Blogging

 

 

Why I Blog

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

• Andrew Sullivan
• November 2008 Issue

(Photo credit: Trey Ratcliffe)

The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog.

Also see:



Video: "Your Brain on Blog"
Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder discuss the narcotic appeal of blogging and the occupational hazards of thinking quickly. 

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

A ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log.

In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship’s owners and traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart from the crew’s own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

I remember first grappling with what to put on my blog. It was the spring of 2000 and, like many a freelance writer at the time, I had some vague notion that I needed to have a presence “online.” I had no clear idea of what to do, but a friend who ran a Web-design company offered to create a site for me, and, since I was technologically clueless, he also agreed to post various essays and columns as I wrote them. Before too long, this became a chore for him, and he called me one day to say he’d found an online platform that was so simple I could henceforth post all my writing myself. The platform was called Blogger.

As I used it to post columns or links to books or old essays, it occurred to me that I could also post new writing—writing that could even be exclusive to the blog. But what? Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions. In my case, I drew on my mainstream-media experience to navigate the virgin sea. I had a few early inspirations: the old Notebook section of The New Republic, a magazine that, under the editorial guidance of Michael Kinsley, had introduced a more English style of crisp, short commentary into what had been a more high-minded genre of American opinion writing. The New Republic had also pioneered a Diarist feature on the last page, which was designed to be a more personal, essayistic, first-person form of journalism. Mixing the two genres, I did what I had been trained to do—and improvised.

I’d previously written online as well, contributing to a listserv for gay writers and helping Kinsley initiate a more discursive form of online writing for Slate, the first magazine published exclusively on the Web. As soon as I began writing this way, I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial, unfinished tone. In one of my early Kinsley-­guided experiments, he urged me not to think too hard before writing. So I wrote as I’d write an e-mail—with only a mite more circumspection. This is hazardous, of course, as anyone who has ever clicked Send in a fit of anger or hurt will testify. But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.

From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic, for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics, editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is. Writers can be sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers. They survive, for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary. Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

And so blogging found its own answer to the defensive counterblast from the journalistic establishment. To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers. Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers. In an era when the traditional media found itself beset by scandals as disparate as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Dan Rather, bloggers survived the first assault on their worth. In time, in fact, the high standards expected of well-trafficked bloggers spilled over into greater accountability, transparency, and punctiliousness among the media powers that were. Even New York Times columnists were forced to admit when they had been wrong.

The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more.

And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink. An old-school columnist can write 800 brilliant words analyzing or commenting on, say, a new think-tank report or scientific survey. But in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context). Online, a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience. Yes, a few sentences of bloggy spin may not be as satisfying as a full column, but the ability to read the primary material instantly—in as careful or shallow a fashion as you choose—can add much greater context than anything on paper. Even a blogger’s chosen pull quote, unlike a columnist’s, can be effortlessly checked against the original. Now this innovation, pre-dating blogs but popularized by them, is increasingly central to mainstream journalism.

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

A writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.

Or take the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus, the publisher of and main writer for Die Fackel, who delighted in constantly twitting authority with slashing aphorisms and rapid-fire bursts of invective. Kraus had something rare in his day: the financial wherewithal to self-publish. It gave him a fearlessness that is now available to anyone who can afford a computer and an Internet connection.

But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before.

Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note that many of these “money quotes” were deliberately taken out of context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in empirical doubt.

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

That atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality. The blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality.

The faux intimacy of the Web experience, the closeness of the e-mail and the instant message, seeps through. You feel as if you know bloggers as they go through their lives, experience the same things you are experiencing, and share the moment. When readers of my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew. Print readers don’t do that. It’s Mr. Sullivan to them.

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print. The same goes for the 2000 recount, the Iraq War, the revelations of Abu Ghraib, the death of John Paul II, or any of the other history-making events of the past decade. There is simply no way to write about them in real time without revealing a huge amount about yourself. And the intimate bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times, say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

These friends, moreover, are an integral part of the blog itself—sources of solace, company, provocation, hurt, and correction. If I were to do an inventory of the material that appears on my blog, I’d estimate that a good third of it is reader-­generated, and a good third of my time is spent absorbing readers’ views, comments, and tips. Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions. And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources, nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him.

