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Breast cancer, why is it the only hyped cancer?
Ever notice that everything donates money for breast cancer research?
How come no other cancer research is represented? You never see “wear blue for testicular cancer research” or “wear purple for brain cancer research”. That doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? Now I know someone who had breast cancer. She survived, apparently the survival chances are fairly high. I also knew someone with brain cancer. He died in a matter of months, chances of survival are nil apparently.
My main concern is all these breast cancer funding organizations, how much actually donate what they get to the scientists actually doing the research? I recall one foundation only was donating 1% to the scientists actually doing the research and the foundation taking the donations was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. For a nonprofit, they were sure making quite a profit eh?
Also, if one makes a remark about why others don’t get the attention breast cancer gets, they get labeled a “Woman hater”. That’s not being a woman hater, that’s being fair.
Oh, and when chicks on facebook were doing that bra color thing, I got the same remark made at me. I said “telling the world what bra you’re wearing does jack shit for cancer research. If you want to do something, fund the universities doing research on it.” Right off the bat, I recived a death threat and a ton of insults labeling me things like “woman abuser”, others suggesting I need to get castrated, etc. It was like making that comment was the most offensive thing on Earth. It wasn’t. I was being objective.
Bottom line: Focus on cancer research on ALL cancers, not just one.
Short Rant
Short rant today about something really simple.
License plate frames.
Okay, so not many people usually leave their home state but, why must people purchase the oversized frames that hide what state they are from?
Example, earlier this morning, I had a car fly by me at least going 20-30 mph over the speed limit. Out of curiousity, I looked at the plate. It wasn’t one of those standard South Carolina plates but another plate. The name of the state was covered on the plate with one of those frames that had a caption, something about them or a dealership being #1 of something.
First thing I said after seeing that is
“Where the hell are you from?!”
I wonder if police officers actually pull people over for that. I got pulled over ironically earlier today because some police officer’s plate reader could not read the letters off my plate. Now that’s stupid.
Weight vs volume on food
So the Wall Street Journal published an article a while back about the push to have the measurement units on nutrition facts labels changed from grams to teaspoons.
Setting aside the fact I’m pro metric system, this has a lot of fundamental problems.
First of all, people claim that naturally in America, nobody weighs their ingredients so nobody can relate weight of sugar in grams to teaspoons. Okay, so I guess that is somewhat understandable. I don’t believe that many people actually do weigh their ingredients. I occasionally do, as well as some bakers I know but that’s about it.
The majority of this article focuses on people not knowing how to measure in grams and that being the primary cause of it. Honestly, that seems like a load of crap. It does not take much to learn a different measurement at all, however nobody really reads the nutrition facts labels anyways.
Here is an argument against changing the labels….
Masses of sugar
Anyone back from school knows the rules of density. Different sugars have different densities. A 5 minute search online reveals a few things. 100g of High Fructose Corn Syrup, a common sweetener used in pop and other sugary drinks, has a volume of 78ml (roughly 5.25 tbsp). Now, compare that to 100g of powdered sugar, the kind you find in the grocery store. 100g of powdered sugar is about 190ml in volume (roughly 12.8 tbsp). Now, the companies that use natural sweeteners are going to get massively shafted, while the ones who used extremely processed sugar get the appearance of containing less sugar.
Now assume that the majority of customers are stupid. The average customer is going to look at these labels and say “Gee, this 2-litere bottle of pop has 20tbsp of sugar, where as this natural sweetened bottle of cola has 30tbsp of sugar. I’ll go for the one with 20tbsp with sugar.”
Now, both bottles of pop actually contained 240 grams of sugar each, one had high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener, and the other used cane sugar as a sweetener. The mass of sugar I used is just a shot in the dark though, as I don’t have any pop in my apartment to actually look at the nutrition facts, but you get the picture there.
Simply stating:
Switching the nutrition facts label from mass to volume is a very bad idea, and the only people who will get screwed of course is the customers.
