Department of Thinking Before You Speak Heard on O'Reilly from the head of the National Lesbian Alliance: "You can't compare a lesbian to some guy who dates fifty women!"
No? What exactly is she trying to say about her membership?
Oh my goodness! A million thanks to the person who sent the steaks. . . I just talked to the folks at Omaha steaks, and am even now mentally planning the grilling & eating of 'em. Whoever you are. . . hope someone does you as good a turn some day.
At his address to the annual Fed economic symposium yesterday, Alan Greenspan defended the fed from charges that the 90's bubble was the fault of Fed policies.
Many people have alleged that the motive force behind the stock bubble was lax policies of the Fed. But as Greenspan pointed out in his speech, the big tightening moves that the Fed made had no long term effect on the markets; they hiccoughed, and then just kept rising. Greenspan says that raising interest rates enough to have had an effect would also have resulted in a severe recession.
Looking back at our last great bubble, in 1925-1929, I see a similar pattern. Raising interest rates a little just fed the flames. It encouraged domestic and foreign capital to lend. But with asset prices rising by 100% or more a year, raising interest rates from 6% to 6.5% had no effect on the consumers who were borrowing money to pour it into the market. Really putting a dent in the bubble would have required raising rates high enough to cause massive cutbacks in business investment, which would have hurt everyone. And with the equity market where it was, in many cases, borrowers would just have turned to equity offerings, further fueling the boom.
It's especially problematic because many people pin the inflationary monetary policies of 1999 as the primary culprit. Well, yes, they were inflationary, and here's why: we had an Asian crisis waning, and more importantly, Y2K right in front of us. The Fed was pumping liquidity into the economy in order to prevent a crisis if people tried to withdraw all their money and stick it under their mattress.
Critics point out that no one, in fact, did this, and the resulting liquidity excess topped up the market to wild levels. Umm-hmmm. And youknew that wasn't going to happen in 1999, genius? Sure you did. So how come you're still sitting on the 4,000 shares of Webvan you bought at the height of that "excess liquidity"?
No one knew what was going to happen during the Y2K rollover. And the risk of being too illiquid during the days leading up to Y2K were simply too astronomical to take. Crunching down on credit, and then finding out that the entire public wanted to hold a lot of cash starting December 20th, would have been an unprecedented financial disaster: a nationwide bank run. In hindsight, Greenspan should have clamped down on credit in the second quarter of 1999. And in hindsight I should have sold Yahoo at 200. But there you are; if we all knew what the consequences of all of our actions would be in advance. . . well, for one thing no one would get married and have babies, and the species would die out, and then where would we be?
The other great panacea offered, raising the margin requirements, would have been no panacea. Just as generals always seem to be preparing to fight the last war, the great majority of financial commentators are prepared tp master the last economic crisis. In 1929, or better yet, 1927, raising the margin requirements would have been a swell idea. The margin requirement, for those who are confused, is the percentage of the value of a stock's price you must put up, in cash, in order to borrow the rest of the money to buy the stock. It's kind of like taking a mortgage on a stock: you put a percentage down, and as long as you make the interest payments, the loan is good, secured by the value of the stock. If the stock rises, you can sell the stock and take all the profit (less the interest you paid, of course.) If the stock falls -- aye, there's the rub. Stock prices are a little more volatile than housing prices. And when the value of your house falls, the bank can't ask you to give them back part of the money you borrowed.
With margin loans, on the contrary, they can. If you buy a stock for $10 with a 50% margin requirement, you pay $5 in your own cash and borrow the other 50% against the value of the stock. If the price of the stock drops below $10, to, say, $7.00, the bank makes you give back $1.50 of the money you borrowed so that the loan on the stock is still only half of the value of the stock, or $3.50. This is the infamous margin call, and it's one of the things that made the crash of 1929 so devastating. Each time prices dropped, the drop triggered another round of margin calls, which some people couldn't meet. Their stock had to be sold immediately to cover the loan, which flooded the market with more shares no one wanted, and caused the price to drop even further.
But 1999 is not 1929. For one thing, margin requirements are much higher than they were in 1929. Back then, margin loans were often secured with as little as 10% cash down, which made the whole thing very liable to collapse; not only were people overextending themselves, borrowing money they had no way to repay unless the stock went up, but also when margins are that low, even a moderate drop in the price means that selling the stock will be insufficient to cover the loan. Both things make the market very volatile. Margin requirements now, on the other hand, are more like 50%, which makes the whole system much less highly leveraged.
