Skinny Thin Girl

It Depends. Are We at a Giants Game or Cheering for the Dolphins?

CNN Sports has assembled the most recent health inspection reports for the food service concessions at every major league baseball, football, basketball, hockey rink, ballpark, stadium or arena in the U.S. and Canada. Based on these, it has listed the percentage of concession stand vendors cited for “critical violations” of health regulations at each venue, a critical violation generally having to do with rodent droppings, insects parts, unsanitary employees, dirty ice, expired meat or dairy or produce items, and so forth.

The violation percentages at various sports venues range from reassuring to alarming. CNN organized its list by states, not percentages, but I have chosen to list, in order, those with more than 33 percent violations, from the worst on down. In fairness to the concession stand brotherhood, I’ve also listed those with fewer than 5 percent violations, starting with the purest. If your city is not on the list below, it fell into the mid-range somewhere; to find it seek out http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=5401646. The list also reveals some ironic, surprising or otherwise noteworthy statistical morsels.

In a few markets, such as the Bay Area, there’s a serious spread in violations, from the Giants’ AT&T Park (4 percent) to the Raiders’ and Athletics’ Coliseum (34 percent). But in most major cities, the various venues are pretty consistent in quality. Unfortunately, that usually means poor. Detroit and Kansas City fans of any pro sport should probably wait until after the game to eat, for example. But for a real health code nightmare, hit almost any concession stand in Florida, where the playing facilities of no less than seven pro sports franchises post vendor violation rates ranging from 75 to 100 percent.

Some cities that are usually associated with health and cleanliness have violation percentages unexpectedly at variance with their image, such as Salt Lake City (50 percent), Portland (53 percent), and Denver, whose three major league venues range from 61 to 67 in violator percentages. In a rather stunning contrast, all three of the sports havens in gritty, bluecollar Chicago scored perfect zeroes. Then again, the Windy City’s health department may set the bar a bit lower than average. Just speculating.

As for the cities most people love to snipe at, New York and Washington D.C., the Big Apple’s ballparks are just moderately unhealthy, in the middle of the pack, while our capital’s violators range from 25 percent at Nationals Park to a ghastly 100 percent at the Verizon Center, where if the food doesn’t sicken you, the Wizards’ record probably will.

Two final observations: 72 percent seems unacceptably high for a shiny new sports monument that cost a shade over one billion dollars (Cowboys Stadium), just as 61 percent seems at least embarrassingly high for a venue named after a line of food products (Heinz Field).

And now, the list…

• Verizon Center (Washington Wizards, Capitals): 100 percent
• Tropicana Field (Tampa Bay Rays): 100 percent
• American Airlines Arena (Miami Heat): 93 percent
• Sun Life Stadium (Miami Dolphins, Florida Marlins): 93 percent
• Raymond James Stadium (Tampa Bay Buccaneers): 84 percent
• Jacksonville Municipal Stadium (Jacksonville Jaguars): 77 percent
• Amway Arena (Orlando Magic): 75 percent
• Time Warner Cable Arena (Charlotte Bobcats): 73 percent
• Cowboys Stadium (Dallas Cowboys): 72 percent
• Ford Field (Detroit Lions): 70 percent
• Pepsi Center (Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche): 67 percent
• Rangers Ballpark in Arlington (Texas Rangers): 62 percent
• Kauffman Stadium (Kansas City Royals): 62 percent
• Coors Field (Colorado Rockies): 62 percent
• LP Field (Tennessee Titans): 62 percent
• Madison Square Garden (New York Knicks, Rangers): 61 percent
• Heinz Field (Pittsburgh Steelers): 61 percent
• Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium (Denver Broncos): 61 percent
• Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City Chiefs): 56 percent
• Bank of America Stadium (Carolina Panthers): 55 percent
• Rose Garden Arena (Portland Trail Blazers): 53 percent
• PNC Park (Pittsburgh Pirates): 53 percent
• Comerica Park (Detroit Tigers): 51 percent
• EnergySolutions Arena (Utah Jazz): 50 percent
• Yankee Stadium (New York Yankees): 48 percent
• AT&T Center (San Antonio Spurs): 48 percent
• Citi Field (New York Mets): 45 percent
• Target Center (Minnesota Timberwolves): 39 percent
• US Airways Center (Phoenix Suns): 38 percent
• FedEx Field (Washington Redskins): 36 percent
• Philips Arena (Atlanta Hawks, Thrashers): 35 percent
• McAfee Coliseum (Oakland Raiders, A’s): 34 percent

• Air Canada Centre (Toronto Raptors, Maple Leafs): 0 percent
• United Center (Chicago Bulls, Blackhawks): 0 percent
• U.S. Cellular Field (Chicago White Sox): 0 percent
• Wrigley Field (Chicago Cubs): 0 percent
• Gillette Stadium (New England Patriots): 0 percent
• Minute Maid Park (Houston Astros): 3 percent
• Honda Center (Anaheim Ducks): 3 percent
• AT&T Park (S.F. Giants): 4 percent
• M&T Bank Stadium (Baltimore Ravens): 4 percent
• Fenway Park (Boston Red Sox): 4 percent

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Several years ago my life was a social train wreck! At the time, I had a new friend who was beginning a successful career as a psychological therapist. We are still the best of friends. I asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me what I was doing to my life back then?”

