Off to Maine

1 Random Road

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving – the Fountain clan plans to. Snowstorm up there tomorrow, maybe, so this seems like a good time to drive up to meet it. Nothing much doing in real estate this week anyway – the MLS shuts down tomorrow at noon and reopens Monday, but here’s one open house that might be of interest, a bank owned house at 1 Random Road, Old Greenwich, asking $1.595. I remember it as being in fairly rough shape back in the day, and the foreclosure process rarely inspires maintenance or improvements, but south of the Village, nice street, so … maybe.

I’ll post from time to time, and check in to make sure Walt hasn’t gone (further) off the rails.

An answer that’s no solution, and one that is

Marilyn Monroe prepares for bed: no objectional fat here

FDA releases new regulations requiring delis to count the calories in that cheese steak.

“I consider this an enormous advance for public health education and well worth the long wait,” said Marion Nestle, a prominent nutrition expert and public health professor at New York University. “This is great news for public health and, hopefully, an incentive to restaurants to reformulate their offerings to be lower in calories.”

The food industry disagrees, and points out at least one unintended consequence:

Rosado said 95 percent of food in grocery stores comes with nutrition information, thanks to a 1990 law that required labels on packaged foods, and that prepared foods represent only a fraction of each store’s business. Requiring labels for fresh food made in grocery stores, delis and bakeries could cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars in signage, worker training and laboratory tests to determine the calories in each dish, he said. He thinks it also might prompt stores to carry fewer freshly made items to avoid the regulatory headaches.

“You’re penalizing any kind of freshness. . . . It’s going to be replaced with prepackaged food,” Rosado said. “It’s going to have a negative impact for grocery store consumers.”

But does the FDA’s new regulation focus on the wrong solution to ridding America of fat people in the first place? Scientists now suggest that it is : Don’t bother counting calories; it’s the type of food that counts. Our government and its mouthpieces haven’t heard the news, though.

Remember when “accepted science” warned against saturated fat? The American Heart Association still does, insisting as recently as this past September that it’s bad, bad stuff:

Eating foods that contain saturated fats raises the level of cholesterol in your blood. High levels of LDL cholesterol in your blood increase your risk of heart disease and stroke.

The more important thing to remember is the overall dietary picture. Saturated fats are just one piece of the puzzle. In general, you can’t go wrong eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories.

When you hear about the latest “diet of the day” or a new or odd-sounding theory about food, consider the source. The American Heart Association makes dietary recommendations only after carefully considering the latest scientific evidence. 

But the latest scientific evidence shows that to be absolutely false. (You can Google “saturated fats healthy” and find dozens of articles explaining why the government and groups like the American Heart Association have been wrong since the 1950s, but here’s just one.). It’s the sugar that’s killing us, not butter,  and it’s not the number of calories we consume, but their source, yet check out the food aisles at any grocery store and you’ll see at least one, often two aisles stocked entirely with soda pop and Lucky Charms, and, at most, 2′ of the refrigerated section devoted to butter, and a couple of short selves stocking whole milk.

Fortunately for all of us, there is a simple solution that cuts through all these conflicting theories that’s free, fun, and might even be entertaining, depending on whether you have a cuddly bedwarmer with you this winter:

Sleeping in the nude burns more calories, improves health