Why popcorn and pretzels are the worst movie snacks... and the best

Tasteless. Unhealthy. The classic “movie” snacks baffled me since day 1. I would rather milk a cow with my bare lips than fill my gut with exploding corn nuggets and knotty dough.

The reason they're popular is simple. When you're watching a movie, you're not thinking. Your brain responds to the salt payload of each bite, and the answer is simple. More. Ever eat an unsalted, unflavored potato chip? Try it. Take a single chip to the sink, rinse, and let it dry. If you're more daring, take a whole bag, and see if you still want to finish 500 grams over a single episode of Parks and Recreation. Not so funny now, Amy Poehler.

Fats and sugar affect brain chemistry, says David Kessler, former head of the FDA and Dean of Yale School of Medicine. Food companies are just as guilty as the tobacco industry. Obesity continues to be the leading cause of preventable death worldwide (counting hypertension, or high blood pressure, whose other main causes are aging, low exercise and poor diet). Smoking is second. Interesting that first and second places for murder, globally, are the products we buy every week at the local supermarket.

Sugar is essential for your survival. It is naturally absorbed through the consumption of carbohydrates. For most of human history, pure sugar was unheard of. In evolutionary terms, humans like the taste of sugar because it encouraged our hunter-gatherer ancestors to eat foods like fruits, vegetables, honey and berries. (Bitter tastes, incidentally, were to scare them away from poisons, diseases, and indigestible flora.) Sugar traders were rare and wealthy until the 18^th century, when suddenly sugar became a food ingredient “necessity”. Colonization of tropical islands, and the slave trade, was driven in large measure by the sugar market, and it was only after sugar production became automated that European cultures “rediscovered” their Christian heritage (which started as the truth of universal social equality) and began to outlaw slavery.

Today, sugar is harvested primarily from sugarcane and sugar beets, plus maize from the United States, subsidized to produce high fructose corn syrup. Fructose and glucose, the resultant compounds of all three, are absorbed directly into the bloodstream during digestion, and are fuel for the brain and other body functions. Fructose is almost twice as sweet as glucose (and by the way, some corn syrups are engineered to have almost exclusively fructose). Sugar is even added to apparently non-sweet food products, like potato chips, peanut butter and soup. As a result of sugar inflation, desensitization and marketing tactics, most people in developed countries consume ten times the sugar the body needs.

Likewise, sodium, highly concentrated in salt, is found in naturally high concentrations in nuts and meats, but is present in nearly all foods. Like sugar, salt was an expensive commodity for most human history and was at times used as trading currency. Essential for storing meat, salt transformed seasonal and geographical limits to food, thus playing a major part in the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler (civilization). 

Biologically, salt (less than a teaspoon daily) is needed to regulate body fluids and pH, and by the nervous system to send electrical signals. When salt is broken down into its constituent elements, sodium and chloride, sodium regulates blood volume and pressure, while chloride is used to break down food into energy.

Food companies take this physiological predisposition toward salt, concentrate it in an almost pure form, and add it to their products so that people find them irresistible. 75% of the world population now consumes more than double the recommended intake, and many surpass the amount agreed by the United States, Canada and Britain to be decidedly unhealthy (6 grams/day).

While we all know that consuming too little salt is lethal, too much (1 gram per kilogram of body weight) is equally deadly short-term and arguably damaging long-term. There are associations between high salt consumption and increased likelihood of stroke, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and edema (fluid accumulation and swelling). Since healthy kidneys work to process excess sodium, the data across an entire population is inconsistent, but as a whole an excess salt diet has a markedly negative impact, particularly on margin demographics such as the infirmed, disabled, youth and elderly.

The Salt Institute, Salt Works and other such organizations claim that there is no negative connection between health and overconsumption of salt. Reminiscent, perhaps, of the outcries of the tobacco companies not too many years ago? In any case, the salt controversy continues to rage, and meanwhile, salt, like sugar, is used to sell. For decades food companies been researching how to keep us hooked to their product. 

