Thursday, December 14, 2006

USA Statistical Abstract

Fatter, Taller and Thirstier Americans

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: December 15, 2006

Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled water per person in 2004 — about 10 times as much as in 1980. We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind.
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Americans bought more than 2 billion pairs of shoes in 2004, a new federal book of data says.

At the same time, Americans spent more of their lives than ever — about eight-and-a-half hours a day — watching television, using computers, listening to the radio, going to the movies or reading.

This eclectic portrait of the American people is drawn from the 1,376 tables in the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, the annual feast for number crunchers that is being served up by the federal government today.

For the first time, the abstract quantifies same-sex sexual contacts (6 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women say they have had them) and learning disabilities (among population groups, American Indians were most likely to have been told that they have them).

The abstract reveals that the floor space in new private one-family homes has expanded to 2,227 square feet in 2005 from 1,905 square feet in 1990. Americans are getting fatter, but now drink more bottled water per person than beer.

Taller, too. More than 24 percent of Americans in their 70s are shorter than 5-foot-6. Only 10 percent of people in their 20s are.

More people are injured by wheelchairs than by lawnmowers, the abstract reports. Bicycles are involved in more accidents than any other consumer product, but beds rank a close second.

Most of the statistical tables, which come from a variety of government and other sources, are presented raw, without caveats; and because the abstract is so concrete, the statistics can suggest false precision. The table of consumer products involved in injuries does not explain, for example, that one reason nearly as many injuries involve beds as bicycles is that more people use beds.

With medical costs rising, more people said they pray for their health than invest in every form of alternative medicine or therapy combined, the abstract reports.

Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

“The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable,” said James P. Rutherfurd, executive vice president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the media investment firm whose research the Census Bureau cited.

Mr. Rutherfurd said time spent with such media increased to 3,543 hours last year from 3,340 hours in 2000, and is projected to rise to 3,620 hours in 2010. The time spent within each category varied, with less on broadcast television (down to 679 hours in 2005 from 793 hours in 2000) and on reading in general, and more using the Internet (up to 183 hours from 104 hours) and on cable and satellite television.

How does all that listening and watching influence the amount of time Americans spend alone? The census does not measure that, but since 2000 the number of hobby and athletic nonprofit associations has risen while the number of labor unions, fraternities and fan clubs has declined.

“The large master trend here is that over the last hundred years, technology has privatized our leisure time,” said Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” Mr. Putnam said. “That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.”

More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990. Meanwhile, the national divorce rate, 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people, was the lowest since 1970. Among the states, Nevada still claims the highest divorce rate, which slipped to 6.4 per 1,000 in 2004 from 11.4 per 1,000 in 1990, just ahead of Arkansas’s rate.

From 2000 to 2005, the number of manufacturing jobs declined nearly 18 percent. Virtually every job category registered decreases except pharmaceuticals. Employment in textile mills fell by 42 percent. The job projected to grow the fastest by 2014 is home health aide.

One thing Americans produce more of is solid waste — 4.4 pounds per day, up from 3.7 pounds in 1980.

More than half of American households owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005. The 91 million individuals in those households had a median age of 51 and a median household income of $65,000.

That might help explain a shift in what college freshmen described as their primary personal objectives. In 1970, 79 percent said their goal was developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2005, 75 percent said their primary objective was to be financially very well off.

Among graduate students, 27 percent had at least one foreign-born parent. The number of foreign students from India enrolled in American colleges soared to 80,000 in 2005 from 10,000 in 1976.

As recently as 1980, only 12 percent of doctors were women; by 2004, 27 percent were.

In 1970, 33,000 men and 2,000 women earned professional degrees; in 2004, the numbers were 42,000 men and 41,000 women.



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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Back Posture

Really?

The Claim: Sitting Up Straight Is Best for Your Back

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By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Published: December 12, 2006

THE FACTS Sit up straight, parents tell their children. It’s a well-known refrain, repeated through generations and based on the theory that anything other than a 90-degree posture places undue strain on the back.

Despite its persistence, that advice is wrong. Parents may insist that sitting up straight with your thighs parallel to the ground is the best way to sit, but a long list of studies has shown that that position increases stress on the lumbar disks in your lower back.

