Gadgets for the Gullible and desperate efforts to cheat the Grim Reaper
The world of gadgetry and novelty is ever with us and I thought I might update you on a handful of oddities I’ve come across in the past few weeks.
1. World Wife Carrying Championships
The July issue of one of my favorite wellness newsletters. ‘Active Living’, reported on the 13th World Wife Carrying Championships in Sonkajarvi, Finland.  The Finns have built a permanent 10,000 seat stadium to host the event, which is stranger even than cell-phone tossing, another Finnish favorite.
The origin of the event is said to date back to the 1800s, when Finnish men would raid other villages and run off with the women. One classic method of transporting their captives was the so-called “Estonian carry”, in which the ‘wife’ is draped down the man’s back with her legs bracketing his head. I guess the event is called ‘Wife carrying’ and does not specify that it has to be your own wife. The 250+ meter course includes not only hurdles but a water hazard. Warning to our married women readers, if your husband starts picking you up, carrying you around the house and talking of a summer vacation in Finland, it’s probably not to see Helsinki and the midnight sun.
Now there are regional elimination meets around the world and Canada was represented by Markus Raty and Dorothy Kazula. (I wonder if they are funded by Sport Canada?) If the wife weighs less than 49k, sandbags are added. If you need to know more about this surrealistic event just Google ‘World Wife-Carrying Championships’ for access to more information than you’ll ever need to know. [Here's one: Wife Carrying World Championships
At SonkajÄrvi, 1-3 July 2005]
Herewith Monty Python’s tribute to Finland, which unfortunately omits wife-carrying. Click the disc to hear an mp3 of 'Finland'.
Monty Python: Finland
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
It's the country for me.
You're so near to Russia,
So far from Japan,
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Eating breakfast or dinner,
Or snack lunch in the hall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.
You're so sadly neglected
And often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium,
When going abroad.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.
Finland has it all.
Composer: Michael Palin
Author: Michael Palin
Arranger: John Du Prez
Lead Singer: Michael Palin
2. In Germany, 2 students have created a plastic coaster with sensors that gauge the weight of beer in your mug. As the mug or stein approaches empty, a signal is flashed to the bar and a refill arrives. No walk to the bar, no hand signaling, no need to talk to the waiter; just non-stop refills before you stagger, or worse still, drive home.
3. The Animal Medical Centre in New York have created a ‘Catkins’ diet for obese cats who, often like their owners, are manifesting symptoms of Type II diabetes. I haven’t seen the figures but suspect there is a correlation between overweight owners who have overweight pets.
In a recent news report: "A German cat [photo] weighing six times the normal weight is so fat that it cannot take more than four steps without getting exhausted. Now officials at a Berlin animal shelter are having trouble finding a new owner for six-year-old Mikesch, after it was taken away from his elderly owner. The man, who was himself taken to a nursing home, had been feeding the 18.5 kilo cat two kilos of mince each day. Cats usually weigh between 3-6kg and should eat no more than about 300 grams of food each day, vets say. Guinness no longer keeps records for fattest cats, but the now-permanent recordholder was an 18.55 kg cat from Minnesota named O.T." [Obese Tommy?]
4. Still on a pet related theme, I see a couple of doggie people each morning who have reduced their own exercise by using a plastic sling to launch the ball for their dog to chase. Once the dog retrieves the ball the owner can scoop it up without bending down and sling it again. One such item called “Chuckit” calls it “a great way to exercise your pet without wearing out your arm” (or legs). Or, in the case of one of the men on my route, without spilling your latte. There is even a thing called “Go, Dog, Go Ball Launcher”. Among the benefits it offers are (i) “a sling arrangement that permits easily launching the ball a long distance” and (ii) “an apparatus that permits balls to be picked up without ever bending down or touching them with your hands.”
Whatever happened to the walk with a stick or a ball, which you actually threw yourself, or at least hit with a tennis racket?
5. North Americans eat faster that Europeans, whether it’s at McDonalds, at home or at a banquet. In an effort to slow us down and get us to savour our food, William J. Curry has invented ‘Powerseed’, which looks a bit like an oval hockey puck with a green flashing light and beeper built in. The battery-operated Powerseed blinks a green light every 30 seconds signaling it’s time to take another bite. Every 5 minutes the Powerseed emits a continuous green light so that eaters can pause and consider whether they are still hungry.
Attached is a delightful bit of satire about the Powerseed by Michelle Slatalla.
June 16, 2005 New York Times
The Gadget That Came to Dinner
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
EATING at the dinner table with my family is like being in a fight scene in an old martial-arts movie. Knives flash through air. Bodies whiz by, as my children throw themselves at their plates. A fist smashes into a loaf of bread and removes a hunk. Even the dogs resort to high kicks to compete for scraps. Most meals end faster than a Bruce Lee nunchunks session. It's not a pretty sight. At a time when slow eating is championed everywhere from diet books to daytime TV, we eat as if we were being chased by the bad guys.
