I have a minor addiction

The things one does for love

The S.O. saw his primary care physician recently. She's placed him on a low potassium diet. That means we get to go through the house eliminating all the foods that qualify as being high in potassium: oranges, potatoes, broccoli, yogurt, bananas. . . and chocolate. Well, I've decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. In the interest of protecting the S.O.'s health, I will throw myself upon any and all chocolate that's in the house.

The whole low potassium diet is a bit of a challenge. I've been looking at the food lists, and most of the stuff we actually like tends to also be on the high in potassium side of the equation. We've got house full of stuff the S.O. should avoid or eat only in small amounts. I guess at this point the good news is no one's told me (yet) to avoid any specific foods. In addition to throwing myself upon the chocolate, I'll get to take care of the high potassium fresh fruit and eat the parsnips that get cooked with the roast. This whole low potassium thing will require more thinking than we usually put into shopping lists. Maybe I'll just start carrying a list of the things that are highest in potassium so I remember not to casually toss them into the cart at Larry's Market. Definitely something to think about. . .

But that's something to deal with the next time I go grocery shopping. Right now I think I hear some chocolate-covered cherries in the pantry calling my name.

Food fads and the gullible

I have written before about food fads, things that are promoted as being better than whatever it is we're used to eating and of course cost a whole lot more. I've found another one. Agave nectar.

Back when I still worked at the Centers for Disease Control, one of my colleagues began pushing agave nectar as a substitute for sugar. I'm not sure why. Supposedly because the agave nectar is sweeter than sugar, you'll use less of it. If the reason for using agave nectar is to cut back on calories, you'd better hope that to your taste buds it seems a whole lot sweeter because when you start comparing calories on a teaspoon to teaspoon basis sugar wins. Sugar has 16 calories in a teaspoon; agave nectar has 20. Anyway, at the time the agave nectar was being pushed by my colleague, I humored her, used it in my coffee, and thought to myself, "Okay. Not bad." So the next time I was at Publix I looked for agave nectar.

Remember the quinoa experience? Well, agave wasn't quite as much of a sticker shock eye opener, but at the time it struck me as fairly pricey for the amount the bottle contained. However, back then (this was about five years ago), agave was a recent arrival on supermarket shelves and Dr. Oz (who's apparently never met a food fad he didn't love) was pushing it on his show. He has since back peddled. For various reasons (market forces? economy of scale?) the price has dropped; it is now cheaper ounce for ounce than honey. It is, of course, still a lot more expensive than cane sugar.

Like the quinoa, the agave nectar was a gift. I have a friend who works at a summer camp that caters to rich kids from Chicago; every year when the camp shuts down at the end of the season the staff have to completely empty the kitchen. Anything that is perishable, might attract varmints (e.g., raccoons), or would be ruined by freezing is removed. Some of it goes to area food pantries and some goes home with the maintenance guys who in turn pass some on to friends and family. Last year I was the recipient of several boxes of quinoa, probably because I actually knew what the stuff was (or was the only one who was willing to try it). This year it was a bottle of agave nectar.*

Unlike the quinoa, the agave nectar is actually edible. It's nicely innocuous. When I dump it in my coffee or tea, I can't tell the difference between using it and using ordinary sugar. Am I using less in terms of total amounts than I would if it was the usual teaspoon of sugar? Who knows. It's hard to do a side by side comparison when agave is a liquid and sugar is a solid. Is there an advantage to using agave instead of sugar? I'm not sure. I've heard some people tout it as being more "natural," but from what I've read the process most commonly used for extracting it from the agave plant is as highly industrialized as the process involved in making high fructose corn syrup. There's a lot more involved than just crushing the plant and boiling the resulting sap. There is a type of traditional agave nectar that comes much closer to the type of processing used for traditional cane syrup, but that's not the agave nectar you're going to find on the shelves at a typical Kroger.

In any case, whether traditionally produced or cranked out in an industrial refinery, the sugars in agave are primarily fructose, which, as other writers have pointed out, puts agave a whole lot closer to being just another form of high fructose corn syrup than it does to anything that's actually good for you. High fructose corn syrup has gotten a bad reputation for a reason: research has shown that the human body does process fructose differently than it does sucrose. High amounts of fructose in a person's diet can contribute to the development of metabolic syndrome, i.e., that lethal combination of weight gain and type II diabetes. So why on earth would anyone think agave nectar would be a healthy alternative to ordinary sugar?