Furthermore, margin trading is much less widespread than it was in 1929. Which is not to say that people weren't borrowing money to play the market. They were; they just weren't borrowing from their broker. Take, for example, the numerous people I went to business school with who took out $100K in student loans rather than sell their Priceline stock, because it was far too valuable. Or any number of people you know who refinanced the house and dumped some of the extra money into the market. Or the ones who were holding onto credit card debt at the same time as they plowed money into their 401(k)'s. All of those people were doing pretty much the same thing a margin trader does -- leveraging up their assets in order to gamble on the market. The difference is that Alan Greenspan has the power to decree what margin requirements are. He can't issue a nationwide edict commanding you to send your money to the nice people at Mastercard instead of those greedy wretches at Merrill Lynch.
So I agree with Alan Greenspan -- he didn't do anything he shouldn't have. (I'm sure he'll be much relieved to know that). We built him up into a God in the 90's, and now we're mad at him because he couldn't wave his magic wand and get us the pretty moon. I'm constantly amazed to find that the American public is actually surprised and disappointed by the astonishing revelation that their officials are human beings, not minor deities. Where do they think we're getting these omniscient, omnipotent beings they want to make their decisions for 'em? And why do they think these superior entities would want to work for us, when all we do is give 'em grief?
After all, it's not like we can afford to pay union scale.
So correspondants have requested that if I am going to try Atkins, I start things off by posting a daily caloric guide before I start, to provide a baseline. Those of you who feel that they already know too much about my life can just skip this post. For the rest, here goes:
Wednesday, August 28: Container Dannon Light 'n Fit Blackberry Yogurt (110 calories)
Salad with mixed greens, hard boiled egg, grilled asparagus, portabello mushroom, and a splash of fat-free vinaigrette. (400 calories? More?) Corn muffin (400 calories?) Banana (100 calories)
Snack: several handfuls of revolting "Land O' Lakes Butter-Flavored Pretzels", approximately 150 calories. It must be hormonal.
Vegetable/Tofu Teriyaki with white rice (500 calories, at a guess) Oreo Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich (230 calories) Excercise: 25 minutes of dog walking
Thursday, August 29:
One banana (ca. 100 calories)
One grilled vegetable wrap with lettuce and tomato (350 calories?) Three french fries off coworkers plate (small, string kind)
One serving lentil rice (350 calories) Salad (50 calories?) Slice of bread and butter (150 calories?) Container raspberries (150 calories) Taste of pound cake I am baking for friend Excercise: Twenty minutes of dog walking; one hour assembly of Samsonite chair which came in a box blazoned with the legend "Assembles in Five Minutes or less!"
Today: One everything bagel with enough salt to make Michael Moore pop like a road toad. Nothing on it. As far as I am concerned, cream cheese is just a vehicle for a good bagel.
One grilled veggie wrap with lettuce and tomato (the deli screwed up and accidentally gave me two yesterday. When you are marginally employed, there is nothing in the entire world better than free food.)
Dinner -- don't know. I'm one of those daring, spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment people you read about in those novels with matte covers and titles done in thin, drab type.
Weight: I have no idea. If I wanted to know how much I weighed, I'd go to Madison Avenue and let the little stick girls at the couture boutiques ask me if madam would like to see something in a felt muumuu. But I'm probably within spitting distance of 150, which for a woman who is 6'2 is well within the normal range, thank you very much.
Aside from the ice cream and the pretzels, those are pretty typical days for me. I didn't include the massive volumes of diet coke I consume, a hang over from going to high school in the eating disorder red zone, because the company has told me the soda has no calories, and I choose to believe them.
Now: how much weight do my correspondants think I'll lose on Atkins?
When I was just a young girl, a slip of a thing, dreaming of the day when I would own and operate my own emerging media project focusing on bringing the finest in economic, political, and large-canine commentary to my throng of adoring readers, I used to envision the publicity stunts that such an enterprise would necessarily entail. Of course, back then, when the world, and my liver, was young, I pcitured sort of latter-day Algonquin Round Table things like hanging from a chandelier at the Waldorf and drinking an entire bottle of champagne while reciting the poetry of e.e. cummings. But I also envisioned making scads of money off all this, and what sort of an American would I be if I let these little setbacks get in the way of my Dream?
