Employers want their workers to be healthy—both for insurance-cost and humane reasons—but aspects of those very jobs can make workers sick. A studypublished this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that workers who toiled for more than 40 hours per week or were exposed to a hostile work environment were significantly more likely to be obese.
Both of those are fairly intuitive—long hours at the office can make it hard to squeeze in exercise, and dealing with, shall we say, “a strong personality” all day can make it tempting to indulge in an extra helping of curly fries. (A more tragic explanation would be that people who are already obese are more likely to be harassed at work.)
But surprisingly, the researchers also found that certain industries and occupations in and of themselves correlate with higher obesity rates, even when controlling for the demographic makeup of those jobs.
The study authors used data from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey and connected it to self-reported weight and height information, as well as industry and occupation codes from the Census. For the hostility factor, they asked workers: “During the past 12 months were you threatened, bullied, or harassed by anyone while you were on the job?” (The obesity rate was 13 percent higher among those who said yes.)
Among the industry categories, manufacturing, healthcare/social assistance, transportation/warehousing, information, utilities, and public administration had the highest obesity rates:
Olga Khazan
Surprisingly, though, only the healthcare/social assistance and public administration industries had significantly higher-than-average obesity rates after the study authors adjusted for factors such as race, gender, and health behaviors like smoking.
"Public administration" means, roughly, bureaucrats in local, city, and federal offices. "Healthcare and social assistance" is anyone who works in a healthcare setting.
This is a bit odd. It’s plausible that sitting behind some far-flung city hall desk might lead to weight gain; it’s more shocking that people who work in doctors’ offices suffer from high rates of obesity even as their workplaces preach healthy living.
From there, the researchers looked at actual job descriptions:
Olga Khazan
Protective service workers—cops, security guards, and jailers—had the highest obesity prevalence, at more than 40 percent. But again, only engineers, office administrators, and social-service workers had unusually high obesity rates after adjusting for the demographic and other factors.
In some ways, this chart simply represents a broad swathe of a country where one in three people are obese: “Engineering” is a pretty wide-ranging description, and the "office and admin" field encompasses everyone from bank tellers to receptionists.
But again, the “social service workers” category includes people working in counseling, mental health, and child protection—a.k.a. healthcare.
So why are people in healthcare jobs portlier than others? The authors think it could be because certain characteristics of those jobs—their sedentariness, for example—contributes to obesity. Doctors might be on their feet all day, but their receptionists and billing staff are glued to their desks, licking envelopes and answering phones.
But the researchers also bring up an interesting data point: An earlier National Health Interview Survey found that the occupational category “health services,” which includes lower-wage clerical staff, had a much higher obesity rate than so-called “health diagnosing” jobs, which comprise higher-earning roles like doctors and nurse-practitioners.
So, as with most trends that seem to co-occur with obesity, it might all just come down to income. Your job might affect your body, but it’s how much you earn, not where you work, that ultimately matters.
When the original Macintosh first shipped to customers in 1984, it came with a whimsical line drawing of a rainbow-hued Macintosh on front. Drawn with just a few sinuous strokes of a colored crayon, the logo is often referred to as the original Macintosh's Picasso logo. But that's a misnomer. As it turns out, the Macintosh's Picasso logo was inspired by another artist entirely.
John Casado and Tom Hughes, who were art directors on the original Macintosh development team, designed the so-called Picasso logo. Tasked with finding an appropriately winsome and approachable logo for the Macintosh, Casado and Hughes drew inspiration from the line drawings of one of Picasso's contemporaries: .
“The inspiration for the drawing style was Matisse, whom I so admired as an artist," Casado tells Adam Rosen at Cult of Mac. "The idea of the graphics being ‘Picasso style’ was, as I remember, a journalist’s description at the time of the launch. I think since no one ever asked me or Tom where the influence came from, it became fact."
Intriguingly, Casado and Hughes were never actually supposed to do the Macintosh logo at all. Instead, the original task of coming up with a logo for the Mac was meant to fall to Jean-Michel Folon, a famous Belgian cartoonist and painter. Steve Jobs seems to have been quite eager to give Folon some work, having previously tasked the artist to design a little cartoon man inside every Mac, but sadly, Folon never did get a chance to design the Mac's official logo.
