SOURCE: MEN'S HEALTH MAGAZINE

By David Zinczenko
Dec 10, 2010

Worst Foods in America, 2010

Eat this, Not that!

When we published our first edition of Eat This, Not That: Worst Foods in America back in 2007, we made a lot of restaurant chains very unhappy. But we also made a lot of their attorneys really, really happy, as they soon began earning massive legal fees sending us saber-rattling correspondences on behalf of the food marketers they represented.

As 2010 draws to a close, it's time for another walk down the Hall of Restaurant Shame. And we’re sorry to say that, despite the fact that more than 6 million Americans have begun using Eat This, Not That! as their weapon of choice against bad-for-you food and the restaurants that proffer it, the restaurants themselves still haven’t gotten the message. This year brought perhaps the craziest, most calorically damaging menu items we've ever seen. In fact, you should not attempt to eat a single thing on this list unless you are sharing it with at least three other people—because each of these “individual servings” include a full day (or more) worth of calories. (You can see our complete—and completely shocking—list of The 20 Worst Foods of 2010 here.)

Oh, and P.S.: Hey, restaurant attorneys. Merry Christmas!

Worst Chinese Entrée
PF Chang’s Double Pan-Fried Noodles Combo (served with beef, pork, chicken, and shrimp)
1,820 calories
84 g fat (8 g saturated)
7,692 mg sodium

The human body needs about 1,500 milligrams of sodium each day to function properly. Anything beyond that could be unnecessary, and possibly put your health at risk. And sure, Chinese food is notorious for its high salt content, but few dishes we’ve seen come anywhere close to this number. It packs enough of the white stuff to meet your body’s needs for an entire week! And the rest of PF Chang’s menu isn’t much better. Stick with the Hong Kong Beef and plan to avoid the saltshaker for the next couple meals. (Or pick up the new Cook This, Not That! Easy & Awesome 350-Calorie Meals and save money and time while losing weight faster than ever.)

Eat This Instead!
Hong Kong Beef with Snow Peas
620 calories
28 g fat (6 g saturated)
1,852 mg sodium
Bonus Tip: Hidden salt bombs are everywhere. Don’t miss this indispensible slideshow of The 30 Saltiest Foods in America.

Worst Mexican Entrée
Baja Fresh Charbroiled Steak Nachos
2,120 calories
118 g fat (44 g saturated, 4.5 g trans)
2,990 mg sodium

If the full day of calories in this entree doesn’t ruin any of your weight-loss goals, then the 2 days of saturated fat almost certainly will. But if all that saturated fat doesn’t wipe out your waistline, then the 2 days of trans fat surely will. If the trans fat doesn’t wreak total havoc  . . . you get the point. Fact is, you could eat eight steak tacos and still take in fewer calories than what’s found in this plate of cheesy chips. Stick to two tacos and save nearly half a pound of body fat in one sitting. 

Eat This Instead!
2 Original Baja Steak Tacos
460 calories
16 g fat (4 g saturated, 0 g trans)
520 mg sodium 
Bonus Tip:  Hungry for more hard-hitting nutrition facts, findings, and advice delivered to your inbox every day? Sign up for the free Eat This, Not That! newsletter, or simply follow me right here on Twitter! You'll get insights like: The word "muffin" was invented so people wouldn't feel guilty about eating cake for breakfast.)

Worst Pizza
Uno Chicago Grill’s Chicago Classic Deep Dish Pizza (individual size)
2,310 calories
165 g fat (54 g saturated)
4,920 mg sodium

Congratulations, Uno! You lose! Again! In all the years we’ve been putting this annual list together, this caloric calamity has never budged—it's the worst pizza, year after year. There's simply no competition for this crusty, cheesy nightmare. With a day’s worth of calories, more than 2 days’ worth of sodium, and nearly 3 days’ worth of fat, they should call it the Classic Deep Doo-Doo pizza. Because that's where your diet will be if you eat it.
Eat This Instead!Cheese & Tomato Thin Crust Pizza (1/2 pizza)
420 calories
16.5 g fat (7.5 g saturated)
885 mg sodium 

Worst Breakfast
IHOP Big Country Breakfast with Chicken Fried Steak & Country Gravy
2,440 calories
145 g fat (56 g saturated)
210 g carbohydrates
5,520 mg sodium

Here’s the anatomy of a breakfast disaster: Take a 12-ounce steak, bread it, fry it, and then cover it with gravy. Then, on the side, drop three eggs and three buttermilk pancakes. Does it not occur to IHOP that this is actually three full meals that would weigh in at more than 800 calories apiece?

