Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

Warning: This blog posting will probably make you mad. If your blood pressure rises in correlation with gas prices, stop reading now!

Gas prices have been increasing over the years, and I personally think it’s great! Don’t get me wrong. I have a car, and I love driving, but I also think people (including me) drive way too much.

Why do we drive so much? Because it’s still too cheap! Even with the price more than doubling in the past five years, there are more cars on the road, more drivers, and people driving further distances each day.

Obviously people need to do a certain amount of driving, but it’s the long distance commuters that really confuse me. Apparently they think it’s more economical to travel hundreds of kilometers and spend 3-6 hours in a car every day than to move closer to their workplace.

I think if you added up all of the costs very carefully (including car ownership and lost productivity due to travel time) you’d find this type of commute is actually way more expensive than moving.

Never mind all of the external costs (ie. costs that drivers don’t directly pay) including road maintenance, emergency services, and environmental impact.

Now, I agree there’s no easy solution to this. City planners need to encourage more mixed commercial/residential buildings. They also need to provide better mass transit.

But nobody is going to bother with any of that when it’s just so darn cheap to hop into the car and drive!

Ok, I think I’ve upset enough people by now At least a few others agree with me:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/hurray-for-high-gas-prices/
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto.html

I just read an interesting article in the Star entitled, “North Americans become obese while foreign children starve.”

An interesting figure from the article: “Right now, there are one billion people who are malnourished and nearly one billion who are overweight.”

So basically there’s lots of food for everyone, it’s just being distributed very unevenly.

Raj Patel has been documenting this phenomenon for quite some time over at Stuffed and Starved.

Health Minister Tony Clement says sodium is a bigger health threat than artery-plugging trans fats. “It’s almost become a silent invader of our food supply and only now are we seeing the consequences of it.” - canada.com

Dr. Graham MacGregor of the U.K.-based World Action on Salt and Health (WASH) says that reducing dietary sodium would result in “the biggest improvement in public health since clean water and drains.” - dietians.ca

“You hate to always point the finger at fast foods, but if you tend to go and get a meat and cheese breakfast sandwich on bread, you’re probably consuming about 1,800 milligrams of salt,” Sally Brown, CEO of the Heart and Stroke Foundation - ctv.ca

The Centre for Science in the Public Interest estimates that as many as 15,000 Canadians a year are dying annually because of excessive salt consumption. - theglobeandmail.com

An important study was released from Statistics Canada today. The report shows that Canadians, on average, eat way too much salt.

A CBC article about the study says excessive sodium intake (more than 2,300mg / day) “…can lead to health problems including hypertension. Hypertension can cause strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure and is one of the leading causes of death in Canada.”

I don’t eat fast food very often, but today I was traveling and had a Harvey’s hamburger for lunch. How much does it take to get to 2,300mg?

Well, the burger itself has 540mg. The bun adds 360mg. The condiments are another 290mg. I also had a side salad (10mg) with half a package of light Italian dressing (160mg) plus a medium Brisk Iced Tea (100mg). That’s a grand total of 1460mg - about 60% the Health Canada recommended daily intake, but almost 150% of the 1000mg that some health professionals recommend.

That’s about as healthy a Harvey’s meal as one can eat. Let’s imagine I was less informed and ordered like I might have a few years ago. We’ll start with a nice bacon cheeseburger (1095mg), condiments (290mg), and a large Iced Tea (135mg). Then, add my favourite - poutine. - a savoury 2360mg of sodium.

Yes, that adds up to 3880mg of sodium, all ingested in about 30 minutes or less. Yikes. No wonder people eat too much salt. It’s just so yummy. And no wonder heart disease has been increasing like crazy the last few decades…

I “banned” McDonald’s food years ago, after living in Atlanta, Georgia and realizing that the food standards there were significantly below those in Canada. Today I read an article describing the 38 ingredients found in Chicken McNuggets. Surprising facts:

• They’re mostly made of corn (56%)
• They have trace amounts of several suspected carcinogens
• They contain trace amounts of a type of butane (lighter fluid!)

Yummy!

UPDATE: Apparently there is some controversy about whether TBHQ (the ingredient in question) is actually a form a butane.  Chemists seem to think not.   Nonetheless, eating one gram of TBHQ will cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.”   So it’s clearly not great stuff to be ingesting.