Thirty years ago, scientists first showed this by inserting needles into the backs of volunteers and measuring the amount of pressure created by various seating positions. They found that a reclining position was ideal, placing the least strain on the back and minimizing pressure that could lead to back problems. Since then, multiple studies have confirmed that finding.

But it was only in 2006 that scientists produced direct visual evidence. In a study that used new magnetic resonance imaging machines that allow people to sit instead of lie down, a team of researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland looked at 22 volunteers who sat in three positions. The first two positions, sitting upright and sitting with the body hunched forward, produced the greatest spinal disk movement, causing the internal disk material to misalign. The third position, in which the subjects reclined at a 135-degree angle with their feet planted on the floor, created the least strain.

According to the study, any position in which a person leans back, opening the angle between the thighs and the back, is preferable to sitting up straight.

THE BOTTOM LINE Sitting upright at a 90-degree angle strains your back; leaning back places less pressure on the spine.

scitimes@nytimes.com



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Sleep for babies AND parents

For Getting Baby to Sleep, Sticking to a Plan Is What Counts

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By DAN HURLEY
Published: December 12, 2006

After years of colicky debate over which method is best for getting babies to fall asleep by themselves, experts have a soothing new message: just about all the techniques work, so pick one you are comfortable with and stick with it.

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Despite their apparent differences, most of the behavioral approaches reviewed in the October issue of the journal SLEEP were supported by evidence that they resulted in infants and toddlers learning to fall asleep independently at bedtime and when they woke during the night. Of the 52 studies examined in the review, 49 showed positive results, with 82 percent of the infants and young children in the studies benefiting significantly.

“The key to this whole thing is parents being consistent,” said the senior author of the review, Dr. Jodi A. Mindell, a psychology professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and chairwoman of the task force organized by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to assess the techniques.

She added, “They need to pick a plan they can absolutely follow through on.”

Even Dr. Richard Ferber of Children’s Hospital Boston — so strongly linked in the popular imagination with the so-called cry-it-out method that it has come to be known as “Ferberizing” — agreed in an interview that no single approach worked for all children.

“Clinicians should try to make a diagnosis for a given family as to why that youngster is having problems, and then try to tailor the choice of treatment to fix that problem,” he said. “When an intervention is chosen that works not only for the child’s problems but for the family’s philosophy of child-rearing, it’s going to work that much better.”

Still, some methods in Dr. Mindell’s review were supported by stronger evidence than others. The strongest evidence was found for the toughest and the easiest approaches.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the easiest option is preventing sleep problems in the first place, through simple parent education, whether one-on-one training, group classes or booklets. Such programs typically encourage parents to have a peaceful, consistent evening routine in which children are placed in bed “drowsy but awake” to help them develop independent sleep skills. Three well-designed randomized trials have found that the babies of parents who had such training slept significantly better than those whose parents did not.

At the tough extreme is the cry-it-out method, formally known as “unmodified extinction,” in which parents are taught to put a child down for bed, close the door and ignore all crying unless the baby is in physical distress. Despite 23 studies showing its remarkable effectiveness, most parents find the technique too emotionally grueling, the task force found.

Dr. Ferber, despite his link to the technique, said he rarely used it.

“It’s not a pattern that most parents will do,” he said.

Instead, he said he relied on a variety of gentler approaches, including one called graduated extinction. Rather than entirely ignoring a child’s cries, the method teaches parents to briefly check on the child on a regular schedule, staying for just a couple of minutes. Each night, the time between the visits grows longer, until the child learns to fall asleep independently. The task force called the approach an “effective and recommended therapy.”

For all their effectiveness, all the methods reviewed by the task force defined success as having children fall asleep independently. And no matter how gentle the technique, once children become accustomed to falling asleep in the presence of a caregiver, they almost always respond tearfully to being left alone — for at least three to five nights.

And there’s the rub.

“It’s not a lot of fun for parents,” said Dr. Ralph Downey III, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Loma Linda University in California.

“The child acts like it’s the end of the world,” he said. “Nobody wants to see their child suffer. The biological blueprint in us says we need to be there, to comfort and soothe them.”

