Socialisation and Gaming, LUV and Science, Poisonous Sugar

[tcpip]

Had a good night out on Friday with caseopaya, Julie A., and Jasper S., the latter visiting from Perth en route to the Cayman Islands, of all places. We had dinner and drinks at the Abbotsford Convent where there Supper Market was being held, then followed up with more drinks at the decidedly death rocker Bendigo Hotel. In my other avenue of socialisation (and good conversation) ran another session of Masks of Nyarlathotep on Thursday with surprisingly no characters going insane; one (NPC) however was turned into paste by dynamite in a warehouse. Today will be another sesison of GURPS Middle-Earth, where investigations continue in Estgaroth for the causes of industrial sabotage - it beats fighting Orcs for a living.

Convened the Linux Users of Victoria Beginners Workshop yesterday and gave the presentation An Introduction to Slackware, which I don't mind as a distribution, even without dependency checking. In other related news, absolutely excited to hear that Plan 9 from Bell Labs is now available as a GPL distributed operating system, albeit with some discussion on the matter. Of ultimate importance however - and if it does work it will fundamentally change the world - fusion power experiment successful; rather oddly this has barely made a mention in the mainstream news.

My epicurean proclivities have never led me to take a great interest in nutritional issues, apart from the most obvious (avoid processed foods, especially refined sugars and transfats etc). However, I recently encountered an article on John Yudkin, which led me to recall a recommendation of Prof. Robert Lustig's lecture on sugar is a poison, and the more recent follow-up, fat chance, on the same topic. Whilst the science intrigues me, politically it would be very difficult to see the regulation he is recommending come into existence. Regulations have an uneasy relationship between power and reason, and it is usually the former that acquires supremacy when challenged.

Comments

[iris]

It's a lot easier to buy healthier groceries now for me, mostly due to Portland. In Texas, I was unable to buy healthy foods as the only places that sold them jacked up the prices as they had a monopoly. I know you're not in the states, but it really varies around here on how easy it is for someone to be able to afford to eat really healthily. I don't think some people here could afford it even if forced to.

[tcpip]

Even in Australia, from the words of visitors, I have heard about food conditions in Texas which correlates with what you tell me.

A very interesting part of one of the lectures is that the blame for the highly processed foods with sugar additives comes down to... President Nixon. Apparently he wanted to ensure that food prices could be kept low (and thus no longer an election issue) and that people would receive their required caloric intake - both of which are admirable goals in themselves.

The answer was to make sugar cheap. Coupled with the generic anti-fats message of the 70s (which effectively meant replace fats with sugars in processed foods) it was a short sweet path to syrupy fructose. Not that fructose in fruit form as much of a problem. Combined with fibres the uptake is controlled.

[mangled-packets.livejournal.com]

Poisonous sugar sounds like a good username.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Sweet and deadly!