Some of this material—e-mails from soldiers on the front lines, from scientists explaining new research, from dissident Washington writers too scared to say what they think in their own partisan redoubts—might never have seen the light of day before the blogosphere. And some of it, of course, is dubious stuff. Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.

Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper. A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.

Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now. There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.

Fellow bloggers are always expanding this knowledge base. Eight years ago, the blogosphere felt like a handful of individual cranks fighting with one another. Today, it feels like a universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating readerships, fighting with one another. To the neophyte reader, or blogger, it can seem overwhelming. But there is a connection between the intimacy of the early years and the industry it has become today. And the connection is human individuality.

The pioneers of online journalism—Slate and Salon—are still very popular, and successful. But the more memorable stars of the Internet—even within those two sites—are all personally branded. Daily Kos, for example, is written by hundreds of bloggers, and amended by thousands of commenters. But it is named after Markos Moulitsas, who started it, and his own prose still provides a backbone to the front-page blog. The biggest news-aggregator site in the world, the Drudge Report, is named after its founder, Matt Drudge, who somehow conveys a unified sensibility through his selection of links, images, and stories. The vast, expanding universe of The Huffington Post still finds some semblance of coherence in the Cambridge-Greek twang of Arianna; the entire world of online celebrity gossip circles the drain of Perez Hilton; and the investigative journalism, reviewing, and commentary of Talking Points Memo is still tied together by the tone of Josh Marshall. Even Slate is unimaginable without Mickey Kaus’s voice.

What endures is a human brand. Readers have encountered this phenomenon before—I.F. Stone’s Weekly comes to mind—but not to this extent. It stems, I think, from the conversational style that blogging rewards. What you want in a conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising. People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.

But writing in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic and readers you will get. The zero-sum game of old media—in which Time benefits from Newsweek’s decline and vice versa—becomes win-win. It’s great for Time to be linked to by Newsweek and the other way round. One of the most prized statistics in the blogosphere is therefore not the total number of readers or page views, but the “authority” you get by being linked to by other blogs. It’s an indication of how central you are to the online conversation of humankind.

The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is not the only fuel in the tank. In a world where no distinction is made between good traffic and bad traffic, and where emotion often rules, some will always raise their voice to dominate the conversation; others will pander shamelessly to their readers’ prejudices; others will start online brawls for the fun of it. Sensationalism, dirt, and the ease of formulaic talking points always beckon. You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with.

But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock. And it’s in the interests of both camps to generate shared traffic. This encourages polarized slugfests. But online, at least you see both sides. Reading The Nation or National Review before the Internet existed allowed for more cocooning than the wide-open online sluice gates do now. If there’s more incivility, there’s also more fluidity. Rudeness, in any case, isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a blogger. Being ignored is. Perhaps the nastiest thing one can do to a fellow blogger is to rip him apart and fail to provide a link.

A successful blog therefore has to balance itself between a writer’s own take on the world and others. Some bloggers collect, or “aggregate,” other bloggers’ posts with dozens of quick links and minimalist opinion topspin: Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit does this for the right-of-center; Duncan Black at Eschaton does it for the left. Others are more eclectic, or aggregate links in a particular niche, or cater to a settled and knowledgeable reader base. A “blogroll” is an indicator of whom you respect enough to keep in your galaxy. For many years, I kept my reading and linking habits to a relatively small coterie of fellow political bloggers. In today’s blogosphere, to do this is to embrace marginality. I’ve since added links to religious blogs and literary ones and scientific ones and just plain weird ones. As the blogosphere has expanded beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it, I’ve needed an assistant and interns to scour the Web for links and stories and photographs to respond to and think about. It’s a difficult balance, between your own interests and obsessions, and the knowledge, insight, and wit of others—but an immensely rich one. There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.

If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.

A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.