Still, Dr. Mindell argues that it’s worth it. “What parents really need to focus on is the big picture,” she said. “In the end, you’ll have months and years of everyone sleeping through the night and functioning better through the day.”

The only popular method not reviewed by the task force was co-sleeping, in which children sleep in the same bed with parents, because Dr. Mindell’s team could find no scientific studies of the approach. Although many experts support the method, so long as parents are happy with it, the American Academy of Pediatricssudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. advises against the practice because it raises the risk of

The Academy also urges parents to put their infants to sleep on their backs on a firm surface to reduce the risk of SIDS, though sleeping belly down is not the only risk factor for the syndrome. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that many babies who die of SIDS have a defect in the portion of their brain that controls breathing, heart rate and arousal.

Co-sleeping also raises the risk of a parent’s unintentionally smothering a baby. A report released last year by Betsey Gotbaum, Public Advocate of New York City, found that 15 children, all less than a year old, died in New York in 2004 while co-sleeping with a caregiver who accidentally rolled over on them or wedged them against the wall.

Despite the risks, Dr. Ferber came out in support of co-sleeping, for parents who prefer it, in the latest edition of his book, “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems” (Fireside, 2006). “To me, whether a family chooses to co-sleep should be their decision, and we work with them either way,” he said.

One of the most prominent advocates of co-sleeping, Dr. Robert Sears, who co-authored “The Baby Sleep Book” with his father, mother and brother, is a strong critic of “cry-it-out” methods. “We’re all for routines and consistency, so long as the baby isn’t left to cry it out alone,” Dr. Sears said in a telephone interview from his family’s pediatric clinic in Capistrano Beach, Calif.

“Certainly most methods do work, no matter how harsh it is on the baby,” he said. “But what happens to these babies left to cry it out for hours, if not weeks on end? What kind of trauma is inflicted on the babies, and what is their psychological and emotional makeup 3, 5, 10 years down the road?”

In fact, longterm studies have shown that children who never learn how to fall asleep independently are at increased risk of continuing sleep problems as they grow up, Dr. Mindell said.

Even on a short-term basis, the task force reported, “Infants who participated in sleep interventions were found to be more secure, predictable, less irritable and to cry and fuss less following treatment.”

While teaching a child to sleep independently can be emotionally wrenching for all those involved, Dr. Mindell said, “Parents need to understand that they’re not doing it for selfish reasons. Their children benefit greatly.”



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Monday, December 11, 2006

Oh My ! Obama !

Obama's magic

With his rock star visit to New Hampshire, the highflying senator continues to tantalize Democrats with intimations of a White House run -- and a buzz not felt in American politics since JFK.

By Walter Shapiro

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Photo: AP /Jim Cole

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., acknowledges the crowd at the state Democratic election celebration in Manchester, N.H., Dec. 10, 2006.

Dec. 12, 2006 | MANCHESTER, N.H. -- As Barack Obama addressed the largest pre-presidential-primary crowd in modern New Hampshire history Sunday afternoon, Democratic state party chair Kathy Sullivan was sitting directly behind the Illinois senator. From her vantage point, Sullivan saw exactly what Obama saw -- 1,500 rapt faces staring up at him with curiosity, affection and hope. Turning to her seatmate Sylvia Larsen, the president of the state Senate, Sullivan whispered, "Imagine what it must be like to be him."

For Obama, the "Imagine" has almost reached John Lennon levels. His political ascent has already reached those star-studded heights where even political insiders like Sullivan cannot fully comprehend the pressures from the adoration and expectations that envelop him. He was not supposed to run for president this time, for Obama was the Democratic future held in reserve for 2012 or 2016. We are witnessing something rare -- a would-be candidate tantalizingly signaling his potential availability and the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party responding beyond his most rapturous dreams. As Chicago-based media consultant David Axelrod, one of Obama's closest advisors, said in an interview Monday, "I wasn't alive then, but this is the closest thing to a draft since Adlai Stevenson in 1952." (Stevenson, the reluctant governor of Illinois, was nominated on the third ballot at the Democratic Convention.)