Coincidentally, Kessler also ousted the tobbaco companies. He's a regular whistle-blower. He was even fired as Dean of UCSF Medical School for calling attention to his own school's questionable financial practices. Kessler's legitimacy is unquestioned. His investigations in tobacco led to a 368 billion-dollar settlement and immunized the companies to future lawsuits. Notice how cigarette prices went up eight-kagillion percent in the past ten years? Notice how cigarette packs have uglier and uglier warning labels on the boxes? That was him. 

Unfortunately, selling eggrolls is a lot harder to tax or prohibit than Camels. Alcoholism was declared an illness as early as 1956 and is currently recognized as both a psychological and a medical afflication. What about food dependency and obesity? 

Dietary fat is an essential part of a healthy diet, despite the attack during the 20^th century on the stuff, to the point where being called “fat” (once merely a scientific term) became one of the bigger social insults, and being fat one of the bigger social crimes. However, vitamins essential to our survival can only be digested and absorbed when fat is present. Fat buffers the body's delicate innards from physical trauma, regulates body temperature, protects us from diseases, and increases the health of every living cell. More well known, but less important in the abundance of the western world, fat allows energy to be stored for future use.

The great irony is that “fat” has been for decades the supposed culprit of obesity. The reality is that fat is more a symptom than a cause. Yes, fat tastes good, as studies in 2001 demonstrated, which is why the smooth creamyness of milk chocolate is so easy to recall.

In 1914 the call against fat went out. To support the rationing war effort, gaining wait was called “unpatriotic” by popular American and British magazines. Before that, we can trace the change of heart toward fat as early as the French revolution, when obesity was associated with the aristocracy and thus damnable. Before this time, some state officials and rulers would pad their bodies to look bigger and therefore more imposing, powerful, dangerous. Oh, how the times have changed. Obesity is seen, at least in North America, as a moral issue. If you are fat you are lazy and cannot control your impulses.

Fat, however, is not the great enemy of the 21^st century. Lobbyists in Washington continue to block the restriction of high-salt and high-sugar foods in universal policies that could transform the diet of the nation. Symbolic initiatives like the soft drink controversy in 2012 in New York are met with ridicule. And all the while these products continue to make headway in Europe, Africa and Asia. The only way that other producers can compete is to artificially enhance their foods and drinks, too. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Check out this webpage for a more complete list.

Speaking of joining them, if you've never tried mixing salted and sweetened popcorn, or eating salted chocolate, it's about the cheapest mouth orgasm out there.

Labeling laws have allowed public opinion to crack down on fat content. Packaging with words like “non-fat”, “low fat”, “less fat”, and “lean” are guaranteed to increase sales. “Unsweetened” and “low sodium”, on the other hand, don't yet sound as sexy. Consequently, the solution is to exchange one tasty substance for another. Take out the fat, label it "non-fat", add salt or sugar, and like magic, sales go up without making food any healthier or less addictive. Everyone wins... except the consumer.

Since fat is a highly stigmatized substance, most foods don't have much. Regardless, remember that fat equals 4 calories per gram, whereas protein (generally viewed as a positive food substance) has 2, so either way you look at it, it's portion size that's going to make a major difference, not whether your yoghurt is 5% fat or 10% fat. As long as the food products are designed to make you crave for more, unable to stop until it's all gone, then wanting to go back to the store to get more, fat content might drop, but portion size will not.

Wet around the gills: conflating idioms

It started with my father, the bastard. He passed it on to me and there's nothing I can do. That's science. Darwin provided us with the perfect excuse. I am not responsible for the way I am. It's all society and ancestry, my bloated arthritic gay great-grandmother and the one-room metal box where I was raised in downtown shitville. Thankfully I'm preaching to a dead horse. We're all evolutionists now.

My father's verbal memory was a tricky bastard. It didn't start that way, at least according to his stories, which I, his only child, heard ad nauseum every day of my youth. When he was in his 20s and 30s, he did those impossible newspaper crosswords every day and blew the competition out of the water. He would refer to Martin Riggs (from Lethal Weapon) as “John Smith” because Mel Gibson played Riggs and also voice acted Smith in “Pocahontas”.

I remember him saying that he was trying to “nail the hammer on the head” and advised me not to “count all my eggs before they hatch”. He would try to “shoot the blue moon” when playing Hearts online. With his mourned that he would “burn that bridge when [he] came to it.” It was all amusing as hell until I noticed that I was cursed with the same problem.