The points of this essay, for example, have appeared in shards and fragments on my blog for years. But being forced to order them in my head and think about them for a longer stretch has helped me understand them better, and perhaps express them more clearly. Each week, after a few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column. It invariably turns out to be more considered,
balanced, and evenhanded than the blog. But the blog will always inform and enrich the column, and often serve as a kind of free-form, free-associative research. And an essay like this will spawn discussion best handled on a blog. The conversation, in other words, is the point, and the different idioms used by the conversationalists all contribute something of value to it. And so, if the defenders of the old media once viscerally regarded blogging as some kind of threat, they are starting to see it more as a portal, and a spur.

There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.


In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.



 Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/

Microwave Popcorn Can Be Terribly Harmful

 

 

 

 

 

    

Deliciously Dangerous: Why Microwave Popcorn Can Be Terribly Harmful

Pragati Shukla , NDTV  |  Updated: August 12, 2015 

 

You know that hypnotizingly lovely smell that fills up the room when you make a fresh batch of popcorn in the microwave? Yeah, that may not be as good as you might think. That enchanting smell is actually a chemical called diacetyl, a synthetic butter flavoring. Why is it so bad, you ask? 

According to a research published in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, inhaling butter-flavouring chemical mixtures has been linked with severe obstructive lung disease commonly known as 'popcorn lung.’ Diacetyl is harmless when consumed, but when heated to high temperatures, diacetyl vaporizes and becomes toxic.

What’s Going on in Those Factories?
In fact, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an arm of the Centers for Disease Control, had begun investigating people who worked in microwave popcorn factories who had developed bronchiolitis obliterans (a lung disease characterized by fixed airway obstruction) and the results revealed the cause of the disease was something back at the factory - specifically exposure to an artificial flavoring agent: 2,3-butanedione or diacetyl. It was evident ‘popcorn lung’ was a problem, with NIOSH even issuing a health alert for workers, complete with preventive steps and an exposure limit guideline.

Chemicals, Chemicals Everywhere
Another problem is the presence of chemicals like perfluoroalkyls, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) which are used to line the popcorn bags to prevent grease from soaking the bag wet. On heating, these chemicals fuse into the popcorn you eat. They’re termed ‘likely carcinogens’ by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which cause a host of health nightmares. They mess up your endocrine system, causes thyroid issues, bladder cancer and much more.

Research Says
A study in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology from researchers from the University of Minnesota reveal a possible link between diacetyl, via its impact on a brain protein and Alzheimer’s disease. Another study that appeared in Mercola says -

“Researchers conducting test-tube studies revealed that diacetyl has several concerning properties for brain health. Not only can it pass through the blood-brain barrier, which is intended to help keep toxins out of your brain, but it can also cause brain proteins to misfold into the Alzheimer's-linked form known as beta amyloid. It also inhibits mechanisms that help to naturally clear the dangerous beta amyloid from your brain.

It's not known at this time whether eating diacetyl-containing foods (it's used not only in microwave popcorn but also in other snack foods, baked goods, pet foods, some fast foods and other food products) increases your risk of Alzheimer's, but the finding that it may contribute to brain plaques linked to Alzheimer's at very low concentrations is concerning, to say the least.”

A Sweet Price to Pay
Probably the most famous case was that of 59-year old Wayne Watson who took home $7.2 million from three companies as damages caused by microwave popcorn. He had been diagnosed with a rare case of irreversible lung disease, which had restricted his air flow by about 60 percent.  His lawyers effectively argued that this disease was a direct result of Watson inhaling toxic fumes and the artificial butter smell of microwave popcorn, which he consumed daily for over 10 years.

Warnings, What Warnings?
A quick look at the labels of most popcorn brands gives way to an unpleasant story. Apart from complex, difficult to understand ingredients, there is no mention of diacetyl or any warning whatsoever. At most, the labels would say ‘natural and artificial flavouring.’ In the past, at large, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considered diacetyl safe for consumption. Diacetyl had also escaped FDA regulation because the after effects are to do with respiration and not indigestion. However, FDA is reviewing and rolling out new warnings. However, what the FDA did recently was pass a rule banning trans fats in all food items. The FDA said in its statement "there is no safe level of consumption of artificial trans fat" and gave three years to companies to eliminate the ingredient from their products. Trans fats are commonly found in butter popcorn so that's one unhealthy ingredient off the list.

