Patrick S

I don't think there is anything PC about preferring accuracy in our dicussions about food. Personally I think Cheetos taste like crap and I never eat them. I also happen to prefer whole milk in my coffee and for cooking and I'm never going to give it up.

I don't know exactly what the problem is with the recipe you're using, but I can point you to a chocolate fudge recipe that has given me very good results: Chocolate Fudge PS - I can't get to the recipe you linked to right now. Recipecircus must be down.

You're right. Baked Cheetos and whole milk are not at all equal with respect to cholesterol and saturated fat. A serving of whole milk has 5 times the saturated fat and >35 times the cholesterol of a serving of baked Cheetos. ← Just gotta love people who quote selectively! ← Quoting selectively is what you do when you wish to single out one particular part of a larger statement, like your factually erroneous implication that baked Cheetos and whole milk have similar "amounts cholesterol and saturated fats". You may not like having your errors singled out and corrected, but that's the risk we all take when we participate in these discussions. How about it?

I didn't imply that all taxpayers in a community should have a vote in what sort of food rules local schools impose. I specified parents only. And I also realize that parents alone do not fund their children's school, which is why I wrote that "it is substantially those parent's tax dollars that fund the school." ← I'm still not sure I understand what you meant. What I was referring to were communities like where I live now. Everyone pays property taxes, but less than 20% of those homes have school-age children. ← I used the word "substantially" because I don't really know what percentage of school funding comes from tax-payers with school-aged children, and because "substantial" is a weasel-word that, handily, I can claim means anything from 1%-99%. So let me change my view somewhat: parents should decide what products are sold to their kids in school, regardless of whether or not their tax dollars provide funding for that school. How that is actually accomplished in the real world, I don't know. Given what jsolomon said, its apparently easier said than done. But as a matter of principle, the more control parents have, the better. kalypso, thanks so much for sharing your experience in this area.

I'm not familiar with any school district that doesn't have to abide by state rules for school lunches. ← Me neither. What I had in mind were local rules that are more restrictive than state guidelines, such as whether or not to offer whole milk with lunch. I don't think it would be any more unrealistic than sending report cards home to be signed. Send questionaires home with children or call parents on the phone, tally the results, and take the appropriate action. An even better solution, though probably unrealistic, would be to allow parents to decide in advance what their kids can buy at school. I didn't imply that all taxpayers in a community should have a vote in what sort of food rules local schools impose. I specified parents only. And I also realize that parents alone do not fund their children's school, which is why I wrote that "it is substantially those parent's tax dollars that fund the school."

The resistance to baked cheetohs has to start somewhere. If I've got to hurt a physician's feelings to get him to give better advice, then I will. ← Generally speaking, merely calling someone a jackass doesn't prompt them to give better advice. I think you're more likely to get that response by demonstrating that the facts don't support the advice, and that some other advice is more appropriate. I hope so. But seeing what a challenge is seems to be just to get everyone reading, writing and arithmetizing, I'm a little pessimisstic. As far as getting the butts out of the seats, that can start right now, in every school, as far as I'm concerned.

NOTE: This is a repost of my last post, which was deleted by the moderator, edited to remove the comments I made in response to jsolomon's defense of name-calling. Well, whether its a mistake or not, and I'm not convinced it would be, it is or least should be the parents' prerogative to make the decision. Exactly right. As I said on the other thread, I think parental behavior is the overwhelmingly dominant part of the obesity problem, and that parents are really the only ones in a position to solve it. That sounds like a good idea to me. If you really reacted with "utter horror" at the dietary recommendations SuzySushi described--switching the kiddies to lower-fat milk and imposing reasonable limits on fruit juice consumption-- I can only surmise that your fear threshold is quite low, and that you spend a good bit of your life in state of terror.

Oops, I misspelled it. Hachez is a German chocolate company. I was given a few bars of their Cocoa d’Arriba by a friend. Its not my favorite, but its not bad either.

That's definitely true for Starbuck's. They use a much higher bean-to-water ratio than I prefer.