Obama's best-selling book may be called "The Audacity of Hope," but a presidential campaign by the fledgling senator (he was elected in 2004) might best be dubbed "The Hope of Audacity." Virtually every major politician believes in destiny, but few test fate's limits so early in his or her career. Facing more than an invasion-size armada of 100 reporters at a press conference Sunday afternoon, Obama said, "I am suspicious of hype. The fact that my 15 minutes of fame have extended a little longer than 15 minutes, I think, is surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife."

Axelrod insists that Obama has not definitely made a decision to become part of the 2008 field, partly because of that wariness about the hype and the hoopla. "Anyone who tells you that he is 100 percent certain that Senator Obama's running doesn't know him," Axelrod said. "He's still working it through." Part of working it through, though, was promising a major announcement before "Monday Night Football," which turned out to be a jokey declaration that the Illinois senator was "ready for the [Chicago] bears to go all the way."

Since two presumed 2008 contenders, Mark Warner and Russ Feingold, have disavowed their candidacies in recent months, there is a danger in assuming that anybody seriously contemplating a presidential bid is destined to run. But few in Democratic politics still believe that Obama is just aimlessly window-shopping outside the White House. A major Democratic strategist, who is affiliated with another presidential candidate, ran into Obama on Capitol Hill last week and was told by him, "I hope that when your conflict-of-interest period is over, we can work together." The easy translation: "After your candidate loses in the early primaries, I hope that you will sign on with me."

There is an unplanned quality to the Obama movement that should not be dismissed. Obama's current ascent began three months ago when he was the headliner at Sen. Tom Harkin's steak fry, the biggest political event on the Democratic calendar in Iowa, the first caucus state. Harkin presumably picked Obama -- a non-presidential candidate -- to avoid offending Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is running for the Democratic nomination and would be suspicious of any potential rival.

As Sullivan tells it, her invitation to Obama to come to New Hampshire for a post-election fundraiser was an impulsive gesture. The Thursday after the election -- buoyed by the Democrats' landslide sweep in the state -- she received a call on her cellphone from an unfamiliar area code. "Kathy, this is Barack Obama," the voice on the other end said, before adding, "I might be coming to New Hampshire." It was yet another signal of Obama's fast-growing fascination with running in 2008. Already envisioning a modest-size victory celebration in New Hampshire, she told him, "We were talking about having a little event, and you might want to come up and help with the fundraising."

No one anticipated that 1,500 tickets (at $25 a piece) would be all sold by the middle of last week -- and fire codes and the lack of a larger venue forced the state party to stop there. (Earlier Sunday morning, Obama attracted another 750 people to a book signing in Portsmouth.) New Hampshire, as the fabled home of the first presidential primary, has a vibrant political culture, but an outpouring like this is unprecedented in my experience covering the last seven primaries here. All day Sunday, long-memoried political reporters struggled to find a parallel. When, for example, Bill Clinton ran for president here in the 1992 primary, he never attracted a crowd beyond, say, 700 people. When John McCain was riding high before he won the 2000 Republican primary, he might have spoken to a thousand voters in a high-school gym. And those were free events on the eve of a primary. Last time around, John Kerry was speaking to crowds of roughly 100 people in fire stations around the state, little more than a month before the primary. Small wonder that local politicians like state Sen. Lou D'Alessandro, a major John Edwards backer in 2004, were harking back to John Kennedy's 1960 appearance at the University of New Hampshire to find an event that matched Sunday's Obama appearance.

There is a palpable uneasiness in New Hampshire and elsewhere with the notion of Hillary Clinton being prematurely anointed as the 2008 Democratic nominee. It is not accidental that Obama is the third candidate this year who has been ballyhooed as the challenger with enough heft to take on the Clinton dynasty. First came Warner, followed by Al Gore -- still a possible candidate, whose luster dims the longer he remains indecisive on the sidelines. Helping propel the Obama bandwagon is that the senator, like Gore, passionately opposed going to war in Iraq in 2002. Part of the rationale for the anti-Hillary star search is the feeling that the New York senator cannot win, barring a full-scale collapse of the Republican Party. "If the country has changed, maybe she could get in," said Nancy Lloyd, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Jaffrey, as she waited to hear Obama. "But if they are going to fight all the old battles and smear her, Hillary should stay out."