Grim Substitutes
In the face of so much backlash, a lot of microwave popcorn manufacturers have said they’ll be replacing diacetyl with another flavoring. But what will this flavouring be? Many experts fear the alternatives won’t be any better. An animal study published in American Journal of Pathology resonates with this thought. The researchers found that 2,3-pentanedione, a diacetyl substitute caused similar problems to the lung in rats and caused gene alternations in their brains.

Other Health Concerns
Trans fats, a byproduct of partially hydrogenated oils, is popular among food manufacturers as it gives food a distinctive taste, texture and also increases product shelf life. However, Trans fats is associated with many health problems – it increases bad cholesterol and builds up plaque in the arteries – which leads to coronary artery disease and heart attacks. Trans fats has been a go-to ingredient for microwave popcorn companies for its high melting point, as it keeps the fat in oil solid till the package is heated. Conversely, FDA has taken steps to ban, or limit, the use of trans fat in United States forcing food companies to come up with substitutes. Also, another matter of concern is the crazy amount of salt in these packs.

Don’t Give Up, Popcorn Lover
Away from the chemicals and grime, it’s far easier and healthier to make your own popcorn at home. You can either put kernels in a brown paper bag and lay it flat in a microwave or put them in a glass bowl covered with a plate for six and a half minutes on high. You don’t even need a microwave. A pan or a pressure cooker works just as good, if not better. The best part about homemade popcorn? Go ahead and ask your lungs to give it a big whiff and inhale in all that homemade goodness.

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Tags:  Food Safety

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Deliciously Dangerous: Why Microwave Popcorn Can Be Terribly Harmful


Source: http://food.ndtv.com/food-drinks/deliciously-dangerous-why-microwave-popcorn-can-be-terribly-harmful-745984

Living with a sense of purpose in life

Conclusion:

A sense of purpose in life also gives you this considerable advantage:

"People with a sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease."

The conclusions come from over 136,000 people who took part in 10 different studies.

Participants in the studies were mostly from the US and Japan.


The US studies asked people:

• how useful they felt to others,
• about their sense of purpose, and
• the meaning they got out of life.

The Japanese studies asked people about ‘ikigai’ or whether their life was worth living.
The participants, whose average age was 67, were tracked for around 7 years.

During that time almost 20,000 died. 
But, amongst those with a strong sense of purpose or high ‘ikigai’, the risk of death was one-fifth lower.

Despite the link between sense of purpose and health being so intuitive, scientists are not sure of the mechanism.

Sense of purpose is likely to improve health by strengthening the body against stress.

It is also likely to be linked to healthier behaviours.

Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Of note, having a strong sense of life purpose has long been postulated to be an important dimension of life, providing people with a sense of vitality motivation and resilience.

Nevertheless, the medical implications of living with a high or low sense of life purpose have only recently caught the attention of investigators.

The current findings are important because they may open up new potential interventions for helping people to promote their health and sense of well-being.”

This research on links between sense of purpose in life and longevity is getting stronger all the time:

• “A 2009 study of 1,238 elderly people found that those with a sense of purpose lived longer.
• A 2010 study of 900 older adults found that those with a greater sense of purpose were much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
• Survey data often links a sense of purpose in life with increased happiness.

No matter what your age, then, it’s worth thinking about what gives your life meaning.”



Read More:

Find out what kinds of things people say give their lives meaning.

Here’s an exercise for increasing meaningfulness

And a study finding that feeling you belong increases the sense of meaning.

The study was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (Cohen et al., 2015).




A sense of purpose in life
Link: http://www.spring.org.uk/2015/12/here-is-why-a-sense-of-purpose-in-life-is-important-for-health

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

U.N. declares junk food a 'human rights' issue

Says countries failing to meet globally agreed upon nutrition

 

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — A U.N. expert says junk food is a human rights concern.
Hilal Elver, the U.N.’s special representative on the right to food, said Tuesday the rise of industrial food production combined with trade liberalization has allowed large corporations to flood the global market with cheap, nutrient-poor foods that force poor people to choose between economic viability and nutrition, effectively violating their right to adequate food.
“Within the human rights framework, states are obliged to ensure effective measures to regulate the food industry, ensure that nutrition policymaking spaces are free from private sector influence and implement comprehensive policies that combat malnutrition in all its forms,” she said.