I have heard that hard core vegans like agave nectar because it doesn't involve animals in any way, shape, or form. They substitute it for honey because they apparently view honey as off limits because it's bee vomit and therefore an animal product. Well, cane sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, and Karo syrup have always been 100% non-animal products, so why agave would suddenly look more appealing than any of the non-fructose loaded alternatives baffles me. It has to be yet another triumph of marketing cancelling out common sense.

Of maybe it's just that magic "organic" seal on the bottles. Who knows. It's a mystery.

*I get other stuff, too, but it's not as much fun to write about a giant unopened bag of Kellogg's Froot Loops or the institutional-size jug of stir fry sauce. Unlike the quinoa, the Froot loops did not end up in a bird feeder.  

More Adventures in Cataloging: What is a Manly Man?

Illustration from Vitality Supreme, 1915.

I've been noticing while cataloging artifacts and documents at the museum that things have an odd way of forming clusters for no apparent reason. There'll be a whole string of things that all tie together in some way even though they were seemingly placed at random in the original chaos. This week's theme appears to be Virility and Clean Living.

Mixed in with old menus, service station receipts, and other weirdness like the pinup I mentioned a couple days ago were lots of booklets on healthy living: a 1930 brochure published by the Cleanliness Institute that explained why bathing is a good idea, a 1948 pamphlet on the evils of venereal diseases that was written for a teenage audience, a 1920's advertisement for a fitness camp, and similar items. By coincidence, a stack of books I was sorting through that day also contained a number of items that seemed geared towards young men, particularly two gems by Bernarr Macfadden, the Jack LaLanne of the early twentieth century. The books made me curious enough about Macfadden to Google him; he was an interesting man.

Like many fitness fanatics, Macfadden's philosophy was grounded in his personal experience. He had been a sickly youth, but living on a farm and engaging in vigorous outdoor exercise (pitching hay and similar chores) improved his health. As a young adult, he found a job that required spending the day sitting at a desk; he noticed he was turning into a weak, sickly person again and resolved to do something about it. Walking and other vigorous exercise combined with a healthy diet and clean living (no alcohol or tobacco) restored Macfadden's vitality. He decided to promote what he had learned. Over the following decades, he turned his ideas about exercise and health into a multi-million dollar fortune. He began publishing one small magazine; by the time he died at the age of 87, he headed an international publishing house. From his first spectacularly successful magazine (Physical Culture) he built a firm that published every type of pulp periodical, including True Story, Amazing Stories, and True Detective. It's the classic American success story: from 90 pound weakling to wealthy fitness guru and influential businessman.

In Vitality Supreme (published in 1915) Macfadden advised both men and women on how to achieve a vigorous and healthy body, one with a straight spine, strong lungs, and fully functioning alimentary system. The Macfadden physical fitness plan involved avoiding vices such as alcohol and tobacco, vigorous exercise (lots of walking), and a vegetarian diet. He also advised eating food in as close to its natural state as possible with raw food being preferred if it was feasible. He wasn't an absolutist, however. He did note that for some people a purely vegetarian diet was not possible; there were individuals who needed to eat meat in moderate amounts in order to remain healthy.

A few years later, Macfadden's book Manhood and Marriage counseled men that, among other things, masturbation did not cause acne but that nonetheless it weakened a person. It was a "dissolute" habit to fall into. Macfadden worried a lot about impotence and infertility and cautioned that mastubatory practices could damage the male reproductive system. I got the distinct impression he believed that the amount of sperm a man was blessed with was a finite number; if a man wasn't careful, he might run dry. In a number of sections of Manhood and Marriage Macfadden asserts that being excessively sexually active in your twenties could result in impotence by age fifty.

Actual sexual relations, on the other hand, were fine, as long as it was with the right woman. Granted, even in the marital bed one had to keep in mind that excessive passion was not good due to the debilitating effect that losing too much sperm could have on a man. There was a caveat, however. If a couple was well-suited and "the man and the woman cooperate there is an exchange of magnetism or vitality, call it what you will, which makes up for the loss."