Today I said “wet around the gills,” after which my wife glanced pityingly in my direction, like Professor Higgins to Eliza Dolittle before she gained the insufferable accent. Being sure of the rightness of my poetic instinct, I googled the phrase. 5,590 hits, or rather, only 5,590 hits. Google proceeds to reveal that my brain is conflating two idioms. “Green around the gills” scores 985,000 hits. “Wet around the ears” gets 19.3 million.

That a phrase exists on the Internet is hardly the litmus test for its rightness or coherence. Even “green around the gizzard” may be found on page 146 in an e-book entitled Sundays in August. People will publish any wild herring these days. Judging by research by the International Data Corporation, we should be closing in on 3 zettabytes of global information, and I may not be able to fathom the ridiculous volume of information that entails, but I do know it includes that every moron like myself who posts a comment on Youtube and all those posts may or may not be included in a Google search. (In fact I tried googling a youtube comment I made a few years ago and thank God, nothing showed, which means that not every word ever interneted is forever available.)

I conclude that there are up to 5,589 other mental delinquents out there, and I can still be proud to say that before this article I never published the phrase.

I'm getting off-track. I was trying to discussing conflating idioms. Conflations.com defines this common confusion as “an amalgamation of two different expressions. In most cases, the combination results in a new expression that makes little sense literally, but clearly expresses an idea because it references well-known idioms.” The introductory articles goes on to distinguish between conflations that are still interpreted to mean the same thing (e.g. “look who's calling the kettle black”) from conflations that do not – usually rendered as incoherent as a red goose chase.

But I'm in good company. During the October 7, 2008 Presidential debate, Barack Obama made a similar error. “Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow... I'm green behind the ears.” The best part is, this could be taken (at least out of context) as the Democratic candidate, still smarting from the birthing controversies, making a Freudian slip and referring to himself as an alien (i.e. little green man).

And now I live in France, which makes it easier, but I live with my wife, who is an educated linguaphile with a perfect memory and an insatiety for pop culture, which makes home a constant stream of embarrassing moments. For years I was able to pride myself on my golden tongue – not so hard when you teach English to Hispanics, French to Americans, and you live with aforementioned dad.

I suppose the dagger's practically in the coffin. Right? Anybody?

The campaign against India's female genocide

To: The Government of India, The OHCHR, UNICEF, The UNIFEM, The UNFPA, CEDAW, The EU and The G8

We the undersigned, strongly condemn the practices that have led to the elimination of millions of girls and women from India’s population, and hold the government of India accountable for failing to protect the lives of its female citizens.

We further contend, on grounds of human rights, that immediate and effective action be taken by the government, through the implementation of rapid action task forces, to halt this femicide. We also insist the government officially commit to a time-line within which the associated practices of female feticide, female infanticide and dowry murders will be effectively arrested through the rigorous enforcement of existing laws and a stringent accountability on the part of India’s hospitals, government offices, and law enforcement agencies.

We further urge international human rights bodies and other governments to join in this effort to persuade the government of India to acknowledge and honor the call of this petition.

Today my brother-in-law invited me to sign a petition demanding that the UN, the EU and the G8 join forces to coerce the government of India to enforce its constitution of democratic equality for all men and women. This particular campaign against India's female genocide was started in 2006 by Rita Banerji, who picked up on the language used by Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen in 1986 to describe the phenomenon demonstrated in national census data. At that time, Dr. Sen claimed that 37 million women were "missing" from India, and since then, claims Banerji, the number has climbed to 50 million. Dr. Sen later revised her research and in 1990 tallied the global number of "missing" women to 100 million.

If we want social practices like these to end, signing a petition isn't going to do it. India is overpopulated and many families want a first-born male. (A lot is actually accomplished as preferential gendered abortion.) In a society that cannot afford reasonable healthcare for all, money is set aside for males and females are neglected.

Take Japan, for instance. In terms of its historic preference of male over female offspring, it is typical of Asian countries. But after World War II Japan was not allowed to regrow its military, and consequently it put all its energies into developing its economy. Now, as in European and Western countries, the balanced has tipped to favor women at a ratio of 1.05 or 1.06.