Read the full story ›

 

 

image: http://www.wnd.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-print/images/printer_famfamfam.gif

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/u-n-declares-junk-food-a-human-rights-issue/#vtpG95RYg8i5WhuQ.99

 

 Nutrition

Why You Need to Stop Eating Egg Whites

• Mandy Oaklander @mandyoaklander

Oct. 25, 2016

Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones for TIME

Eat your yolks, folks

Scan the “healthy” section of a brunch menu and there you’ll find it: the world’s saddest order, the egg white omelet. This time will be different, you think, these things aren’t so bad, but then you stare down at the flat, pale pancake of liquid protein and think to yourself: Why do I do this to myself?
You do it because you were told to. We all were. Until just recently, experts warned that dietary cholesterol causes spikes in blood cholesterol, which in turn clogs arteries and hurts the heart. Cholesterol is found in the yellows, not the whites, so down the drain went the yolks.

Left behind are a wobbly mix of water, protein, some vitamins and little else. These whites are also sold in one-ingredient cartons, pasteurized so they can be eaten raw. (That’s not the case for shell egg substitutes, like Egg Beaters Original, which come with egg whites but cut out cholesterol by mimicking the yolk with natural flavor and color, vegetable gums, maltodextrin and many other added ingredients.)

But there’s good reason not to fear the yolks. Scientific research has vindicated dietary cholesterol, finding that eating cholesterol has no real impact on cholesterol metabolism. That is, eating foods high in cholesterol does not mean you’ll develop high cholesterol. Some evidence suggests that eggs might even be beneficial for cholesterol by raising levels of HDL cholesterol, the “good” cholesterol that’s linked to a lower risk of heart disease.

Egg yolks contain a vibrant mix of saturated and unsaturated fat—another nutrient that, when it comes from a healthy whole food source, is unfairly slandered. Yolks have a good helping of vitamin E, one of the nutrients Americans eat too little of. But the real case for egg yolks can be made by their abundance of carotenoids, nutrients in plants and animal fats that give things like egg yolks (and even autumn leaves) their yellow color. Egg yolks are rich in the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin, which help eye health and protect against inflammation.

Sure, you can find carotenoids in more virtuous places, like fruits and vegetables. But egg yolks have an edge. Carotenoids need to be eaten with fat in order for the body to more fully absorb them, and a whole egg is the total package. Eat them, and you’ll get more of these nutrients—not just from the eggs, but from the stuff you eat it with, too. Two large eggs provide 143 calories, 13 grams of protein and almost 10 grams of fat.

A study last year found that when people ate eggs on a raw vegetable salad, their bodies absorbed about 9 times the carotenoids, including lutein and zeaxanthin from the eggs and alpha carotene, beta carotene and lycopene from the veggies. A new one from the same authors found the same effect on vitamin E absorption as well.

Americans are notoriously bad at eating vegetables; a full 87% of them eat less than the recommended amount. If they can wring more nutrients from those they do eat by adding an egg, yolks could do a lot of good, says Purdue University nutrition researcher and study author Jung Eun Kim. “There’s no fat in egg white, so you are not going to observe the same effect.”
So next time you crack open an egg, don’t let the fatty, cholesterol-choked yolk slip away. Mix it in for good texture—and even better health.

Link: http://time.com/4536939/egg-white-yolk-cholesterol/?xid=newsletter-brief 

This puts a new spin on responsibility...

Fathers drinking: Also responsible for fetal disorders?

Date:

February 14, 2014

Source:

Taylor & Francis

Summary:

Maternal exposure to alcohol in-utero is a known risk and cause of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). FAS children suffer significant problems such as retarded intellect, stunted growth and nervous system abnormalities, social problems and isolation. Until now, fathers have not had a causal link to such disabilities. Ground breaking new research has been revealed which shows dads may have more accountability.

 

 

FULL STORY

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The authors believe alcohol consumption affects genes in sperm which are responsible for normal fetal development.