Eat This Instead!
Simple & Fit Turkey Bacon Omlette
420 calories
21 g fat (10 g saturated)
730 mg sodium
24 g carbohydrates
Bonus Tip: Remember the old saying "Milk: not just for breakfast anymore." Well, here are 20 foods that shouldn't be for breakfast, period. Check out this eye-popping list of the Worst Breakfasts in America!

The Worst Food in America
Cheesecake Factory’s Bistro Shrimp Pasta
2,730 calories
78 g saturated fat
919 mg sodium
141 g carbohydrates

No restaurant chain exemplifies America's portion problem more than Cheesecake Factory, where the average sandwich contains nearly 1,400 calories—more than three full meals. But the Factory doesn't stop at elephantine portion sizes; combine that with heavy-handed application of cheap cooking fats and the result are dishes like the 2,580-calorie Chicken and Biscuits and the 2,460-calorie French Toast Napoleon. However, it’s this relatively healthy-sounding plate of shrimp pasta that earns this year's Worst Food in America crown from Eat This, Not That!, delivering to your system more saturated fat than you’d find in three packages of Oscar Mayer Center Cut Bacon and as many carbs as you’d slurp down from 1½ cases of Amstel Light. Gross.

Eat This Instead!
Fresh Grilled Mahi Mahi
240 calories
1 g saturated fat
364 mg sodium
2 g carbohydrates

Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand

SOURCE:

/FASHION & STYLE SECTION

Published: December 11, 2010

ON a brisk Saturday morning this month, a dedicated crew of about 90 women, most in their 30s or thereabouts, arrived at a waterfront hotel here, prepared for a daylong conference that offered to school them in the latest must-have skill set for the minivan crowd.
Teaching your baby to read? Please. How to hide vegetables in your children’s food? Oh, that’s so 2008.
The topics on that day’s agenda included search-engine optimization, building a “comment tribe” and how to create an effective media kit. There would be much talk of defining your “brand” and driving up page views.
You know. For your blog.
Yes, they had come to Bloggy Boot Camp, the sold-out first stop on a five-city tour. It is the brainchild of Tiffany Romero and Heather Blair, the founders of the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers. Boot Camp is at once a networking and social event, bringing together virtual friends for some real-time girly bonding, and an educational seminar designed to help the participants — about 90 percent of them mothers — to take their blogs up a notch, whether in hopes of generating ad revenue and sponsorships, attracting attention to a cause or branching out into paid journalism or marketing.
“You’re here because you want to be seen as a professional,” Ms. Romero told the group. A summer-camp director from Los Angeles, she steered the proceedings with the good-natured sass of a sorority social chairwoman and the enthusiasm of a, well, summer-camp director. (She went barefoot for much of the day and said “You guys!” a lot.)
After the obligatory announcement that participants — who had paid $89 and traveled from as far as California — should “feel free to tweet” (hashtag: bloggybootcamp), the women splayed their laptops, pecked at their BlackBerrys and traded business cards. A handful drank mimosas out of brightly colored plastic sippy cups.
“Do I call you ‘Jill’ or ‘Scary Mommy?’” a participant asked Jill Smokler, a speaker whose blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month.
Discussions ranged from how to let public relations firms know that you don’t work free (“Your time and your experience and your audience are worth something,” Ms. Romero said. “It’s capitalism, plain and simple.”) to the benefits of using Facebook fan pages and Twitter (“My entire life in social media changed when I got on Twitter,” she said to knowing nods).
There was a presentation on the new Federal Trade Commission guidelines requiring bloggers to disclose their connections to advertisers, and another on how to use keywords to make a post more visible in Google searches. Heed the speaker’s advice, and you, too, might get 28,549 views of your tutu-making tutorial!
Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with. Embellished with professional graphics, pithy tag lines and labels like “PR Friendly,” these blogs have become a burgeoning industry generating incomes ranging from $25 a month in what one blogger called “latte money” to, for a very elite few, six figures.
According to a 2009 study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, 23 million women read, write or comment on blogs weekly.
“We all live online,” said one of the Boot Camp attendees, Jennifer Gerlock, who blogs at hipasiwannabe.com.
Some women are so entrenched in the blogosphere that there’s even a blog just about ... blogging conferences. (Disclosure: My own blog, in which I write about everything from “American Idol” to my love of Alpha-Bits, was once included on a list of the Top 50 “lesser-known mom bloggers.”)
For many, the blogosphere functions as a modern-day kaffeeklatsch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails, especially at a time when many mothers raise their children far from family and friends, or work outside the home at 9-to-5 jobs.
Blogging has “opened up a whole new world to me,” said Stephanie Stearns Dulli of Germantown, Md., a former Los Angeles-based actress who now writes about being a stay-at-home mom — and occasionally about “General Hospital,” for which she displays a “brand ambassador” badge on her blog, dialmforminky.com. “Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time.”
The blogosphere is also increasingly the place many women look for their parenting role models. Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines.
Another attendee, Mary Fischer, began her blog, the Mommyologist (tag line: “Analyzing Motherhood with Laughter and Honesty ... and Trying Not to Lose my Mind in the Process!”), as a way to cope with her feelings of disorientation after trading in a career as a meeting planner for life as a stay-at-home mother. “I thought that something was wrong with me,” she said. “Or maybe I wasn’t a good mother. And so now I feel like with my blog maybe I can help other girls that are feeling isolated know that everybody goes through that. ”