Without ever mentioning Clinton by name, Obama repeatedly spoke in New Hampshire about this weariness with old battles. At his press conference, he lamented "the small, petty slash-and-burn politics that we have been seeing over the last several years." In his formal speech, which he delivered wearing a dark jacket and crisp, open-necked white shirt, Obama declared, "Politics is not a sport and the debates we have in Washington are not about who is up or down, they are not about personal attacks, they are not about tactical advantages ... They are about who we are as a people."

This was about the level of issue-oriented specificity in Obama's speech and his other public remarks. What Obama is offering is a different kind of hope than the standard Democratic variety. He embodies the idea of a style of governing that goes beyond the nonstop rat-a-tat invective that dates back to the Clinton era battles against Newt Gingrich. Obama, the mixed-race son of Kenya and Kansas, who grew up in the multicultural melting pot of Hawaii, also represents a politics that transcends the two-century-old battles over race and ethnicity. Asked about his middle name "Hussein" at Sunday's press conference, Obama, provoking laughter from the reporters, flatly declared, "The American people are not concerned with middle names."

Obama's vagueness provoked a certain degree of grumbling among the Democrats lucky enough to snag tickets. "I came with questions and I left with questions," said Anne Stowe, a high-school mathematics teacher from Nashua. "I'm not certain that I know who he is and what he stands for."

The morning after Comet Obama flashed across the New Hampshire skies, Democrats were still trying to sort out exactly what had happened. As Sullivan said, referring to the massive turnout for Obama, "People have been constantly asking me, 'Why, why, why?'" By way of explanation, she mentioned Obama's status as the first prominent post-Vietnam era politician and the way he reflects the changing ethnic and racial makeup of the country. The New Hampshire party leader also acknowledged that she understood the complaints that Obama was light on the issues. "But he has the vision and he has the magic," she added. "And maybe that comes first."

Something near-magical did happen in New Hampshire on Sunday, when more than 2,000 Democratic voters turned out at two events to see a would-be presidential candidate, who had been in the Illinois state Senate just two years ago. Magic can easily dissipate in politics, especially during a long and grueling campaign year like 2007. But something is happening around Obama that we have not seen in American politics for decades. And no matter what happens from here, the significance of Obama-mania, in terms of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, the politics of race and the coming of a new generation, may long endure.

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About the writer

Walter Shapiro is Salon's Washington bureau chief. A complete listing of his articles is here.



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Hungry = Better ?

Empty-Stomach Intelligence

By CHRISTOPHER SHEA
Published: December 10, 2006

Hunger makes the best sauce, goes the maxim. According to researchers at Yale Medical School, it may make quadratic equations and Kant’s categorical imperative go down easier too. The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

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Illustration by Leanne Shapton

Empty-stomach intelligence.

A team led by Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, had been analyzing the pathways followed in mouse brains by ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining, when the stomach is empty. To the scientists’ surprise, they found that ghrelin was binding to cells not just in the primitive part of the brain that registers hunger (the hypothalamus) but also in the region that plays a role in learning, memory and spatial analysis (the hippocampus).

The researchers then put mice injected with ghrelin and control mice through a maze and other intelligence tests. In each case, the biochemically “hungry” mice — mice infused with ghrelin — performed notably better than those with normal levels of the hormone. The finding was startling, but “it makes sense,” Horvath says. “When you are hungry, you need to focus your entire system on finding food in the environment.” In fact, some biologists believe that human intelligence itself evolved because it made early hominids more effective hunters, gathers and foragers.

Horvath says we can use the hormonal discoveries to our cognitive advantage. Facing the LSAT, a final exam or a half-day job interview? Go in mildly hungry, not carbo-loaded for endurance, and snack to maintain that edgy state. Such advice, applied on a national scale, might help save our schools. Since overweight kids have suppressed ghrelin levels, Horvath theorizes that perhaps the obesity epidemic has contributed to declining test scores and other American educational woes.



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Sunday, December 10, 2006

Talkers: Brits Vs Yanks

Well Done!