Western countries, too, have clear sexist treatment in favor of men -- look at our political representatives, university professors and CEOs -- but we are wealthy enough to be able to afford quality nutritional and medical care for all.

In other words, perhaps it's wrong to look at the "missing" 50 million women as a result of immoral practices that can be stopped through a simple change in policy. Look at the mess that China is in due to a well-intentioned attempt to guide change in population over time - and the male-to-female ratio is much worse than ever before. How can democratic India jarringly mandate equal treatment between males and females when their society is still very classist in practice, mindset and design?

If women have opportunities for gainful employment, slowly, perception of their relative worth will change. In developing countries for so much more labor is physical, women, with higher body fat and less muscle mass than men, are at a disadvantage. Women were given preferential treatment in North America because they were needed as the lynchpin to the colonists' cultural warfare against the native tribes -- in short, we needed to increase our population, so we could not afford to let our women die. India's population is bursting at the seams. Consequently, to be blunt, what do they need women for?

In some places in India, women are able to find gainful employment, and this is likely due to high literacy rates in those areas. As regional populations increase in wealth over time, education is more highly valued, which nullifies the inherent physical advantage of men over women in densely populated and labor-intensive areas.

The petition is useful in that Westerners are being made more aware of the plight of not only Indian women, but women generally in the undeveloped and developed world. However, change comes slowly, and I doubt that Dr. Sen herself would have ever called for the powerful countries of the world to pressure India into using a big stick to stop social practices that have arisen as a result of the geographic reality of southern and southeast Asia. Even if we were to succeed in artificially ending these abortive practices against women, will not that many women still die from increased starvation, crime and civil unrest?

It is paramount that we look to preventing similar imbalances from happening in other countries. India is so far gone that it may take generations more to arrest these social practices and turn around the imbalanced male-to-female ratio. We need to understand why it is happening in India and learn from it. Reacting to it impetuously and forcefully won't necessary help the situation; in fact it may make it worse.

Film in 2012: Reviews

Premium Rush. Action. ★★ 1/2 (Fair-Good)
I usually enjoy movies that take unconventional, everyman roles and turn them into heroes. Daniel Koepp does this with NYC's bicycle messengers. Surreal "gaming" motifs are regularly inserted into the story, at times turning Premium Rush into a muted Scott Pilgrim. Stereotyped roles: the dirty cop, the ex-girlfriend, the Chinese loan shark, the self-obsessed rival, the impatient boss. Ironically Gordon-Levitt (the lead role) did injure himself while cycling too fast during shooting. An appropriately light-hearted movie worth seeing if you need to unwind.

Looper. Science fiction action. ★★1/2 (Fair-Good)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play Joe Simmons' younger and older selves in this science fiction action thriller. "Looper" derives a unique premise from a previously unexplored possibility of time travel, an increasingly rare beast. There are glimpses of a larger world behind the sharply drawn characters thrust into the foreground, which gives the story a depth often lacking in modern sci-fi. The story would have worked better if the two leading roles could have looked a bit more like each other. Great entertainment, some implicit philosophical issues for a thinking viewer (like "Minority Report", are individuals already culpable for actions not yet committed? Can trying to avoid a certain future result in its very fulfillment?), and overall a lean and trim addition to the genre.

Argo. Historical drama/thriller. ★★★ (Good)
After "Good Will Hunting", Ben Affleck was been in so many bad movies ("Pearl Harbor", "Daredevil"), it is positively thrilling to see him succeed again. I never saw The Town, the only other film Affleck both starred in and directed, so this was a first for me. Based on a true story (certain points about the Iranian government and the role of the CIA have received criticism), this film had me on the edge of my seat for nearly the whole two hours. Ever since "A Separation" I have wanted to see another movie based in Iran, and with "Argo" I was able to revel in the Arabic world once again. Unfortunately, with American-Iranian relations at such a historic low, "Argo" exploits current public anti-Iranian sentiment and fails to engender any sympathy for the Iranian people. But in terms of raw entertainment, you can't get much better than this.