Does speed eating prompt us to eat too much? Are our habits unhealthy? Nobody knows for sure, although the American Dietetic Association says it may take up to 20 minutes for your brain to send a signal to your stomach that you're full. "People who eat too fast can get overly full before the message get to the brain," said Tara Gidus, an association spokeswoman. When it comes to food, I'm as susceptible to a trend as anybody. So I turned to the Internet for help. At Powerseed.com I learned about a small egg-shape gadget designed to slow down eaters.
The $49.95 Powerseed looks like a small black version of a Silly Putty container. Battery operated, it blinks a green light every 30 seconds to signal that it's time to take a bite. Every five minutes it sends a different signal, a steady light for three seconds. The purpose of the longer light, according to William J. Curry, the Powerseed's inventor, is to make eaters aware - at regular intervals - of what they are eating and whether they are still hungry. "It started with my own disordered eating patterns," said Mr. Curry, who got the idea for the Powerseed after a trip to Italy a few years ago. "I ate very rapidly and I was 20 pounds overweight."
"In Venice I wanted to take my wife to a nice place on the last night," he said in a phone interview. "As we sat down, I noticed a handsome man who ate so slowly and who enjoyed his food so much. I was fascinated with this very urbane guy who could eat in a very nice way. But by the time I looked down at my own entree, I had eaten it all."
I said: "No one in my family would have noticed the urbane guy. We aren't the type of people who look up from our plates."
Mr. Curry sent me a Powerseed to test and reminded me that the gadget should be used in conjunction with the 112-page "Powerseed Guide to Mindful Eating."
The philosophy is the opposite of a restrictive diet, Mr. Curry said. "Radical changes in a person's diet are not sustainable, and this is not about perfectionism or about being compulsive," he said. "It should make you enjoy your food more, not less." With that in mind, I introduced the Powerseed as unobtrusively as possible. The night it arrived in the mail, I optimistically cooked a slightly smaller amount of food than usual. The menu included grilled flank steak, steamed broccolini with lemon, and buttered pasta, a concession to my 7-year-old daughter, who refuses to eat colored food other than raspberries.
I discreetly set the Powerseed in front of my own plate.
"Dinner!" I called. My three daughters and husband stampeded in, threw themselves into chairs, faced plates and started to eat.
I looked at the Powerseed, waiting for my signal.
The seconds ticked by slowly.
My husband ate one, two, three bites of flank steak.
I waited.
My 7-year-old deftly pushed all food but the pasta to the edge of her plate, ate her noodles and asked for more.
Was the Powerseed broken?
By this time, I was staring at it so intently that I barely noticed my two older daughters helping themselves to more vegetables.
Finally, after several millenniums, after an era that lasted longer than the dinosaurs' time on Earth, the Powerseed flashed.
Gratefully I cut broccolini, put it into my mouth, chewed, enjoyed the taste, chewed more, swallowed, enjoyed the swallowing and then realized with despair that I still had 27 seconds to wait for my next bite.
"Mom, why is that black salt shaker blinking at you?" my oldest daughter asked.
"It only lets you take a bite every 30 seconds," I said. "Try it."
"No thanks, you look cranky," my middle daughter said.
"Try a bigger bite so it lasts longer," my husband advised, shoving four strips of steak into his mouth at once to demonstrate.
"I'm full," my 7-year-old said. "Can I go ride my bike?"
Platters were empty. Napkins were ravished. I was hungry.
The next day I sought advice.
"Why won't my family eat slowly?" I asked Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.
"Why should they?" she said. "I happen to be a fast eater myself. Much faster than other people. When I'm hungry, I want to eat."
"Don't you worry that you'll overeat before your stomach tells your mind you're full?"
"There is a theory that if you eat fast, the food goes in and doesn't have time to be absorbed or to raise blood sugar to turn off the signals that make you hungry, and that by the time those signals have operated, you've taken in far more calories than you need," Dr. Nestle said. "But I've never seen compelling evidence that it's true. Certainly if you drink a big glass of water, you know it. You get a feeling of fullness right away."
"How do you keep from eating too much?" I asked.
"Portion control," she said. "Parcel out portions in advance, and then eat them any way you like."
Other strategies include setting your fork down between bites and taking sips of water between every bite. "A salad before a meal will fill you and slow your pace of eating," said Bonnie Taub-Dix, a dietitian in New York. "Or a nice big crispy apple before a meal will take up space in your stomach."