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Henning Wagenbreth

Why do moms write blogs and why do you read them?

Share your thoughts.

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Monica Lopossay for The New York Times

Sunday Sitwell, with her blog-icon mask.

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Monica Lopossay for The New York Times

Jayme Tate, shown with her son Dylan.

Francesca Banducci, a writer of mayhemandmoxie.com (tag line: “Because Perfection & Motherhood Simply Cannot Co-Exist”), has an M.B.A. in marketing, but said that she’s given up trying to have the “big blog.” Instead, Ms. Banducci, pregnant with her third child, blogs mostly for fun and friendship, treating it as a hobby like any other. “My husband calls it my expensive hobby,” she said with a laugh.
Just as companies like Tupperware saw the untapped sales potential in the old-school kaffeeklatsch, advertisers have now set their sights on mommy blogs, recognizing that anywhere women’s eyes go in huge numbers — especially anywhere they might be discussing the products they use — is prime real estate.
“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening,” said Pamela Parker, a senior manager with Federated Media, which sells ad space for an A-list roster of about 150 bloggers that includes superstars like Dooce and the Pioneer Woman, who’ve parlayed their blogs into lucrative one-woman industries. (The New York Times Company is an investor in Federated Media.)
“Marketers are recognizing that they want to be there, associated with that authentic conversation,” Ms. Parker said.
And how. According to eMarketer, advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007. There are perks, too. In just the last month alone, popular mommy bloggers have been sent to the Olympics, courtesy of Procter & Gamble, and to the Oscars, courtesy of Kodak; and road-tripped to Disney World in a Chevy Traverse, courtesy of G. M. Canada, to help raise awareness about Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy.
But just as some cringe at Tupperware parties and the like for allowing a commercial enterprise to masquerade as a social one, some find the vast influx of corporate sponsors, freebies and promotions into the blogosphere a bit troubling. That might be, in part, because bloggers and corporations are still forging the proper boundaries of their relationship, groping through uncharted territory.
“It’s like we’re playing seven minutes in heaven,” Ciaran Blumenfeld, the publisher of momfluential.net, said in a telephone interview. “The brands know they need a blogger. The bloggers know they need a brand. When everyone gets in the closet, nobody knows what to do with each other. It’s like we’re all 13 again.”
Last summer, one blogger organized a weeklong public relations blackout in which bloggers were urged to eschew contests, product reviews and giveaways and instead get “back to basics” by writing about their lives. Another blogger replied that she couldn’t do so because the blackout fell the week of her daughter’s first birthday party, which she was promoting on her blog. With sponsors and giveaways.
“I wish we could go back to where blogging was five years ago, when it was just about the writing and the connecting and none of the free stuff and the vacations and the swag bags,” said Ms. Smokler, of ScaryMommy .com. Her blog recently landed her a full-time job with the Nickelodeon ParentsConnect.com social-networking site, despite her not having a résumé. “I think it dilutes the point.”
But some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, giving women a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
It’s also a way for mothers to flex their dormant professional muscles, make some money and, says Amy Lupold Bair, who runs resourcefulmommy.com and was a speaker at the Boot Camp, still “take their kids to the bus stop in the morning and be there when they get off in the afternoon.”

Readers With Plenty to Say !

SOURCE:

/THE OPINION PAGES

Published: December 11, 2010

LATE at night, at home in the Eastern time zone, Karen Garcia awaits the electronic publication of The Times’s daily dose of two Op-Ed columnists. Her goal: read fast, formulate a hurried response and fire back with her “comment.”

“I try to be fast, accurate, on-topic and censor-proof,” said Ms. Garcia, of New Paltz, N.Y.