Credit: © Dario Lo Presti / Fotolia

 

 

Maternal exposure to alcohol in-utero is a known risk and cause of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. FAS children suffer significant problems such as retarded intellect, stunted growth and nervous system abnormalities, social problems and isolation. Until now Fathers have not had a causal link to such disabilities. Ground breaking new research has been revealed which shows Dads may have more accountability.

Published in Animal Cells and Systems, researchers studied male mice exposed to varying concentrations of alcohol and one control group exposed only to saline. After exposure the mice were mated and resulting fetuses examined. The findings revealed previously unknown and riveting evidence that paternal alcohol consumption can directly affect fetal development.

A number of fetuses sired by males exposed to alcohol suffered abnormal organ development and or brain development. Those in the saline group were normal. So, can developmental abnormalities be predetermined at fertilization? This research proves so. The authors believe alcohol consumption affects genes in sperm which are responsible for normal fetal development.

Until now fathers' lifestyle choices have not seen any repercussion on their unborn children. This ground-breaking research provides the first definitive evidence that fathers' drinking habits pre-conception can cause significant fetal abnormalities.

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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Taylor & Francis. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Hye Jeong Lee, Jae-Sung Ryu, Na Young Choi, Yo Seph Park, Yong Il Kim, Dong Wook Han, Kisung Ko, Chan Young Shin, Han Sung Hwang, Kyung-Sun Kang, Kinarm Ko. Transgenerational effects of paternal alcohol exposure in mouse offspring. Animal Cells and Systems, 2013; 17 (6): 429 DOI: 10.1080/19768354.2013.865675

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Cite This Page:

• MLA
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Taylor & Francis. "Fathers drinking: Also responsible for fetal disorders?." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 February 2014. .

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Link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140214075405.htm

Visceral Fat

   Tuomas Marttila via Getty Images

 

Why The Fat You Can See Isn’t The Fat You Should Worry About

All body fat is not created equal.

• Erin Schumaker Healthy Living Editor, The Huffington Post

 

In reality, the area of your body where you store your fat may be a better predictor of health -- regardless of your body mass index.
"All fat is not the same," said Dr. Virend Somers, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Fat directly under the skin -- the stuff we can see -- isn't necessarily harmful.
It's the invisible fat that we need to be concerned about.
"The fat inside is the one that we’re realizing is harmful," Somer said. "It’s much more metabolically active and produces all kinds of bad things. It’s the kind of fat that’s linked to high cardiovascular risk."

The difference between visible and invisible fat

While obesity is linked to myriad health problems, including coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes, all fat is not created equal.
Subcutaneous fat is the visible kind that we're used to seeing, the stuff that you can pinch on your stomach or thighs. This type of fat lives under the skin, and is relatively safe, health-wise. Pear-shaped people, who have smaller waists and store weight in their hips, also tend to have more subcutaneous fat.
Apple-shaped people, who store weight around their mid-sections, tend to have more visceral fat. Visceral fat is internal, and you can't usually tell if someone has it just by looking. Visceral fat collects around organs such as the stomach, intestine, spleen and kidneys.
"You don’t see this fat early on," Somers explained. If you're lean and you start putting on weight, without seeing any visible outward changes, that could be visceral fat. "Then suddenly it starts bulging out and that’s when the belly starts hanging out," he said.

But all is not lost if you're 'apple' shaped

 

  via Getty Images

Luckily for those who carry their pounds around their mid-sections, losing just a small amount of weight -- even just 10 pounds -- can make a huge difference in health outcomes, and can lower your risk for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
A small 2010 study compared two groups of young, healthy-weight participants. One group maintained their weight over eight weeks, but researchers overfed the second group, causing them to gain about 10 pounds each on average. The health results, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, were striking.
Among the fat-gain group, some participants gained more visceral fat and some gained more subcutaneous fat. Those who gained the most visceral fat, about a third of participants, saw the biggest deterioration in blood pressure and in endothelial function, a measure of how well the blood vessels are working. At the end of the 16 weeks of the study, when the visceral fat-gainers had lost the excess weight, their endothelial function returned to normal.
Those who gained mostly subcutaneous fat didn't see any significant change in endothelial function.
"They didn’t look that different," Somers, one of authors of the study, said of the participants' modest weight gain. "It’s not merely a function of getting fat. It’s where the fat goes."