As for the Powerseed? The next night my daughters gave it a try but complained after a couple of minutes that their food was getting cold. Maybe they are better candidates for the Manners To Go flashcards at onestepahead.com ($22.95). |
6. Just to show that it’s not only lay people and late night TV watchers who are gullible, The British Medical Journal published an article by a group of Dutch, Belgian and Australian scientists claiming that their ‘Polymeal’ diet reduced heart disease by 76%. The diet included wine (150ml/day), fish (114g/4xweek), dark chocolate (100g/day), fruit and vegetables (400g/day), garlic (2.7g/day) and almonds (68g/day).
All of the above at one time or another had been touted as reducing heart disease by a certain percentage. So the authors totaled up the percentages for different foodstuffs from a variety of studies and came up with 76%. The mélange of food and wine was christened ‘Polymeal’.
Most doctors and researchers took the article seriously and wrote in erudite letters wondering, for instance, whether grape juice could be substituted for wine. There were plenty of clues in the article that it might be a hoax including a sentence near the end, “Redundant cardiologists could be retrained as Polymeal chefs and wine advisors.”
Our thanks to Joe Taylor of Active Living for drawing this to our attention.
The Polymeal: a more natural, safer, and probably tastier
(than the Polypill) strategy to reduce cardiovascular disease
by more than 75%
Oscar H Franco, scientific researcher 1, Luc Bonneux, senior researcher2, Chris de Laet, senior researcher1, Anna Peeters, senior researcher3, Ewout W Steyerberg, associate professor1, Johan P Mackenbach, professor1
1 Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC University Medical Centre Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2 Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE), Wetstraat 155, B-1040, Brussels, Belgium, 3 Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University Central and Eastern Clinical School, Melbourne, Australia
Correspondence to: O H Franco
o.francoduran@erasmusmc.nl
Abstract
Objective Although the Polypill concept (proposed in 2003) is promising in terms of benefits for cardiovascular risk management, the potential costs and adverse effects are its main pitfalls. The objective of this study was to identify a tastier and safer alternative to the Polypill: the Polymeal.
Methods
Data on the ingredients of the Polymeal were taken from the literature. The evidence based recipe included wine, fish, dark chocolate, fruits, vegetables, garlic, and almonds. Data from the Framingham heart study and the Framingham offspring study were used to build life tables to model the benefits of the Polymeal in the general population from age 50, assuming multiplicative correlations.
Results
Combining the ingredients of the Polymeal would reduce cardiovascular disease events by 76%. For men, taking the Polymeal daily represented an increase in total life expectancy of 6.6 years, an increase in life expectancy free from cardiovascular disease of 9.0 years, and a decrease in life expectancy with cardiovascular disease of 2.4 years. The corresponding differences for women were 4.8, 8.1, and 3.3 years.
Conclusion
The Polymeal promises to be an effective, non-pharmacological, safe, cheap, and tasty alternative to reduce cardiovascular morbidity and increase life expectancy in the general population. |
7. Square-Eyes
Square-Eyes looks like an orthotic that you can put into a child’s or adult’s shoe. However, it is an orthotic with a difference; rather than correct your foot plant, it records the exercise you do in the form of steps. (This makes it like a pedometer in an insole). But there’s more. Square-Eyes transmits the activity information to a base station connected to the child’s TV. It calculates the time earned by activity and converts this into a TV viewing allowance. Once the earned time has been used, the TV automatically switches off.
 It’s ingenious and it the brainchild of Gillian Swan, a 22-year-old student at London’s Brunel University School of Design. I like the goal she sets of between 12,000 and 15,000 steps a day for her tele-hungry users. Unfortunately, too many of the lazy kids of today would find another TV, watch a DVD, catch something on their new video iPod or dive into a video game, such as Grand Theft Auto.
8. The “Death Clock”
After you type in a few basic bits of information such as date of birth, BMI, smoking stats and personality type the Death Clock will tell you how many seconds you have to live. As I write this I have only 184,302,809 seconds to go, so don’t expect any copies of “Well” after October 3rd, 2011. (Note: On closer inspection I corrected my BMI to 24 and my personality mode from ‘normal’ to ‘optimistic’ and gained another 20 years. Be optimistic or die indeed!)
The Death Clock isn’t scientific and I hope I’ll be around for more than 6 years. Hey, but it makes you think.
A really sick person can use it as a screen saver and watch life slipping away second by second.To keep the Grim Reaper away or at bay
Eat your fruits and vegetable and go out and play. 
Seriously Folks
If you are buying a piece of cardio equipment, a recent panel of experts voted the elliptical trainer as the best bet. It is low-impact, variable resistance, good for the central core of the body as well as the lower muscles and, of course, an excellent cardio-vascular challenge. Don’t look for the cheapest model, but check out a few at a store or health club to see if this form of activity works for you.
 Afterword
Please send us the silliest fitness gadget you have come across, with photographs if possible. We will put them together for a future issue. Tony Little beware!
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