So, since neither my liver nor my biceps are up to stunts on the order of the abovementioned, and since everyone's so mad at me about dissing Atkins, and since they're all hurling tons of anecdotal evidence about its complete and utter awesomeness at me, and since you can never be too rich or too thin, I'm going to try it. Starting Tuesday after labor day, I'm going on Atkins for two weeks. My mother will rejoice, and all my vegetarian friends scowl, to learn that I am falling off the wagon and onto a nice, juicy steak. I'll post a daily report on my findings, including how many calories I've eaten, and how much weight I've lost or gained. After two weeks, I will present the evidence as to how a low-carb carnivorous diet compares to a low-sugar vegetarian one.
But my Atkins correspondants be warned: if I get fat, I'm personally going to hunt down each and every one of you and suffocate you with a box of twinkies.
"So if you don't think that fat calories are better for you than sugar calories," ask several emails, "what do you think makes Atkins work, Miss Smartypants?"
Well, first of all, thank you to the eight hundred people who wrote to tell me that the important thing isn't metabolism; it's the effects on appetite due to the slower digestion of fat, and the steadier blood sugar levels. I agree with that, and indeed, I wrote about it in my first post on the subject.
I also think that most people on Atkins probably aren't eating that much more fat than they used to. Aside from meat, what does fat taste good with? Carbs! Bread and butter, french fries (McDonalds french fries have more calories than the burgers, and something like 75% of those calories come from fat), cheese on pasta, luscious, fatty desserts laden with sugar and butter. After you cut all of that stuff out, the fat you're getting from salad dressing and meat probably isn't much higher (for most people) than what they were eating before.
Which brings me to the second point -- fewer calories. First of all, on Atkins there's a ton of stuff you can't eat. I've sat with friends at restaurants, watching them pore over their choices, and like as not they end up with the low-calorie fish dish because it comes with the veggie sides, instead of the potatoe or rice. Second of all, the stuff you can eat is harder to overeat. Most of us can chow down on a loaf of bread or a huge dish of pasta, but it's hard to eat twice as much steak as you meant to, at least for most of us. Third of all, I believe that there are suppressant effects on appetite, due to the aforementioned gastric emptying rate. And fourth of all, fatty substances by themselves aren't snack food. How often have you watched a co-worker stand by someone's candy dish, absent-mindedly popping candy or chips into their mouth as they tlaked? Now how often have you seen someone do that with, say, a hunk of cheese? Even if it didn't have to be refrigerated. So you get fewer "uncounted" calories -- the kind no one bothers to factor into their running total of what they've eaten because it was just a little penny candy, but which could easily be 200-300 calories a day.
I believe Atkins works. I've seen it do so. My contention was only that Atkins was not working because fat calories aren't real calories, which is an argument I've seen over and over. It works because you're eating less than you're expending, which is how all diets that work, work.
To my mind, Atkins is a heuristic. By putting entire large categories of food off limits, it causes you to cut your calories with minimal mental effort. As long as the heuristic isn’t too restrictive, I think such diets can work over the long term. I knew a model who had a different color on each day of the week: blue for Monday, red for Tuesday, etc. On that day of the week, she only ate food of that color. It made her skinny; she was the girl they got to model the “support garments”, because there wasn’t an ounce of fat on her to bubble over the elastic waistband. But it didn’t work because there’s some magic in food colors, though as I recall, she believed there was; it worked because on “purple” day, all she was eating was blackberries and eggplant. Vegetarian diets work the same way, when they’re done right; to be a healthy vegetarian, you have to eat a lot of complex carbohydrates, which take the place of the empty you’d otherwise consume. It’s tough to get enthusiastic about a baked potato with sour cream when you’ve just eaten a half a pound of rice and beans.
I actually think the low fat diets used to work the same way. When they came out, they got just as much buzz as Atkins gets now. But think of everything you’d be cutting out, in 1980, if you cut out the fat. Who wants bread or a baked potato without butter? Jello without whipped cream? No ice cream, cookies, candy bars, cream sauces, not even that many simple starches; none of the low-fat, high sugar substitutes we take for granted, like frozen yogurt and reduced-fat cookies, had been invented. The diets claimed if you counted the fat grams, you wouldn’t have to count calories. Which was true, because given the foods available at the time, anyone serious about cutting fat would also be cutting their calorie intake.
The problem is, as marketers worked to capitalize on it, they found ways to make empty calories – simple starches and sugars – low fat. People who had been holding off on low fat diets now found that they were quite palatable. Which was because they now had more calories.
So I think Atkins works on much the same principle. And I think that if we saw widespread adoption, we’d see more and more high-fat products come out that would do to Atkins followers what Snackwells did to the low-fat disciples – up their calories intake without their realizing it until they started to gain weight. But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Anyway, my beliefs about dieting were summed up by my coworker when she saw this week’s Time Magazine headline: “What Makes You Fat?”