Once you know that the Macintosh "Picasso" logo was inspired by Matisse, you can't help but think it's completely, head-thunkingly obvious. Picasso's cubist artwork looks nothing like the Macintosh logo's fluid, colorful draughtsmanship. Matisse as muse makes far more sense. All it took was one art-blind journalist to get it wrong to put Picasso as a signature to it forever. Funny how that goes.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Repair Your Car
Fixing modern cars requires special diagnostic tools and official service information—information that some manufacturers don’t share with independent technicians.
In a dusty, industrial corner of Sacramento, a married couple say their prayers and open up their own business—a little car repair garage. It's something they've always dreamed of doing together, and they name the shop after Eve, the better-half of this husband-wife duo.
But a couple months after opening, Eve runs into a problem. While the shop is both willing and able enough to fix modern cars, they can’t get the service manuals they need from automakers to actually perform some repairs.
And they’re not the only ones.
Modern luxury cars have more code in them than fighter jets. Most new cars—luxury or otherwise—come equipped with on-board computers, complicated diagnostic systems, and software that controls everything from the radio to the navigation system.
You can’t fix a computer with a wrench. Instead, fixing modern cars requires special diagnostic tools and official service information—information that some manufacturers don’t share with independent repair techs like Eve.
But all that might be changing. Automotive Right to Repair just became a nationwide policy, thanks almost exclusively to voters in the state of Massachusetts.
At its heart, Automotive Right to Repair is about consumer choice. As an owner, you should have the right to repair your car wherever you want: at the manufacturer repair center, at the trusty corner mechanic, or in your driveway.
The announcement (or MOU, as they are calling it) is unexpected, but it’s not exactly surprising. Right to Repair is a hugely populist issue. When it came in front of Massachusetts voters as a direct ballot measure, Right to Repair passed with 86 percent of the vote. Manufacturers likely saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to go national—while they could still hammer out a deal on their terms.
The result: Beginning in model year 2018, all automakers will be required to use a standard, non-proprietary interface so mechanics can access a car’s service data. Manufacturers must also sell both repair tools and service information at a “fair and reasonable price.” Of course, there are some caveats: Information that manufacturers deem to be a trade secret or proprietary is exempt from the agreement. A five-person panel will settle disputes between parties, should a manufacturer overcharge or refuse information.
The agreement “will ensure that independent repair professionals and interested consumers have access to the tools and information required to repair increasingly high-tech cars,” said State Rep. Garrett Bradley, the Massachusetts lawmaker most vocal on Right to Repair.
As part of the agreement, CARE and AIAA—both Right to Repair advocates—will stand-down on the issue. They won’t lobby and they won’t support Right to Repair legislation in other states. For them, the fight is over.
“A patchwork of 50 differing state bills, each with its own interpretations and compliance parameters doesn’t make sense,” said Mike Stanton, president of Global Automakers. “This agreement provides the uniform clarity our industry needs and a nationwide platform to move on.”
But the argument isn’t quite settled yet. The MOU isn’t a law, and it can’t be enforced like a law—even with a five-person regulatory panel. Plus, individual auto companies—all 23 of them— still need to endorse the agreement. Until then, it’s just words on a sheet of paper.
The MOU also failed to garner the support of AAA, a longtime advocate of repair. Unlike the Massachusetts law, the new MOU excludes information about telematics—like navigation, vehicle location technologies, and wireless communication technologies.
“When you look at where telematics is going, you can start to diagnose problems before they occur,” John Nielsen of AAA told Car and Driver. “That’s really the future of repair.”
Ultimately, the agreement is a step in the right direction—but it certainly isn’t future proof. The exemption of telematic systems will likely prove problematic as automakers integrate more “connected” features into cars. Without stronger Right to Repair provisions, independent repair techs could once again be left out in the cold.
