Pay My Eighty Bucks for Six Things and Get the Heck Out

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Hot Meatball Treatment

It's April Fool's, which means websites everywhere are in the pranking business today. What's more, a bunch of 'em look like they were created by animal protein enthusiasts -- and what could possibly be more hilarious than meat?

Exhibit A: Whole Foods - "Insects Raised with Compassion"

Bonus points for the "Speed Up Your Checkout" article, which explains how "you can set up a direct deposit account to have your whole paycheck automatically converted to a Whole Foods Market gift card. It's the fastest and easiest way to pay." (But I still disapprove of your secret vegan agenda, Whole Foods.)

Exhibit B: Living Social - "Spa-Lami"

You know you want meat in your face, and an "Ultimate Protein Package" in your eyes.



Exhibit C: ThinkGeek - "Angry Birds Pork Rinds"

"A low carb, high protein, high fat snack that tastes like winning" indeed.

Mr. T Has Good Taste

Noted comic artist Paul Maybury's career was launched after he was fired from Whole Foods for creating signs like this one:

That steak looks awfully small for a man of Mr. T's size, though.

(Source: Dangerous Minds)

Link Dump

• Behold: the 40 deadliest fast food meals.

• A new genetic test "claims to show whether people will do better on a low-fat or a low-carb weight loss plan." Mindy Dopler Nelson, a Stanford nutritional biologist, conducted a study that concluded that "women on diets well-matched to their genes, as defined by the test, lost roughly five times more weight than those on mismatched diets." According to Nelson, "the study tested four diets -- Atkins (ultra-low-carb), the Zone (low-carb), Ornish (very low-fat) or a low-fat diet following the federal Food Pyramid." In the end, "researchers saw that women whose diets matched their genetic makeup lost more than 13 pounds over a year compared to less than 3 pounds for women on mismatched diets." 

• Could it be that Wal-Mart's produce is better than Whole Foods'?

• If you're healthy, don't go on cholesterol medications as a preventative measure. Medical experts say that statins -- "the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States -- may not be as safe a preventive medicine as previously believed for people who are at low risk of heart attacks or strokes." Among other things, "recently published evidence indicates that statins could raise a person’s risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 9 percent."

• The secret to touching your toes: "It's a tennis ball. You don't need to throw it, hit it or catch it. You just need to roll it under each foot for a few seconds. Then put it aside, bend down again and you're guaranteed to reach a smidge closer to the ground." Is this why Ichiro rubs his feet with a wooden dowel?

• This isn't news to anyone who's read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories," but it's gradually getting out there that we should be eating more (good) fat: "Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the cardiologist who led the Harvard meta-analysis that's published in current issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, says that in their zeal to rid diets of 'fat' many consumers, snack makers, and restaurateurs have loaded their meals with sugar and simple carbohydrates, instead. It's a bad trade-off for the heart."

Fat Workers Pay More at Whole Foods

Whole Foods is offering a steeper employee discount to workers with lower BMI scores. As many have pointed out, BMIs aren't the best yardstick with which to determine if someone's fat and unhealthy, and some have suggested that Whole Foods' application of this policy could run afoul of the law. My biggest issue with this discount policy, however, is that Whole Foods is penalizing fat workers -- the very segment of the workforce that most desperately needs to buy healthy food.

Perhaps Whole Foods' employee discount policy isn't all that surprising, given what we've come to learn about Whole Foods' CEO, John Mackey. Among other things, he's a rare "right-wing hippie" -- a "vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot." What's more:

Two years ago, Mackey passed through one of the roughest stretches of his life. The Bush Administration, in an uncharacteristic spasm of antitrust vigilance, was fighting Whole Foods’ purchase of a competitor, Wild Oats, contending that the merged company would unfairly corner what the Federal Trade Commission called the “premium natural and organic supermarket” sector. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Mackey: for nearly eight years, he had been secretly logging onto an Internet message board devoted to Whole Foods stock under the sock puppet, or pseudonym, “rahodeb” (an anagram of Deborah, his wife’s name), praising his own company, disparaging Wild Oats, and throwing in a flattering remark about his hair (“I think he looks cute!”).