“I don’t even need to read the article,” said Ewa. “The answer is ‘sitting on your ass and eating all the time.’ ”
So I was at dinner the other night with a friend who was arguing that Russia's per-capita GDP was higher in 1916 than in 1989. He knows more about the subject than I, but I just can't believe it. No one is more aware of the economic problems with Communism than I, but the Russians had the benefit of 70 years of Western advances, and no copyright. Even with a horribly screwed up economy, they should have been able to improve things over 1916.
But friend argued that Russia's GDP was crippled by the people Stalin killed collectivizing architecture and industrializing, devastated by World War II, stifled by the secret police in the 1950's, hamstrung by the culture of non-work that had evolved by the 1960's, and that it went all downhill from there. That the political culture stifled not just economic advances, but also technical ones, because the best man for the job was less likely to get it than someone's idiot relative -- and everyone worked for the same company which never went out of business. That the destruction of both the local and national work ethic will take decades to rebuild.
He also said he didn't think that Russia was done in by trying to keep up with our military expenditure in the 80's; he said rather that the inevitable doom had been staved off by fortuitous events: foreign aid during World War II, seizing German and Eastern European assets, including their productive work force with better work ethics than those who had been living under communism for 20 years, looting the economies of later Eastern European possessions, and wild spikes in the prices of the commodities from which it got nearly all its hard currency in the 1970's. He traced the fall not to our military expenditure, but to the collapse of the price of oil, and no further cash infusion coming along to bail them out.
It seems hard to believe. After all, much of the "software" for a modern industrial economy was as absent in Tsarist Russia as under communism -- the rule of law, ironclad property rights, political freedom. Yet he argued, convincingly, that had Russia simply continued under the Tsars, they would today be a modern European republic. I don't know if I buy it, but it's certainly an interesting question.
One of the things that I just adore about Microsoft is that with each new version of their software, they decide that something that I have been previously doing -- something simple, unremarkable, and utterly necessary -- is something that I no longer need to do, and so they remove this feature from their new release. For example, in NT 4.0, I'd been merrily making bootable floppies to connect to the network any time I needed to with the handy client administration tool. Apparently, the folks at Microsoft couldn't stand the thought of my whacking around hooking up to the network any old time I please, and so they've taken away my ability to make a DOS bootable floppy. Nor will they allow me to download the client files, presumably for fear that I will engage in an orgiastic frenzy of DOS-clienting and thus endanger my immortal soul. Yet, I must connect the DOS client to the network. Who has an idea?
Well, everyone was yelling at me and saying I didn't understand fatty acid metabolism, which was true, but also true of my interlocutors, so I don't feel too bad. I've had a poke around at some data, and here's what I've gleaned so far:
1) Fat can indeed be turned into glucose, and is on a regular basis, by your liver. Whereupon it enters your bloodstream as sugar. Protein can also be turned into sugar with little effort by your body.
2) Your body likes your blood sugar steady. If you stop eating carbohydrates, your body will turn protein and fat into glucose. There is, at least as far as I can tell, no magic about getting your blood sugar from sugar vs. fat or protein, except the blood sugar spikes caused by ingesting large amounts of refined carbohydrates that I discussed below. You do not lower your blood sugar by cutting carbohydrates out of your diet; you just make it steadier.
The pancreas is the primary organ that figures out how much energy you have and how much you need, by monitoring glucose concentrations in the blood. Low blood glucose stimulates the secretion of glucagon (it's like the opposite of insulin: where insulin sweeps extra sugar out of your blood and stores it as fat, glucogen puts extra sugar into your blood from carbohydrate, protein, and fat stores); high blood sugar stimulates the production of insulin. If you eat fewer carbohydrates, the preferred source of blood sugar is protein, either from your diet or your muscles, because it's easier to break down. Your body turns to fat only as a last resort. That's why the protein content of Atkins et al. has to be so high; otherwise your body would start cannibalizing your muscles.