Sometimes, her contribution actually is posted in the NYTimes.com “comments” area appended to the published column. Other times, she is rebuffed. But she and the thousands of other Web commenters who practice this emerging form of participatory journalism return to opine again — and again and again.
I delve into their world this week because I now understand that the reader commentariat is a vibrant and often disgruntled community, peopled by highly motivated writers who say they are moved to criticize, to challenge the “censors,” or just to find self-expression inside this safe house on the Internet.
Their range of purpose is striking. Charles Jencks, of Vida, Ore., told me he finds the work of some Times writers to be substandard. “The urge to vent frustration is my main motivation,” he said. “As I read what I have written so far, I feel I’m being far too nice. The fact of the matter is The Times has abdicated the primary responsibility of an institution so important to democracy and to the future of us all.”
Nicki Orsborn of Scottsdale, Ariz., sees the comments as a “broad view of America.” She believes her fellow commenters do it because it’s a “safe place to express themselves. They are not going to get in an argument with their co-worker or neighbor, but they can put in writing how they feel.”
While these folks sometimes achieve their ends, all is not well in comment world. I am bombarded routinely with complaints about the quirks of the comment process. Complaints include:
Comments are shut off too quickly, closing out would-be commenters.
The comments bin is full and shut down by the time West Coasters get their newspaper.
Comments are often not published in the order they were submitted.
“Regulars” suspect they have been banished or sent to the back of the line.
Too few news articles, editorials and Op-Ed pieces are opened to comments.
The list goes on. What is clear to me, though, is that the considerable grumbling arises because The Times has created an online feature that is extremely appealing to many readers.
In the creation of something good, alas, expectations have risen. Now the thundering herd of commenters wants more. And, as I have learned in exploring the origins and features of the comments system, more is going to cost more.
The system of commenting at The Times owes much of its success to the human beings who actually moderate comments — read them, filter them and decide which ones to publish. This filtering process yields, in many cases, substantive commentary by a readership that feels empowered to participate online — a combination that I believe is of great value. Many other news sites offer comments areas, but because they are not human-moderated, they are deluged with snappy tripe that scrolls on endlessly.
Jonathan Landman, now The Times’s culture editor, recounted that the comments feature began four years ago as a replacement for forums where readers could exchange views. The unsupervised forums, he said, had devolved into something less than Timesian.
“They were taken over by crazy people with aluminum foil on their heads,” said Mr. Landman, who headed online operations at the time.
He considered a variety of approaches, like automated systems and relying on users to report abuses. But in the end, Mr. Landman and Marc Frons, the chief technology officer for digital, decided along with other colleagues to build a system that relied on human moderators.
The goal was to create quality, and it worked. The moderators were trained to filter out personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, commercial promotion and other bad things while filtering in thoughtful, diverse and to-the-point comments.
More recently, The Times has used a digital filtering algorithm to take a first pass at some categories of comments and quickly cull offending matter.
It is evident from a conversation with Bassey Etim, who supervises the desk, that handling the 24-7 onrush of comment is at times like stoppering the proverbial dike. The comments desk’s eight moderators, including Mr. Etim, field comments on 8 to 10 articles a day — selected for news value and comment value — plus a lone editorial and two Op-Ed columnists and a blog or two.

There is no hard and fast maximum number of comments that will be accepted for an article or column; the desk makes judgment calls and juggles its load day to day. There are days, particularly when an Op-Ed column by Paul Krugman runs, that the system moves quickly to “tilt” and Mr. Krugman’s commenters have to be shut down. And “if each column mentions Sarah Palin, for example, we have to close everything much earlier because the comment volume and level of difficulty increases greatly,” Mr. Etim said.

The Palin effect only compounds the problem. “We are chronically short on moderation,” said Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor, who wishes more of his department’s work was opened for comment. There are days, he says, when an editorial on the president isn’t open for comment but is discussed rampantly elsewhere on the Internet.
On top of that, the system for comment moderation is handled differently in different parts of the balkanized Times empire. Bloggers, for example, generally moderate their own comments, outside of the comment moderation desk, and there are other occasions when editors, reporters and Web producers moderate as well.
Inconsistency results, sometimes for ill, sometimes for good. A paragon of comment moderation, by all accounts, is Tara Parker-Pope, whose popular blog “Well” generates a continuing conversation between her and commenters. “Reader comments enhance the work that we do,” she said, “and are one of the great benefits of online journalism.”
(The downside: She monitors comments all day long, spending some 20 percent of her time doing it.)
Having opened Pandora’s box of comments, The Times now faces a huge challenge meeting reader expectations. Some of the problems could be fixed, I believe, by more communication from The Times — more frequent and prominent explanation of things like comment cutoffs.
But the larger problem is capacity. The Times needs to supplement its comment moderation staff to meet the demand, either with more people or additional analytical tools, or both.
Failing that, it will not capture the full value, and loyalty, of an engaged readership that isn’t content merely to read.