Oh, I was thinking other kinds of competitor drinks, like sparkling Ice drinks, so my bias was showing. I don’t price LaCroix so it slipped my mind as a competitor. Carry on. I was also referencing Costco’s preference to have unit sizes so that item price was north of $10.
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“It’s 100% the diet,” agrees Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “And I think then the question is, what is it about the diet?”
Mozaffarian was not involved in the study, but he says it adds to other recent research that suggests food is the biggest driver in obesity. He points out there’s been a major shift in our food supply in recent decades — which is now dominated by ultra-processed food. In a subanalysis of the data for some of the populations, Pontzer and his colleagues found that people in countries that got more of their calories from ultra-processed foods tended to have more obesity and higher body fat percentages.
“For decades we’ve been telling Americans that you’re lazy, it’s your fault, you’re not moving enough, you’re eating too much,” Mozaffarian says. “And I think what this study shows is that there’s really complicated biology happening and that our food is driving this.”
- I’ll guess 90% diet, maybe. Still way more than commonly assumed.
- For the last decade or more (I have a book published in 2002 or so regarding changing what one eats and increasing muscle mass in order to increase the base metabolic rate (written for men, whose Testosterone helps with this), diet has been considered the major cause of obesity. How much and how much shit one eats are it. And “how much shit” often causes the body to increases the “how much” part.
- Probably AI-generated. Not sure how much was stolen from existing studies.
Next they’ll be discovering that HFCS is a culprit.
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I hope you don’t expect me to read that report.
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Congestion pricing and other changes to reduce the number of cars in NYC means fewer pedestrian fatalities
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It’s a weird thing for him to double down on.
Evergreen statement imo.
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Looking for the Transportation Alternatives press release on that, but evidently they put out a PR after a lot of the pedestrian deaths in NYC:
This morning, a driver hit and killed two pedestrians on 42nd Street in Astoria. The driver also died from injuries from the crash. The pedestrians were 41 and 70 years old and were waiting at a coffee truck when they were killed. The driver was speeding northbound on 42nd Street — a street eligible for a speed reduction through Sammy’s Law, but remains speed-limited at 25 mph.
Given the driver was grossly speeding on the street as it was, I’m not sure dropping the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph would have done much.
I don’t disagree with this:
Slower speeds are proven to reduce crashes dramatically. A pedestrian hit by a car going 20 mph is six times less likely to die than someone hit by a car going 30 mph.
I disagree with this:
Lower speed limits make everyone drive slower; even people who exceed the speed limit exceed it to a more minor degree.
It’s true for those who speed only a “little bit” – those going about 5-10 mph over the limit.
The speed demons are limited only by other vehicles in their way, which is why they’d slow down a little… but often, you can have an empty street and they will just VROOM.
The solution, obviously, is to have more traffic.
Here we go:
New Data from Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets Shows Vision Zero Works, Should Be Expanded; Congestion Pricing Has Made Streets Safer
There are some cause-effect arguments to be made as to why congestion pricing would be involved in all of these results (including increased street traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, in Brooklyn, as people try to avoid the congestion toll zone…but maybe it has nothing to do with that at all.) Maybe people in the Bronx and Staten Island driving into Manhattan less, thereby driving around their own boroughs less… or people driving through those boroughs less often to get to Manhattan.
It would depend on the usual pedestrian death locations, of course.
Anyway, interesting stuff.
What’s interesting is what happened in 2020 re: MVA (motor vehicle accident) deaths
there were less vehicles on the roads… and more deaths.
One of the interesting shifts is that the age group (in annual rate) who dies most in MVAs – the really old – had their death rates come down, because they weren’t on the road. But younger ages had their death rates come up.
The “pace cars” of the highways – the slowpokes – weren’t there to slow down the speed demons (and I think some people were driving a bit more maniacally as well, of those on the roads. There was more alcohol/drug abuse during 2020 & 2021.)
Anyway, that was an unexpected result.
The main way to get people to slow down is to build the roads so that it’s hostile to fast driving: “traffic calming features”, like speed bumps, dips, roundabouts, etc. Anything physically difficult to speed through. When the roads are already built with a straight grid like Manhattan, and lots of NYC overall, it’s a bit tougher. Speed bumps are a pain in the ass for snowplowing.
They’ve tried timing the lights before, which definitely helps, but it also gums up traffic overall.