Talking the Yanks Under the Table

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By SARAH LYALL
Published: December 10, 2006

LONDON

NO sooner had her words been reported in the British newspapers then she frantically took them back, saying that she had been misunderstood and misquoted. But the question remains: was Gwyneth Paltrow on to something when she noted (or didn’t) that “the British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans,” and that “people here don’t talk about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner”?

Whether Britons are objectively cleverer and more amusing than Americans, or whether they just sound that way, is one of the deep mysteries of British life for expatriates like Ms. Paltrow, who lives in London with her husband, the British rock star Chris Martin, and their children, Apple and Moses.

Britons seem to have the advantage of accent: their exotic pronunciation can make even dubious observation sound like unimpeachable truth. They are also experts at the art of speaking coherently and with authority on topics they know little or nothing about. “Every Englishman can talk for 15 minutes on any subject without a note,” Norman Mailer has been quoted as saying.

This somehow makes them seem more persuasive. When Tony Blair put the case for the Iraq war to Congress in 2003, his elegant fluency made him appear not only more articulate and intelligent, but also more credible, than President Bush. If silky-tongued Mr. Blair supports the war, some Americans felt at the time, then there must be something to it.

As for the dinner parties alluded to in Ms. Paltrow’s reputed quotes, they are indeed different here. For one thing, said Amelia Mendoza, a transplanted New Yorker, London dinner conversation is enhanced by the alcohol that Britons like to swig between remarks. At the end of dinner — which can be later than midnight, even during the week — it is considered a hospitality failure if there aren’t at least as many empty bottles of wine left on the table as there were guests.

“People are more relaxed and they’re not thinking, ‘I’ve got to get home because I’ve got to get up to work,’ ” Mrs. Mendoza said. “It’s looser here; there isn’t that grind.”

Unlike Americans, Britons think it is rude to ask a stranger what he does, in case the answer is “nothing.” They think it is rude to talk about the price of one’s possessions, the cost of one’s house or the angst one feels on account of one’s shrink’s incompetence, not that anyone would admit to having a shrink.

But curiously, they don’t think it is rude to be rude, said Mary Killen, who writes the “Your Problems Solved” column in The Spectator magazine.

“People who are good value do tend to be outrageous and indiscreet and fairly childish,” Ms. Killen said. “In this country, we’re still quite happy behind closed doors to be as offensive as we want.”

That can lead to violent shouting matches over the table, with guests readily contradicting and insulting each other. A similar robustness of exchange — a delight in the quality and originality of the insult — characterizes proceedings in the House of Commons, where debates are as quick and sharp as fencing moves, thrust-lunge-recover, so nimble that Congress seems worthy and dull by comparison. In Britain, prime ministers’ careers can rise and fall on their ability to slash their opponents with the perfect verbal put-down.

“The Brits, as far as I can tell, don’t take themselves as seriously as Americans do,” said Stephen Miller, an American essayist who is the author of “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art” (Yale University Press). But they are serious about conversation itself, treating it as an art form.

“The U.S. hasn’t historically had a strong respect for conversation, something both de Tocqueville and Mrs. Trollope mention in their writing,” he continued in an interview. “The Puritans looked down on conversation as an idle waste of time.”

But the British writer and editor Sir Harold Evans, who has lived in the United States for 20 years, made the case for American conversation, saying that “those of us who grew up speaking the Queen’s English get more credit than we deserve.” London parties, he said via e-mail, tend to be more eclectic because people from different spheres are all based here. “But U.S. politics, very much personality based, gives U.S. dinner tables plenty to talk about,” he said.

At the same time, with their layers of veiled signals, bluffs and counterbluffs, Britons are skilled at using willful buffoonery in conversation, as a way to appear modest. This can prove confusing to the American observer.

Called to the White House in the first season of “The West Wing” to advise the president on how to defuse an escalating conflict between India and Pakistan, the fictional British diplomat Lord John Marbury arrives drunk, insults the chief of staff and leers salaciously at every woman in sight. But then his idiocy melts away, as he delivers a brilliant off-the-cuff analysis of relations in the Indian subcontinent, alluding among other things to the religious wars of the 16th century and quoting, accurately, from the Book of Revelation.