Cloud Atlas. Drama and science fiction. ★★★ (Good)
The most expensive independent film ever produced ($102 million budget) and the most recent work of the Wachowskis ("The Matrix", "V for Vendetta"). This is intended as a philosophical work, but only attentive viewers will pick up on the connections between the six stories from six different time periods, ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to the post-apocalyptic 24th century. This mosaic takes a dozen actors and recycles them with some consistency across the half dozen stories, which provides some guidance for the connections that are supposed to be made and the patterns supposed to be seen. After an ambitious three hours of airtime, I was satisfied with the movie's message, although many movie critics apparently were not. Worst movie of 2012? Best movie of 2012? Neither. Some of the mini-stories are compelling and interesting; others are not. Some of the philosophical points are said well (fighting against a greater power to find the truth and free oneself is the occasion to demonstrate the noblest qualities of our race) and others are not (actions and consequences of individual lives impact each other and last far into the future). My recommendation is to leave your snarky side at home and see what signs you can read in this ever-shifting Atlas.

Skyfall. Action. ★★ 1/2 (Fair-Good)
Martin Campbell directed the first, Marc Foster the second, and now this third Craig installment of this Bond reboot (after Brosnan derailed the franchise in an attempt to be "the last Bond") is directed by Sam Mendes, whom I love for "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road", but I didn't know he had a talent for action. Admittedly, this 23rd Bond film feels very different from anything else in the entire corpus, mostly because Bond is not playing spy but rather a bodyguard most of the time. There are still the great action and chase scenes but, for the first time, Bond is not the target. This being the case, Bond feels like another agent, and Bond's world has a chance to grow beyond the constraints of megalomania. In fact, I would suggest that the franchise has more fundamentally evolved with this film than with any other as far back as "On His Majesty's Secret Service", the first movie after Connery's retirement from the franchise, and the occasion of Bond's only marriage (his wife is killed shortly thereafter). The story arc that started in "Casino Royale" continues to develop his character into the roundest any movie Bond has ever been. I am still unhappy with Ben Whishaw's persistence as Q but hopefully that role will be recast next time around.

Silver Linings Playbook. Romantic Comedy/Drama ★★★1/2 (Good-Great)
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawerence co-star in this full and compelling romance about two people who have lost their spouses (although in vastly different ways) and struggle to move on. If half of the joy of this film is piecing together the backstory, the characters' motives, and the truth, the other half is watching them bounce off each other at each encounter. It's like nuts in a nuthouse. Each pair of characters exhibits its own fiery chemistry and the verbal exchanges are usually hilarious. The artistic and athletic performance that marks the climax of the film is beautiful. There are a few times when the situation is so surreal as to lose credibility and believability, but only a few. In the meantime the film sensitively explores questions of destiny, positive thinking. Cooper here shows a range of acting ability that he didn't need in comedies like "The Hangover" and "Wedding Crashers". Lawrence, incredibly, moves from her barely pubescent performance in "The Hunger Games" to acting opposite a man 16 years her senior, and miraculously she feels perfectly fitted for the task.

Lincoln. Historical Drama ★★★ 1/2 (Good-Great)
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a magisterial performance in Spielberg's new "Amistad" (1997). The sixteenth president is exactly as I always imagined him: self-possessed, sharply intelligent, approachable, powerful. The film moves back and forth between the epic and the personal, conveying both the critical historical juncture belonging to late nineteenth century Washington, as well as the intimate moments between Lincoln and his wife, sons, African-American soldiers, servants, and fellow politicians. What is essentially a two-and-a-half hour long West Wing episode goes by in a flash. I am no history buff so I cannot say to what degree the film is faithful to history, but I can say that it is faithful to American memory of it. What Spielberg clearly hoped to achieve in "War Horse" (2011), namely, a dramatic tribute to our collective interpretation of Lincoln, the civil war and the abolition of slavery, is achieved here. The final moments of the film should have been handled more deftly -- little screen time is given to the reaction of the President's family, and makes his death a rather cold and lackluster event. Spectacular supporting roles by Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens) and David Strathairn (Secretary of State Seward), all worthy of Oscar nominations. John Williams, too, for yet another flawless soundtrack. This film the inspirational powerhouse that "War Horse" could never be. Skip "Vampire Hunter".