“If I had, you never would have listened,” was his reply.

“Maybe not, but at least someone would have told me!”

Perhaps like the lonely tree falling in the forest, his advice would not have been heard. Maybe what I really needed was that tree to fall on me!

Learning Lesions

Sometimes it seems that initially a leaf may fall on you. If that is ignored, then a branch may try to get our attention. That failing, the tree may be on its way.

The world has a way of teaching, or at least offering us the opportunity to learn lessons. If we don’t pay attention to the messages that we are hearing, the volume often gets louder, and the lessons get more numerous and possibly more severe. This is not due to some master’s plan, but simply to the natural function of how we repeat behaviors, both good and bad until we refine our actions. That’s the way we learned not to pick up hot objects as a child, and the way we often have to learn many other scalding lessons.

I’ve seen this story play out too many times with obesity and its many negative physical and psychosocial effects. Watching someone close to us suffer these problems with increasing frequency can be both disheartening and painful. It has been personally frustrating, as I’ve seen friends and loved ones sacrifice so much of the potential of their physical and emotional life to this condition, and I have not been able to help them. Setting an example is often the best I can offer, and it has not been enough.

I had a very recent conversation with someone who, as they said, “made the choices that did this to me,” as they were lamenting the scars on both their knees from obesity related degenerative joint disease knee replacement surgeries. I wish he would change his behaviors and learn new habits. That’s what we have to do to either reverse or prevent obesity related effects on our health We must learn the lessons and earn the wisdom to make our needed changes.

The Day That Changed Me

That day in the karate studio when my sensei told me with sharp simplicity that, ” J, you are getting FAT!” That’s all it took. I realized he was right, and I began to make changes that corrected the problem. It didn’t happen overnight, but I then began a series of new behaviors that changed the direction of where I was heading. Establishing these new habits have kept me on track to this day.

I’ve heard it said that “knowledge is learning something every day, and wisdom is forgetting something every day.” Sometimes I look at that as meaning that we must learn and repeat new, helpful habits every day, and forget, and stop doing the old unhelpful habits every day. Combine doing the new and not doing the old and you won’t have to, one day, regret what you did to yourself, like my friend.

You may not believe or hear me about the problems that obesity will cause in your future, but now, at least, you have been told. After all, I am in the school of, “if you keep leading a horse to water, eventually they may be thirsty!”

Dr. J on Lessons to Learn, Wisdom to Earn is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

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That Brat Will Make You Fat. Drat

Just as we head into the start of another football tailgating season comes unpleasant — but not really surprising — news from Europe: Eating meat is associated with weight gain, and especially when it comes to eating the kind of meat we associate with the coldcuts layout or barbecue grill. The Imperial College London studied 400,000 adults from ten European countries over five years and found that in both men and women, eating meat went hand in hand with weight increase.

Even controlling for skewing factors such as physical activity and total daily calorie intake, people whose diets included more meat than others put on more pounds than others; specifically, those who consumed an extra nine ounces of meat a day wound up packing on an extra five pounds of weight after five years. The meat-weight link was strongest in the case of processed meats, your sausages and hotdogs and pastrami and ham.

Along with being unhappy news for tailgaters and deli lovers, this is a bit of a downer for proponents and marketers of high-protein diets, implying as it does that there are diet-friendly proteins and diet-defeating proteins. On the other hand, a pound a year is hardly dramatic and could probably be offset just by consuming one less soft drink or doughnut or side of fries for each meat dish eaten.

Tailgaters, of course, could probably offset the caloric effect of a fistful of bratwursts if they simply limited themselves to one beer on game day. Unfortunately, from the point of view of most tailgaters that would probably defeat the whole purpose of the event. Some would rather give up watching the game.

Tomorrow: As bad as parking lot fare might be, when you get inside the stadium the food just gets scarier.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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A Possible Answer: When Others Find Themselves Sharing the Load

One of the tenets of the fat acceptance movement is how the overweight or obese individual conducts his or her life is his or her business and not that of experts or the media or anyone else. But that is not altogether true, as the following news item out of Columbus, Ohio illustrates.

It seems that the city’s Division of Fire, which is its firefighting and rescue department, began finding itself dealing with sick or injured citizens who were literally too heavy for the paramedics to manage with customary ambulance stretchers. So the city bought 18 heavy-duty stretchers, able to handle loads of up to 650 pounds each, and contracted for 34 more, one for every rescue unit in the city.

The tab on these stretchers came to about $5,000 each. That’s $260,000 total, at a time when Columbus, like most American cities, is desperately trying to wring money out of thin air just to stay afloat. But it gets worse. It seems that paramedics are now finding themselves confronted with patients too large even for the beefed up stretchers — on average, about twice a month.

