Websites and designers face prosecution in new French anorexia law – Times Online

Websites and designers face prosecution in new French anorexia law

Websites and designers face prosecution in new French anorexia law – Times Online

Promoting extreme thinness will become a criminal offence punishable by a jail sentence under a government-backed law that was tabled yesterday in France to combat anorexia nervosa.

Now, I’m all for doing away with the obsession for excessive thinness and helping correct women’s body images (and I really hope that the super thin model ideal stops soon but I doubt it will), but I’m not certain this law is going to do anything affective to fight anorexia nervosa. It’s just going to create more work for lawyers.

Real change needs to occur in the industry, the schools and at home. Until the fashion designers and magazine editors change their attitude, nothing will change. Schools should be teaching healthy habits and outlooks and parents need to be more aware of the problem. More and more girls are starting to think they are too fat at 8 years not 16 years.

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Tags: anorexia, fashion, body-image, thinness, models, health, law, france

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Conspiracy: Halloween, Candy, & Daylight Savings!

An Extra Hour of Halloween Daylight? Thank the Candy Lobby – City Room – Metro – New York Times Blog

The candy lobby has a long history with Halloween and “saving”
daylight. By 1986, a year of great Congressional debate on the matter,
candy sales had suffered a sharp falloff as trick-or-treating was
hammered by

• Hysteria around the myth of candy poisoning
• Increased concerns about child abduction brought on by photos of missing kids on milk cartons.

“The candymakers were so desperate for this that, beside lobbying
for years, they went and put pumpkins filled with candy on the seat of
every senator in America,” Mr. Downing said.

I knew there was a conspiracy somewhere! The best part of Halloween was being out in the dark. We were truly afraid of visiting certain houses and lots of people installed great displays that needed to be seen at night.

Now the kids come around demanding candy and not even bothering to dress up in costumes. I’m sick of the high-school age kids thrusting forward their opened backpacks and grunting – no “Trick or Treat”, no “Thank you”.

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Tags: Halloween, daylight, time-change, candy, lobby, government

 

40th Anniversary of the Loving Decision

Loving Decision: 40 Years of Legal Interracial Unions

NPR : Loving Decision: 40 Years of Legal Interracial Unions

I subscribe to the NPR Story of the Day podcast and today’s entry was about the Loving Decision when the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws across the country. The podcast covers not only the details around the Loving’s and their struggle but also interviews a young woman from Caroline County in Virginia (where the Lovings hailed from) and her comments about her own “mixed marriage”. This 13-minute piece is well worth the listen.

technorati tags:anti-miscegenation, SupremeCourt, Loving, race

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FDA to change chocolate standard

Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate

OK – I love chocolate. It’s a real weakness for me. I don’t think I’m a connoisseur but I do like the higher quality stuff on the whole. I’ve eaten enough chocolate in my many years to know that the proposed changes will be truly detrimental to the chocolate industry. So what’s this about anyway? Well, the Washington Post recently published an article Chocolate Purists Alarmed by Proposal To Fudge Standards. The gist of the controversy can be summarized in the following exerpt:

That’s because the current FDA standard for chocolate says it must contain cacao fat — a.k.a. cocoa butter — and this proposal would make it possible to call something chocolate even if it had vegetable oil instead of that defining ingredient. Whoppers malted milk balls, for instance, do not have cocoa butter.

Chocolate without cocoa butter – wrong, wrong, horribly wrong!

If you love chocolate, do your part and visit this site to learn how you can comment on this legislation.

technorati tags:chocolate, FDA, legislation

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