And Right to Repair doesn't stop with cars. This MOU is just one small moving piece in the greater repair puzzle.
Consumers should have the right to repair everything they own. Manufacturer claims of proprietary information and intellectual property have plagued every repair industry. They’ve kept farmers from repairing their tractors, owners from repairing Apple products, and even tinkerers from modifying the software on their calculators. But as with cars, those are rights consumers will have to fight for.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
The Rise and Fall of Orange Juice as a Health Drink
How U.S. consumers came to believe that oranges, in any form, were an important part of a healthy diet.
audreyjm529/flickrA tall glass of orange juice is the very image of refreshment, packed with vitamins and radiating with sunshine freshness. It’s part of a balanced breakfast, after all. But America’s classic morning drink is in trouble: sales of commercial orange juice are down to their lowest levels in the last 15 seasons, according to the WSJ and the Florida Department of Citrus. The industry is facing growing competition from exotic fruit and energy drinks while its “all-natural” claims are being called into serious question.
Orange juice’s fresh and healthy reputation lies in the balance today, but it was once America’s healing elixir around which an entire industry staked its hopes. Orange juice’s fabled health benefits were promoted by nutritionists, fruit producers, marketers, and the government, who credited orange juice with curing everything from scurvy to listlessness, and even a rare blood condition called acidosis. But orange juice did not always have a place at the American breakfast table, mostly because for years it was either too expensive, or just didn’t taste very good.
Here’s a taste experiment for the adventurous and historically inclined drinker: Boil some orange juice, place it in a can, and leave it on a shelf for several weeks. This is what most people knew as orange juice in the 1920’s. In lieu of pricey fresh-squeezed, average Americans enjoyed what the latest preservation technology offered: canned juice, which was essentially boiled to death. Unsurprisingly, its flavor was…somewhat lacking.
At the time, most people ate oranges rather than drinking their fruit. Coffee was the primary morning beverage. But consuming oranges in any form became an increasingly important part of a healthy diet largely because of the efforts of advertisers and an ambitious biochemist named Elmer McCollum. According to Harvey Levenstein’s book Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, McCollum became the unofficial nutritionist of the nation beginning in the early 1920’s when he heavily promoted the life-extending and healing capabilities of vitamins and warned against the deadly effects of a vitamin-deficient diet. This “Vitamania” gave producers the perfect marketing opportunity. The National Fruit Growers Exchange, under the Sunkist brand, created a national campaign promoting drinking daily doses of orange juice for its “health giving vitamins and rare salts and acids.” But McCollum soon cast aside vitamins in favor of acid.
McCollum ignited a panic over a nebulous condition called acidosis: an excess of acid in the bloodstream which supposedly caused fatigue and lassitude. He claimed the ailment was brought on by consuming meat, eggs and bread, which were acid producers. His advice: Eat lots of citrus fruit and lettuce. These foods rather counterintuitively were transformed from acid into alkaline in the stomach. Unsurprisingly, citrus producers seized upon this new health scare.
In this 1929 acidosis awareness booklet/Sunkist advertisement, the devastating effects of untreated acidosis are illustrated: “Estelle seemed to lack vitality; didn’t even make an effort to be entertaining; hence, she did not attract the men...‘Acidosis’ is the word on almost every modern physician’s tongue.” The cure was simple: Consume oranges in any form and at every possible opportunity. And Sunkist assured the acidosis-fearing reader that it was impossible to overindulge in oranges. By 1934, scientists began calling acidosis a fad and a rare ailment unaffected by drinking orange juice, and citrus producers redirected their marketing efforts back to vitamin C. When World War II broke out, the government also turned its attention to vitamin C. Orange juice’s journey to its exalted place at the breakfast table really begins here.
During World War II the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged Florida citizens to do their wartime duty and increase production of food staples such as oranges. But the government soon recognized a larger problem: American soldiers were rejecting the vitamin C-packed lemon crystals included in their food rations—they simply didn’t taste very good. The government needed to fulfill the nutritional needs of soldiers and ward off scurvy with a tasty and transportable vitamin C product. With the support of the federal government and the Florida Department of Citrus, a group of scientists went to work developing something superior to canned orange juice in the name of science and country. In 1948, three years after the war had ended and after nearly a decade of research, frozen concentrated orange juice was born. It was heralded as a symbol of American innovation and determination, and it arrived just in time.