Sharing the Load

If that frequency seems unduly nigh, bear in mind that the extremely obese are statistically more likely than average to require emergency transportation, due to their greater susceptibility to illness or injury. As a consequence, about twice a month the city is hit with health insurance claims from rescue personnel for back injuries suffered while attempting to move the super heavy.

Happily, there are even sturdier stretchers that have their own hydraulic systems and can heft loads of as much as 1,000 pounds. Not so happily, these bruisers run $10,000 or so each, and they require retrofitting of the ambulances to the tune of another $6,000 per. To its credit, the city is making every effort to buy the super stretchers, with or without help from the state of Ohio.

“Our community may have to pick up the additional cost,” acknowledged one Columbus Public Safety official. But that is what responsible communities do; they provide essential services for those who need them. Doing so is — and I choose my words specifically here — a responsible community’s business.

This is a fundamental problem facing those who advocate for the rights of the obese: to the extent that their lifestyle draws upon resources provided by others, it becomes the business of others. And that is when people who might have been indifferent or even sympathetic to the grossly overweight begin viewing them in a less charitable light.

That’s when more and more people come to the same conclusion reached by the Columbus official noted above: “Obesity is detrimental not only to the individual but society in general.”

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

I guess back in the day they had one or two choices for you to get your vitamins. Well, maybe this was mom’s choice, but she did have another one for us. I remember those earlier vitamin delights. I pretty much looked like Lucy when I forced it down every morning under mom’s watchful and approving gaze. It didn’t take long for the food and drug industry to see the green in this product, and the competition was on for our vitamin dollar.

A vitamin is defined as an organic compound which may or may not be synthesized by the organism, which is required by the organism as a nutrient in tiny amounts to survive. Thirteen vitamins have been identified.

I noticed a commercial for One A Day vitamins, http://oneaday.com/products.html and I believe they are one of the most, if not the most popular vitamin. Did you know that they offer 17 specialty types of vitamin products? That is four more than the 13 officially recognized number of vitamins!

Very Creative Marketing

If you look at the ingredients in each of these products, they are quite similar with minor variations to account for the creative names from the companies marketing department, including, Woman’s Active Metabolism, Woman’s Active Mind and Body, and Men’s Pro Edge, for example. In all there are six women’s formulas, three men’s formulas, four unisex, two teen and two for children. I’m sure the teen and children’s areas are vastly under supplied and expect that to be corrected very soon.

Are vitamins necessary? Absolutely! Are vitamin supplements necessary? Perhaps, but certainly not as an everyday need.

A few years ago I read the book, “Stop Aging Now.” The title not withstanding, it’s a pretty good book on how to be healthy and fit. In it they present the vitamin regimens of many reasonably known experts. There is a bit of variation, but for the most part, they are in agreement on taking vitamins C and E. The book was written before the current push for vitamin D, but I expect that would also be one of the top three now. In addition, many take an iron free multi with adequate levels of the B vitamins and Beta Carotene. That’s pretty close to what I take in addition to the micronutrients, chromium and occasional selenium. I do not, however, take them every day.

It would be nice if we could get all of our essential nutrients from natural food sources. My concerns with this ideal is that because of the changes in our atmosphere, terrain and farming practices, as well as the vitamin destructive nature of industrial processing, I fear that our food supply does not have the levels of vitamins and other nutrients that it used to. One of the advantages of exercise is that it allows you to consume a few more calories, and if you are smart, you will use those for foods with high nutritional value.

I’d like to comment on something I’ve heard regarding water soluble vitamins. “Why take them if you just urinate them out.” Did you know that in the early days of the use of penicillin, which is water soluble and excreted in the urine because of the scarcity of the antibiotic — not that I’m trying to give the vitamin companies any ideas — they collected the patients’ urine, withdrew the penicillin and gave it to them again? Between your mouth and the formation of pee, vitamin C, for example, is used for many functions by our bodies.

Is there anything wrong with vitamins? Absolutely not! Is there anything wrong with vitamin supplements? Yes, there can be.

ConsumerLab.com used independent laboratories to test 21 different brands of multivitamins. Only 10 met the claims that the manufacture made on the label or did not have other problems with meeting quality standards. Of the 11 that failed the testing, some had excessive levels of lead or other containments. Some had quantities of vitamins that were only half that on the label, and probably worse, some had levels twice that stated on the label. In a fat soluble vitamin such as A, especially in a children’s product, with every day dosing, it is possible to reach toxic levels.

I feel that supplemental vitamins do have a place in our diet. Pre-natal use, and for the individual who has been on a very poor diet, are prime examples where they have an indication. However, in most situations, my recommendation is to be judicial in their use. Research the brands you choose to buy, and if possible, get as much of your vitamin needs filled from a healthy, nutritious diet, and use supplements, as the term implies, in a supportive role.

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