How do I know if I have visceral fat?

Unfortunately, the body-fat scale at your gym, which uses a method called bioelectrical impedance analysis, isn't especially accurate. The gold standards for visceral fat analysis include MRIs, CT scans and hydrostatic water weighing, which don't come cheap. If you're not interested in investing in a pricey test or two, a good rough proxy is to calculate your waist-to-hip ratio. For men, the ratio should be no higher than 0.90, for women, no higher than 0.83.
Don't despair if the resulting number isn't what you'd hoped -- it's easy enough to start addressing the problem, because "Exercise disproportionately targets visceral fat,” Gary R. Hunter, a professor of human studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times in 2015.
Hunter's research bears this out. A 2010 study published in the journal Obesity found that sedentary women who started a twice-weekly, 40-minute exercise regimen lost 10 percent of their visceral fat during the year that they were enrolled in the study.


Have a question for Healthy Living? Get in touch here and we'll do our best to ask the experts and get back to you.

"Ask Healthy Living" is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Please consult a qualified health care professional for personalized medical advice.

Link: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1rmpD7/:1sOFtIzmC:AqJ3R6br/www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/difference-between-visceral-and-subcutaneous-fat_us_56d48b65e4b0bf0dab32e46f

Pornography

‘You cannot accept any pornography in your man’s life’: Terry Crews reveals his fight with porn addiction

 

Sadaf Ahsan | February 24, 2016 

In a series of video confessions that could one day become educational tools, former NFL player and Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Terry Crews has taken it upon himself to reveal his “dirty little secret” — a porn addiction.

Crews actually first revealed his addiction two years ago in his memoir, titled Manhood. And in an interview with Wendy Williams to promote the book, he admitted, “I was addicted to pornography since I was 12 years old. My father was addicted to alcohol and my mother was addicted to religion. So what happens is you had an addictive household.” 
“It messed up my life in a lot of ways,” he said of pornography...
After entering rehab six years ago, Crews changed his ways and now firmly believes porn “changes the way you think about people. People become objects. People become body parts. People become things to be used rather than people to be loved.”
He meant to share his personal experiences as a “servant to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” while touching on masculine pride and porn being “an intimacy killer.”

Despite his reveal being layered with his own moral views, Crews is helping to put the message out there that addiction doesn’t have to be such a secret in your fight to conquer it.

 Link: http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/celebrity/you-cannot-accept-any-pornography-in-your-mans-life-terry-crews-reveals-his-fight-with-porn-addiction

Topics: Arts, Celebrity, Need to Know, Pornography, Sexual Addiction, Terry Crews

World Fatter

 

Startling growth in obesity over past 20 years

Just when you thought the obesity crisis couldn't get worse:

To Your Health

America’s getting even fatter: 

Startling growth in obesity over past 20 years

By Ariana Eunjung Cha

 June 22, 2015 

 

New obesity statistics are out for the United States, and they show that nearly two-thirds of adults are at an unhealthy weight.

An analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday found that 75 percent of men and 67 percent of women ages 25 and older are now overweight or obese. That's a startling shift from 20 years ago when 63 percent of men and 55 percent of women were overweight or obese and a depressing sign that campaigns to get Americans to eat healthier and exercise more may be failing.

Based on information from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67.6 million Americans were obese and 65.2 million overweight as of 2012. The CDC defines obese as having a body mass index of 30 or higher, and overweight as a body mass index of between 25 and 29.9.

This marks the first time that Americans who are obese outnumber those who are overweight.

More than one-third (35.7 percent) of adults are considered to be obese. More than 1 in 20 (6.3 percent) have extreme obesity. Almost 3 in 4 men (74 percent) are considered to be overweight or obese. The prevalence of obesity is similar for both men and women (about 36 percent).

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/ambianc-the-worlds-longest-ever-film-gets-a-seven-hour-trailer-a6989561.html

 

 

Overweight and Obesity Statistics | National Institute of Diabetes ... 

 http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

America's getting even fatter: Startling growth in obesity over ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../2015/.../americas-getting-even-fatter-st...