“Americans would rather describe great transcendent truths than do anything else; Brits would rather carry off challenging polemic than do anything else,” Andrew Solomon, the American writer and self-described Anglophile, said via e-mail. “American speech is inflected with the patois of multiculturalism and its expressive imprecision; good debating skills are taught in England to excellent effect.”

Ms. Paltrow should “recognize the virtues of each culture,” Mr. Solomon said. “Each offers its particular pleasures.”

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Saturday, December 09, 2006

Fast Diet

I Heard It Through the Diet Grapevine

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By LOLA OGUNNAIKE
Published: December 10, 2006

WHEN Teron Beal, a songwriter and aspiring actor in Manhattan, was looking to drop weight quickly for a photo shoot, he didn’t double up on gym visits, gulp metabolic boosting pills or limit his diet to leafy greens and lean protein. Instead, he took a more drastic approach: he tried the “master cleanse,” a fast that requires subsisting for 10 or more days solely on an elixir of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Sworn to by some, sworn at by others, master cleanse, a liquid diet, is back in vogue.

Noah Berger for The New York Times

Kristina Wong, a performance artist, lasted only five days on the diet. Nevertheless, she says, she lost weight.

“I had only three weeks and I needed the difference to be noticeable,” said Mr. Beal, adding that he lost nearly 10 pounds during his 12-day fast in July. “The first few days were horrible, but by the fifth day I woke up and looked in the mirror and saw two ab muscles that had eluded me for years. I was grumpy no longer.”

While popular diets and fasts come and go, master cleanse remains a perennial favorite, a kind of folk regimen that owes its popularity to word of mouth and the Internet. Created in the 1940’s by a nutrition guru, Stanley Burroughs, to treat ulcers and other internal ailments, the fast enjoyed a vogue in the late ’70s after the publication of his book “The Master Cleanser.” Its fans then were health-conscious types, interested in purging their bodies of impurities and toxins like pesticides and food additives.

But in recent years master cleanse has enjoyed yet another vogue among people seeking to shed pounds in a short time. Celebrities, of course, are in the vanguard. On Oprah Winfrey’s show, the singer and actress Beyoncé Knowles announced that she had lost 20 pounds on the fast to prepare for her starring role in the new film “Dreamgirls.”

Robin Quivers, Howard Stern’s long-suffering sidekick, told People magazine that she did the fast on three separate occasions in 2004 and shrunk to 145 pounds from a peak of 218. (She heard about it from the magician David Blaine, no stranger to challenging his body.)

And on a recent episode of “30 Rock,” the NBC comedy, Tina Fey’s character is asked: “What are you doing? South Beach? Master cleanse?”

She did look skinnier.

The Internet teems with testimonials to the cleanse, also known as the lemonade diet, claiming that it fights disease, clears the mind as well as acne, and increases energy. Bloggers chronicle their daily fasting. Master cleanse video diaries can be found on YouTube, and a cottage industry has developed with various companies peddling cleansing kits including all ingredients for the beverage except lemons.

Never mind that most nutrition and diet experts advise against multiday fasting.

“I cannot believe how this thing has had a total revival,” said Joy Bauer, a nutritionist and the author of “The 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan.” “People want a quick fix and they want to be thin so badly that they’re vulnerable and open to almost anything.”

Ms. Bauer estimated that fasters who drink six glasses of the lemony potion a day — the low end of the recommended amount — are consuming about 650 calories, far less than the 1,600-plus calories the average woman needs to maintain her weight or the roughly 2,400 calories a man requires.

“Of course you’re going to lose weight,” she said. “You’re starving yourself.” Seldom do the pounds stay off, she added, and people have a tendency to binge once they begin eating again.

Still, many are willing to disregard the word of nutritionists, seduced by the notion that the only things standing between them and a slimmer body are a citrus-flavored drink and several days of discomfort.

Last week at Amoy’s Beauty, the hair salon of Amoy Pitters in the East Village, a brunette complained about her holiday weight gain. “Girl,” Ms. Pitters said, “you need to do master cleanse.”

Ms. Pitters, who first tried the fast four years ago at the prompting of one of her clients, Kacy Duke, a personal trainer to several celebrities, said she was skeptical at first. But 10 days and dozens of lemons later, she was eight pounds lighter, and elated. “I fit into my ultraskinny jeans and I couldn’t believe it,” Ms. Pitters, a petite clotheshorse, said. “I was so proud of myself for sticking with it, because it wasn’t easy.”