Two other points. First, I think that the best way to decide whether or not a school should serve any particular product is to ask the parents. It should be decided by the parents whose children are served by that school. After all, it is substantiallly those parent's tax dollars that fund the school, and it is those parents who should ultimately have control over their children's diets. It doesn't need to be, and shouldnt be, a federal rule or a state rule. Second, I think its obviously true that lack of physical activity is the biggest factor behind rising obesity rates. There is debate about how many more calories the average person is consuming today as opposed to, say, 40 years ago. But there is complete agreement that kids today get only a fraction of the exercise that earlier generations got.

You're right. Baked Cheetos and whole milk are not at all equal with respect to cholesterol and saturated fat. A serving of whole milk has 5 times the saturated fat and >35 times the cholesterol of a serving of baked Cheetos.

What kind of person immediately resorts to third-grade name-calling when a doctor advises a parent to switch their child to lower-fat milk and impose perfectly reasonable limits on fruit juice consumption? You may have a legitimate disagreement with this advice, and I'm sure SuzySushi would listen to your arguments. You're an intelligent person, and such ad hominems really are beneath you.

Here's a picture of that caramelized cinnamon hot chocolate I made. After trying for a couple of days to get a good photo of it, I have more admiration than ever for the wonderful hot choocolate photos in Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. Its a challenging subject to photograph.

You can find some really good threads on croquembouche using the search functions. I believe there was a long thread active on this forum about a year ago. amccomb, you don't need to go to the trouble of cutting them in half. What I did was just kind of twist the tip into the bag into the puffs. If you find that this pushes your tip back up into the bag, then just pre-hole-poke your puffs with another tip.

That sounds like a good idea! Does anyone else do this? If so, does it have much effect on the appearance of the cheesecake?

It's not the fat per se, it's the fact that a cup of whole milk is nearly double the calories of a cup of skim milk. That's a lot of calories, particularly given that you're drinking them. Whole milk is a very efficient way to get calories into people that need them, like infants. Very few of the rest of us need to get so many calories so easily. I guess it depends on how much milk you're drinking. Regardless of whether whole milk has almost double the calories of skim milk, it's still not that high. We're talking about something like 150 calories per cup. And when I was growing up I certainly wasn't drinking more than four cups of milk each day maximum. That's 600 calories compared to 340 calories for skim milk. Now, I can't believe that 260 calories a day is going to make a big difference to a growing active child with an otherwise healthy diet that does not include tons of extra calories in the form of fruit juice and soda. ← Definitely it depends on how much milk you are drinking, but 260 calories per day difference is nothing to sneeze at! If you are holding all other factors equal, than 260 calories a day can certainly make a big difference. Consider a skim milk drinker who is neither gaining nor losing weight, i.e. is in caloric balance, who switches from 4 cups of skim to 4 cups of whole, that would give them a positive caloric imbalance of 260 calories a day. Again, all else remaining equal, that would be expected to result in weight gain of about 2lbs/month, 24lbs/year, 240lbs/decade. Conversely, consider a whole milk drinker who is starting from a positive caloric imbalance of 100/day. who switches from 4 cups of whole to 4 cups of skim, that would give them a negative caloric imbalance of 160 calories a day. Again, all else remaining equal, that would be expected to result in weight loss of about 1lb/22 days, 10lbs/220 days, and so on. Edit to add: 260 calories is roughly 10% of the caloric intake needed for men of average weight with average physical activity to maintain their body weight.

Thanks for posting that. I found the following values from the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory. Values are in different units but the same units are used for each comparison. It appears from these USDA values that there is really little or no significant difference between skim and whole milk in terms of most nutrients, except for vitamin A. However, vitamin A is added to most skim milk and thus has as much as whole milk. Whole vs Skim A=102/7 B6=0.036/0.040 B12=0.44/0.38 C=0.0/1.0 D=40/not listed E=0.06/0.04 Calcium=113/123 Folate=5/5 Coper=0.011/0.011 Iron=0.03/0.011 Magnesium=10/11 Manganese=0.003/0.002 Niacin=0.107/0.088 Riboflavin=0.183/0.140 Thiamin=0.044/0.036

You're right, and that's why 2% milk should not be referred to as low-fat milk.