In skimming these books, I was struck by Macfadden's permissive attitude for the time. He railed against the prudery that treated sex as something immoral and instead argued that "The sex instinct is the source of all that is sweet, beautiful and ennobling in the love of man and woman." He deplored the lack of practical advice young people were given when it came to "intimate relations" as he believed ignorance about human physiology was the leading cause of unhappy marriages. He denounced men who persuaded their sweethearts to engage in the marital act before the wedding and then jilted the girls for being immoral; Macfadden placed the blame on the men who had made promises the girls had believed. He also noted that if a woman was passionate before the legal marriage, this was a good sign she would continue to be so after the ceremony, thus reducing the possibility of physical incompatibility and long term unhappiness. In addition, what a man should look for in a potential mate was a woman who was as physically fit as he was, not some shrinking violet who worried about her figure and wasn't interested in healthy pursuits such as brisk walks in the park. One assumes the female model pictured in Vitality Supreme fits Macfadden's image of what the ideal woman would look like. By today's standards, of course, the lady is much, much too zaftig; she's obviously not a size 2.

Macfadden was apparently a strong believer in marriage; according to Wikipedia he had four wives (serially, not simultaneously). He saw nothing wrong with divorce if a couple was unhappy; his philosophy was that if a couple was incompatible, if their love was truly dead, then divorce could help rectify mistakes and allow both the husband and the wife to move on and possibly find happiness with a different partner. Not surprisingly, Macfadden's rather hedonistic attitude towards sexual intimacy and his emphasis that good health, vitality, and virility were all linked made him a convenient target of moral conservatives.  

These are interesting books. One thing that intrigued me was the way Macfadden carefully skirted describing explicitly various aspects of human sexuality. In Manhood and Marriage he devotes a chapter to abortion, including what would motivate a woman to get one, and notes that one problem could be that in the United States it was illegal to sell contraceptive devices or to counsel women on how to prevent pregnancy. He then does a eugenics pitch saying it's important to think carefully about bringing children into the world who might not be wanted, but he never directly tells the male reader to use contraception. If anything, he advises against it. However, at the same time he does describe the time of the month when a woman is most likely to conceive.It's an intriguing contradiction. Was he deliberately alerting men to the times to avoid intercourse? Given some of the other contradictions in these two books, who knows?

Of course, no one talked directly about sex at the time. One of the other items I cataloged this week was a mid-1920's booklet published by the U.S. Public Health Service that was purportedly the advice a mother would give a daughter as that daughter neared adulthood. The booklet is multiple chapters long, probably contains several thousand words, and is notable for its complete lack of any actual information. It's all euphemisms about behaving like a lady and avoiding intimate relations before marriage. What "intimate relations" are is never specified; for all a girl knew, they could be passionate kisses. It warns that unspecified nasty diseases exist but never comes right out and says "syphilis" or "gonorrhea" or describes how they're actually contracted. It's no wonder that, as Macfadden noted, many young couples entered the marital chamber for the first time having no idea just exactly what went where or that women often suffered sufficient pain and injury that their affection for their husbands turned to loathing.

Did men actually follow Macfadden's advice? That's another unanswerable question. He was a prolific writer who sold numerous books on multiple topics relating to health and physical fitness. The two books I found don't appear to be particularly heavily-read -- Vitality Supreme in particular looks like I was the first person to actually open it -- but that doesn't mean his physical fitness advice wasn't influential. At the same time, you have to wonder how long any person stuck with Macfadden's suggested diets or exercise regimens. The milk diet, for example, suggested a person subsist on a diet of milk alone; the dieter was supposed to drink 6 to 8 quarts a day. The only creature I can think of that would thrive on that diet would be a calf.

The little bit I did learn about Macfadden through Google has inspired me to go looking for an actual biography.The articles I found described him variously as an early feminist who empowered women to a thorough sleaze who took advantage of women much younger than himself. Those are interesting contradictions. There have been several studies of Macfadden's life published; I'm going to see if I can track down a copy of Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet by Mark Adams. It's the most recent so it may also be the most readable. 

As for the Macfadden books the museum owns, Vitality Supreme is going into a display that features a number of early 20th century artifacts relating to men: straight razors, pocketknives, hair brush sets, shaving mugs, and other paraphernalia. If I get lucky and stumble across some early exercise equipment, like some vintage hand grips, I'll include them, too. In any case, there will be an interpretive card explaining who Macfadden was and when the book was published. I'm not sure what to do with Manhood and Marriage. Stick it back on the shelf, I guess, and let someone else worry about it 20 years from now. 

The incredible shrinking junk food

Interesting marketing technique - turn the wrapper into a memo pad and hope consumers won't notice that what's inside that New wrapper has shrunk while at the same time the price being charged for the box has gone up.