Ms. Pitters estimated that 85 percent of her more than 200 clients have tried the cleanse after hearing her rave. She uses it after the holiday season and before trips to bikini-friendly locales. “I know it works,” she said. “And you’d be surprised how many models I know who do it, too.”

Kristina Wong, a performance artist in Los Angeles, lasted on the fast for only five days, but she also saw results. “I looked great,” said Ms. Wong, who uploaded a video diary of her fasting experience on YouTube in September. “No more stomach rolls. I was such a skinny mini.”

Ms. Duke, who puts herself on the lemonade diet four times a year for a week to 12 days, pointed to other supposed benefits. “My eyes are clearer, my skin has a different glow and some of my best running times have been while I’m on master cleanse,” she said. She introduced it to her client Denzel Washington and “he loved it,” she said.

The enduring popularity of the cleanse may have as much to do with its instant results as with the drink’s relatively inoffensive taste (think lemon Gatorade with a spicy kick) and simple recipe: 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons Grade-B maple syrup, 1/10 teaspoon cayenne pepper and 8 ounces of spring or purified water.

According to “The Master Cleanser,” Burroughs’s book, the lemon acts as a purifier and provides potassium, the cayenne pepper adds B and C vitamins and aids in circulation, and maple syrup, a sugar, provides energy and minerals. Burroughs suggested that fasters drink anywhere from 6 to 12 glasses of the stuff a day as well as a mixture of water and sea salt in the morning and an herbal laxative tea in the evening, to help aid in waste removal.

On message boards at Web sites like CureZone.com, writers warn that it’s best to stay close to a restroom. “One day it was just two hours of me running back and forth to the bathroom,” Ms. Wong said.

All that time in the loo can adversely affect one’s social life. Many fasters also say so long to the business lunch, the after-work cocktail and dinner at the latest restaurant, for fear of temptation.

Samuel Klein, the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the medical school of Washington University in St. Louis, is leery of master-cleanse-like regimens because there is no data that prove they provide any medical benefit and no evidence that fasting helps rid the body of toxins, which happens naturally, he said.

While fasting for a few days is not dangerous, Dr. Klein said, “Fasting for too long can deplete muscle tissue, including your heart muscle, and it can reduce the size and functioning of organs like the kidney and liver.”

He is just one of many nutritionists who caution that fasting can be counterproductive. Some say it can even slow down the metabolism, making it even more difficult to lose weight in the future.

Try telling that to the converts. Peter Glickman, the author of “Lose Weight, Have More Energy and Be Happier in 10 Days,” is among them. Mr. Glickman, who at 6-2 once weighed more than 230 pounds, had already made over his lifestyle, going on a vegan diet and losing 42 pounds, when he came across the fast three years ago online. He lost 23 pounds in 20 days, he said. He sold his software company and went into the business of promoting the diet.

It has proved lucrative. On his Web site, themastercleanse.com, he sells Burroughs’s original book ($8.95), his updated version and an accompanying CD ($31.95), and a master cleanse kit ($49.95; just add lemons). He wouldn’t give specifics, but said his book is in its fourth printing. “I just put in an order for 10,000 more the other day,” he said.

Adaora Udoji, an anchor at Court TV, grew up watching her father use the fast. “We all just thought he was a weirdo,” she said.

But after quitting smoking last year, she fasted for 14 days, and now she is a believer. “It’s almost like a religious experience,” she said. “The first few days you’re obsessing about food and by the fourth or fifth day, you get this inexplicable burst of energy and you feel like you can run laps around the world.”

Ms. Bauer, the nutritionist, is not convinced. “I really think this chanting about people feeling so invigorated by this really comes from the happiness that people feel about losing weight,” she said.

Running laps was the furthest thing from Ms. Wong’s mind during her fast. She found herself staring longingly at takeout menus and scouring food blogs. “I drive a car that runs on vegetable oil so it smells kind of like a fast-food restaurant, and there were times when I was so hungry I just wanted to pull over and put my mouth around the exhaust pipe,” she said.

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