Despite marketing campaigns promoting the consumption of oranges as a cure for everything from singlehood to the common cold, Florida’s fertile groves were producing too many oranges. The push for production during the war was now threatening the survival of the entire Florida orange industry. The arrival of frozen concentrated juice provided mass market potential for oranges for the first time. By 1949, Florida’s orange processing plants were churning out 10 million gallons of concentrated orange juice which was, rather deceptively, marketed as “fresh-frozen.” Consumers finally had an affordable, “tasty,” convenient and vitamin-C rich product, and they gulped it down.
The post-war American Dream was an image of domestic serenity in which the national talent for creating labor-saving technology was realized. Americans were eating better for less money and in less time. “Fresh-frozen” orange juice was concentrated health stuffed into a can and its only preparation requirements were thawing, adding water, and stirring. In Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Harvey Levenstein argues that such convenience foods became an essential part of the post-war housewife’s duty to build a healthy and happy American home. In 1952, the American Can Company advertised that frozen orange juice had saved housewives the equivalent of 14,000 years of “drudgery” that year.
Alissa Hamilton points out in Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, that with the rapid growth of convenience foods a larger question emerged around the very notion of what normal food was: processed or untouched? People ate one alongside the other without thinking too much about it. In the 1950’s, chemists developed more than 400 new additives to aid in processing and preserving food (taste was an afterthought, at best). Canned meals, powdered foods, frozen seasonal and exotic produce were now readily available year-round. Women’s magazines extolled these “new” foods and their miraculous time-saving attributes. But the idea that something processed could also be “fresh,” was provoking questions. By 1960 the FDA was becoming concerned with the misrepresentative “fresh” labeling of commercial orange juice. Not only was it far from fresh, but sugar and water were being added. Federal standards and regulation ensued.
Frozen concentrated orange juice remained the breakfast drink of choice until the mid-1980’s when technology finally got closer to quenching consumer’s thirst for fresh-tasting juice with the creation of reconstituted "Ready to Serve" juice. Portraying orange juice as practically fresh-squeezed was now the primary pursuit of marketers, like this Tropicana commercial with the enticing “squeeze me a glass” jingle. In the 1990’s “not from concentrate” orange juice hit the shelves and blew everything else away. Rather than vitamins in a can, we now had freshness and purity in a carton.
But as Hamilton details in her book, there is practically nothing fresh or pure about it. Most commercial orange juice is so heavily processed that it would be undrinkable if not for the addition of something called flavor packs. This is the latest technological innovation in the industry’s perpetual quest to mimic the simplicity of fresh juice. Oils and essences are extracted from the oranges and then sold to a flavor manufacturer who concocts a carefully composed flavor pack customized to the company’s flavor specifications. The juice, which has been patiently sitting in storage sometimes for more than a year, is then pumped with these packs to restore its aroma and taste, which by this point have been thoroughly annihilated. You’re welcome.
Recently there has been a series of lawsuits against PepsiCo, Tropicana’s parent company, disputing its “all-natural” labeling, in part because of Hamilton’s exposure of industry practices. Meanwhile, growers plan to roll out a marketing campaign to address some of these health concerns by promoting drinking smaller glasses of juice. “The industry is trying to revive its healthy reputation against all odds,” says Hamilton. “Not only is orange juice heavily processed, but it’s straight sugar which today people recognize as contributing to obesity and diabetes.” Hamilton admits that orange juice is low on the FDA’s list of priorities, but the British government is taking action by calling for a tax on fruit juice and warning consumers that it has as much sugar as Coke and should be consumed sparingly. In the meantime, though the acidosis scare may be long forgotten, most of us still like to think we can find health in a glass of orange juice—at least more health than in a can of soda. Maybe that classic breakfast isn’t so balanced after all.