I don't recall asking them to babysit, but in case I was unclear, let me restate the question in a way that's more specific to the discussion at hand: are corporations free to knowingly contribute to a significant public health crisis, without censure or regulation, in the name of shareholder value? ← Babysitting the kids wasn't the issue. The issue was whether anyone had answered your question regarding whether or not corporations had any duties or responsibilities aside from profit making. I'll interpret your restating of the question as an admission that you were wrong about that. Now, which public health crisis is the food advertising industry contributing too? Parents-being-bugged-for-Count-Chocula-Osis? Or childhood obesity? If the latter, I again refer you to the IOM report, which states that the evidence at this time does not allow for any firm conclusions with respect to the causal role food advertising has on childhood obesity. And maybe you could also explain how you objectively partition the contribution made by parents --who actually, you know, buy the product and deliver it to the kids-- and the contribution made by the food manufacturers and advertisers themselves.

No, you misstate my position in a way that is all but inexplicable given what I've already said, as indicated by the highlighted text. There are all sorts of government interventions, that do not require banning any form of exression, that are uncontroversial and may even do some good.

Half of a Valrhona chocolate bar, the kind with the candied orange peel in it. Also, some caramelized cinnamon hot chocolate made with some extremely bitter Hatchez chocolate.

Truly, you have to admire the precocious ability of the three-year who manages to find their own money, tip-toe out of the house, travel to the store, and buy their own cereal without any gaurdian supervision. I myself have never seen a three-year buying Lucky Charms. I bet Stewie Griffin could do it, though. ← Actually I admire the tenacity of three-year-olds who are willing to beg, cry, wheedle, connive, charm, stomp, shriek, threaten, shoplift and whimper to get what they want. Kids have ways. ← They sure do. But luckily, you are bigger, stronger, more intelligent, can punish or reward you child, control all the money, do all the shopping, and have nearly absolute control over what types of foods are present in your home. If you are routinely unable to resist the purchase requests of your children, obesity is only one of many problems you are likely to encounter. If you don't want to lectured about parental responsibility, you should probably quit making statements, like the one above, in which it is implicitly assumed that corporations sell their products directly to three-year olds, without requiring a series of actions and/or inaction on the part of the parent. Deal? Right, we're disagreeing on how much responsibility is rightly the parent's. I happen to think that if my child begs for junkfood, and I mean really, really begs for it, and I buy it for her and give it to her, then any resulting health consequences are my responsibility. You should read the thread a bit more closely, as this was in fact answered. For instance, when you asked a variation of this same question on the first page, I replied:

To me that type of education makes SO much more sense than an outright ban on advertising. Its not just food advertising that kids need to learn to analyse, its all arguments and attempts at persuasion. You might have some success with preteens or teens, but I doubt younger kids will realy give a rats you-know-what. And their tastes might already be formed by then, yes? ← Granted, your probably not going to transform an 8-year old into a perfectly rational, health-conscious consumer with a few critical thinking courses. But I think nonetheless that we need to begin building these skills as early as possible, even if they don't really pay off until later. 8 year olds are not able to do do algebra or program computers or solve complex moral problems either, but they still need that early training, which is the foundation for the later training and abilities. Mom and/or Dad obviously still need to exercise parental control while the training wheels are on.

Well, no one is proposing to actually ban milk at school, right? Just a particular variety. Interestingly, a serving of Baked Cheetos has as much total fat and more calories as a serving of full-fat milk. BUT, it is much lower in saturated fat and cholesterol and sugars. Baked Cheetos Calories =200 Fat =8g Sat Fat =1g Cholesterol=0mg Sugars =<1g Full-fat Milk Calories=150 Fat =8g Sat Fat =5g Cholesterol=35mg