3) Fat does indeed turn into fat quicker than sugar or protein. Why? Because the liver is responsible for turning all your extra food into storable form. Since the fat is, well, already fatty, it's easier for your liver to pass it through to your adipose tissue than to initiate the transformation of carbohydrate or protein into fat for storage. Also, because the fatty acids require less synthesis, turning fat into fat is much more efficient than turning carbohydrate or protein into fat. This isn't based on some sort of sympathetic magic "fat makes you fat" study as some have argued; it's based on what we know about cellular metabolic mechanisms. From what I can see, arguing against this would require overturning current medical understanding of the entire fat metabolism process. Anyone who says they're consuming 4,000 calories a day on Atkins and losing weight either has a hell of a metabolism, a hell of a metabolic disease, or a tapeworm. Your body doesn't just excrete the extra fat you consume; it stores it. The same way it stores extra protein, or extra carbohydrate: as adipose tissue. AKA body fat. Arguing otherwise requires arguing that your body simply excretes the extra fat -- how? There's no organ responsible for excreting it, it doesn't appear in your urine, and it sure doesn't get reabsorbed into your intestines to be eliminated in your feces. Where's all the extra fat going?
4) Your body gets its quick energy from glucose; most of your working muscles use glucose unless you engage in sustained (+10 minutes) activity with one muscle group. Your brain and many cells in muscle tissue can only use sugar. That's why your body keeps your blood sugar steady. Other muscles that are used all the time, like your heart and lungs, prefer ketones or fatty acids, which deliver a longer, steadier kick. But they can get the ketones they need from sugar as well as fat; the only difference is where the ketone bodies are produced; in a high carbohydrate environment, they're synthesized in the cell, while in a low carbohydrate diet, they're synthesized from fat in the liver.
5) The average American gets 40% of their diet from fat. Guess what's way under the FDA recommendations? I'll give you a hint -- it isn't protein. In other words, we haven't been following the dietary recommendations that Taubes says are making us fat.
6) Calorie counts are roughly accurate, and are based on how much weight people gain over the long term from eating given substances. Saying "A fat calorie is different from a carbohydrate calorie" is true but not useful; the calculations are not based on some theoretical idea about how much energy they should provide, but how much energy they in fact do. In other words, a gram of butter causes an average observable weight gain of more than twice that of a gram of sugar. Now, they may have different, significant effects on appetite and satiety (they also may not).
7) Unless you are severely dehydrated, your kidneys don't care how much water you drink. As long as there's enough water in your system to allow you to pee, the stuff from your kidneys passes out of your system just fine. It's overwork that can damage your kidneys, not concentration of metabolites.
8) Eating too much sugar probably makes susceptible people diabetic by causing insulin spikes. But sugar isn't the only culprit. If diabetics go on a high-calorie, low-sugar diet, they don't have as much success as if they go on a low-calorie diet. Because insulin is involved in the fat metabolism process, total body weight also matters. Interestingly, sugar isn't the only thing that triggers insulin production; so does high levels of amino acids, which is the symptom of consuming more protein than you need for cellular repair and muscle-building.
9) The Atkins diet cuts out more fat than people think. While it's true that there's more fat from animal soures, there's less fat from french fries, Cinnabons, and the like. And it's easier to consume an entire bag of potato chips than a 20-oz steak.
10) You need fewer calories than you think. I'm a very tall woman, and my basal metabolism rate (the number of calories you'd consume if you were lying flat on your back all day, and doesn't that sound nice?) is 1500. If you're shorter than me (and a female with an office job), yours is less than that. Most people only need 1,500 to 1,800 calories a day, not the 2,000 the FDA recommends.
Other resources on digestion and fat metabolism can be found here, here, here, and here.
Stupidity Watch So I'm in the hotel elevator. And I'm listening to a man and his wife violently agree with each other that the main problem with the world is SUV's, and that there ought to be a law so that people can't waste our precious natural resources, a conversation they continue as they walk through the lobby, step out the door, and get behind the wheel of their minivan.
I go away for a weekend and the mailbox goes nuts. Lesson learned: don't dis Atkins. Listen, what y'all want to do with your bodies is your own business. I just don't think that Taubes made his case for a high fat diet. I'm not trying to take your energy bars away.
Well, actually, I am, because I've noticed that they keep "restating" the amount of sugar in them as the feds close in, until we find out that what we've been eating is basically a Snickers with half a gram of soy protein, which the manufacturers "accidentally" told us only had five grams of carbohydrate. But that's another rant.
But here's the thing. I want to answer my mail. I appreciate that you guys take time to write to me. But I get, really, more mail than a busy blogger can handle. So when you send me email with subject lines that drip with sarcasm or contain words I can't repeat on a family blog, do you think I
a) Open them with alacrity, eager to find out what a stupid [expletive deleted] I've been b) Think "Thank god, there's a couple I don't have to respond to" and delete them unread.
I'm just saying -- consider your audience. When it comes to nasty invective about my intelligence, manners and morals, I am not part of your target demographic.
More tomorrow on my exciting weekend in beautiful Champaign-Urbana.
