Edge and Tostitos Edge, they’ll have 6g net carbs and 10g protein per bag (product packaging photo, nutrition label photo).

To create the new products, the company will use soy proteins and fiber to convert to a lower carbohydrate chip […]. This move will result in a 60 percent reduction of carbohydrates in both products.

Of all low-carb products, I think the introduction of low-carb bread made the most sense to me — after all, most people eat bread every day. But chips? Is there really a market for people who want to eat healthier yet eat chips on an everyday basis?

I do wonder how these chips will taste, though. Much like their low-fat counterparts, low-carb foods never seem to taste as good as the full-fat/high-carb versions. I suppose we’ll find out in May.

Airline on A&E

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

I first heard about A&E’s new reality show Airline from, of all places, NPR’s Marketplace (RealAudio article). Airline is a reality show based around Southwest Airlines:

A camera crew has spent the last six months at Los Angeles International Airport filming the work of Southwest Airlines employees. Is this an employee training video? No, it’s the latest in reality TV. The weekly half-hour show called “Airline” is devoted to the drama that goes on behind the scenes at a big-time carrier. […]

Interestingly enough, even though Southwest granted A&E permission for the initial filming, the producers still had the final say on which segments made it into the show. And, Southwest wasn’t paid for this, though they hope that the show will act as positive advertising for the brand.

They seem to be airing two 1/2 hour episodes back-to-back each week and I recorded last week’s episodes on TiVo just to see what it was like. And I rather enjoy the show — there were no spiteful fights or gossip (unlike some reality shows) but it was surprisingly interesting. And, the Southwest employees generally acted like real people rather than zombie marketdroids.

Airline airs Mondays on A&E at 10/9c and 10:30/9:30c.

Customizing Gallery Footers

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I posted some Thanksgiving photos on Friday and I was trying to figure out how to add footers to my Gallery pages to signfy my Creative Commons licensing — under the license I chose, you can “copy, distribute, display, and perform” the photographs as long as you give me credit (commercial use requires separate permission).

Writing some HTML & CSS wouldn’t be hard, but I wasn’t sure which Gallery files I needed to modify. After some searching, I soon found EclecticPixels’ Gallery customization tutorials (the Gallery forums can also be handy for this kind of thing). And the part that applied to me was the second part on headers and footers. But, you only want to add a header or footer, then you may find the steps here easier (for one thing, EclecticPixels’ tutorials create extra nested tables, which isn’t necessary).

I’ve only tested these directions with Gallery 1.4.1, but they should work for Gallery versions from 1.4.1 to 1.9x (Gallery 2.x may be completely different).

  1. If it’s a Creative Commons license that you’re adding, you’ll need to go through their license selection wizard if you haven’t already. That will then take you to a “Mark Content” page which has some pre-built HTML code which you can either use as-is or as a starting point.

  2. In any case, the Gallery files you’ll need to modify are in the “html_wrap” directory which branches off your main Gallery directory. You’ll need to grab “wrapper.footer.default” if you’re adding a footer (or “wrapper.header.default” if you’re adding a header). If you’re downloading these from your web host, remember to set your ftp client to ASCII mode.

  3. Before making any changes to the file(s), save them without the “.default” extension (as “wrapper.footer” and “wrapper.header”, respectively) to ensure that the original files stay intact (the customized files need to have these new filenames anyway). And, if you’re only adding a footer, you don’t need to bother with wrapper.header.* (and vice-versa if you’re only adding a header).

  4. Open up the file in a text editor and, if your editor has syntax highlighting, you can set it to PHP highlighting mode (this will make the file easier to read, but there’s no consequence if your editor doesn’t have syntax highlighting for PHP files). Then, scroll to the bottom of the file and add any HTML code that you want in your footers. (Here’s my finished wrapper.footer for an example.)

  5. If you need to add any CSS to accompany your HTML, you can add that to the bottom of your Gallery skin’s CSS file (which can be found at http://yourdomain/path/to/gallery/skins/skin-name/css/embedded_style.css). And, for an easy back-up path in case your changes are overwritten when you next upgrade Gallery, you may want to make a note of your CSS changes in a separate file as well.

  6. That’s it :). Just upload your new wrapper.footer (and/or wrapper.header) into “html_wrap” and the updated embedded_style.css (if you even changed that) on top of your old CSS.

(You can see my new footer on any of my Gallery pages.)