Nice examples of the evolution of the diet industry and the role of businesses in trying to market their products as dietary aids (found here and here):

The fine print:

Everyone knows sugar contains calories.  So it’s hard to think of sugar as a big help in weight control, yet that’s exactly what sugar can be.

When your blood sugar level is low, your appestat is turned up and you’re hungry.  (Probably tired, too.) Just a small amount of sugar, in a soft drink, candy, coffee, or tea, will turn your appestat down.  Then you’re not so apt to overeat, and overeating is really what makes you far.

In addition to helping with weight control, sugar does other good things.  For one, it gives you quick energy.  Sugar is all energy, and is taken into your blood stream faster than any other food.  So when sugar turns your appestat ‘off,’ you might say it ‘turns you on.’  Artificial sweeteners don’t affect your appestat and have no energy value.  Also, sugar tastes good, and so do foods made with sugar.  Stay with sugar.  Sugar’s got what it takes!

Only 18 calories per teaspoon…
and it’s all energy.

NEW (Dec. ’09)!

See also our recent post on marketing disguised as news.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tarte is a products sold by Sephora, which has a whole line of “naturally gorgeous” brands:

Naturally gorgeous could mean two things, I suppose:

1.  You are gorgeous without make-up.

LOL… moving on:

2.  Our make-up is natural.

This is what Sephora means.  But if you use their “naturally gorgeous” products, will your gorgeous be natural?  Not necessarily.  As Audrey at Triple Pundit points out, the USDA does not regulate cosmetics, and neither does any other governmental agency.  They can apply the word “natural” to any product because no entity ensures that the word actually means anything.

Audrey continues:

According to their website, their natural products are “formulated with high concentrations of plant-based and naturally-derived ingredients, and fewer to no parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate, phthalates, petrochemicals, and synthetic fragrances or dyes.” And the products in their organic section contain over 70% organic ingredients.

So Sephora says they’re natural.  The Environmental Working Group however, an organization with a wholly different agenda, says that products that Sephora labels natural–such as Tarte, Caudalie, Decleor, and Korres Natural Products–present a moderate to high toxin hazard.

I think this is a really nice example of how difficult it can be to figure out what’s true.  First, language is tricky and it’s used to trick us.  Second, we can’t trust corporations (we just can’t).  They say that they have our best interests in mind, but they do not.  Third, other entities also have agendas.  The Environmental Working Group is a non-profit organization, but it too has an agenda.  Audrey points out that if there is a make-up that doesn’t get labeled as toxic by the Environmental Working Group, she has yet to figure out what it is.

So how do we know?  More problematically, how do we know when there is a question like this to be asked of every single product and service we could buy?  Because even if we had time to do the real research to figure out the answer to the cosmetics question, no one has time to do the research to figure out the answers to all the questions.  And while there are website designed to tell you the answers (like the Environmental Working Group or this one on eco-labels), we still have to look more closely at them in order to know whether their answers are good.  So the work in finding the truth isn’t alleviated, it’s just one step removed.

See also this post on the framing of genetically-modified food by activists and this post on what “organic” looks like.

(Image via.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

This graphic, found at ChartPorn, compares the average number of work hours per year and per week across selected countries.  After the graphic, I listed the countries in order just for fun.

hours/country

27 Germany
27 Netherlands
27 Norway
30 Belgium
30 France
31 Ireland
31 Denmark
31 Spain
31 Sweden
32 Austria
32 Switzerland
32 U.K.
33 Australia
33 Canada
33 Finland
34 Japan
34 New Zealand
34 Portugal
35 Iceland
35 Italy
35 Slovakia
35  U.S.
36  Mexico
38 Czech Republic
38 Hungary
38 Poland
41 Greece
44 South Korea

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The figure below, borrowed from U.S. News and World Report, shows that the wage gap between women and men, for nearly all age groups, has narrowed significantly between 1979 and 2008.  It also shows that the wage gap is smallest for men and women aged 20-24, grows for men and women aged 25-34, grows even further for men and women aged 35-44, and remains steady after that.

These data are for men and women in the same jobs working full time.  So what would explain this change?  Sociologists have found that much of the growth in the wage gap over the life course is due to the fact that women are held disproportionately responsible for childcare and housework (see some data here).  As men and women start to have children, women (whether by choice or necessity) find themselves sacrificing their careers more so than men.  On the flip side, mothers are discriminated against by employers more often than fathers and women without children. (See, for example, this clip of Gov. Rendell commenting that Janet Napolitano is a good candidate for secretary of Homeland Security because she has no family.) That’s why you see the wage gap increasing during prime childbearing years (25-44), but not afterward.

For more on the wage gap, see our posts on the wage gap for college grads, comparing different kinds of wage gaps, the role of job segregation, gender and the wage gap in different professions.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (preventing a vote on a bill with continuous speech–or at least the threat of it, since often now a Senator just has to state that s/he intends to filibuster; if there aren’t 60 Senators to vote for cloture, they often just pretend the filibuster happened without making a person actually do it)–has been increasing over time:

Why? Greg Koger at the Monkey Cage has a fascinating explanation (via Matthew Yglesias):

So why did the Senate change? The stock answer is that the chamber’s responsibilities grew with the size and scope of the federal government, so it became more costly to sit around watching obstructionists kill time. There is some truth in that explanation. Also, however, senators’ work habits changed. The introduction of railroads, cars, and (especially) air travel made sitting around in the Senate chamber so…boring. Tedious. Totally lame. During the mid-20th century, the Senate increasingly became a Tuesday-Thursday club, and individual senators began insisting that major legislation be kept from the floor to accomodate their travel schedules. A serious attrition effort would mean cancelled speeches in Manhattan and Chicago, no trips to the Delaware coast, and waiting longer to return to the ranch back in Texas.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

We often present a single example of a cultural pattern.  If you’re a member of the relevant culture, that single example might ring true.  That is, you might recognize it as one manifestation of something you see “out there” all the time.

But it’s still just one example and it’s not very convincing to someone who is skeptical that the cultural pattern exists, especially if it’s subtle.

But one advantage of this blog is that it’s cumulative.  We can put up single manifestations of a cultural pattern and, even if it’s not very convincing at the time, the other evidence on the blog (and the evidence yet to come) may sway some skeptics.

In that spirit, I offer you this screen shot of the front page of the Gap website (borrowed from stuff white people do).

Notice that there is only one black woman included and she is wearing the “curvy” jean.  This could be random, but I am going to suggest that it’s not.  For more examples of black women’s butts and thighs being fetishized in U.S. culture (that may or may not convince you that this is a pattern) see here, here, here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s always fun for me to have my own gastronomical assumptions revealed. Earlier we posted a cross-cultural example (soup for breakfast in South Korea) and historical examples (mmm aspic, 7-Up with milk, and prunes are for kids!).  On Shakesville, Deeky posted this photograph of ice cucumber-flavored Pepsi being sold in Japan:

UPDATE (June ’10)! In another flavor-shake-up, BoingBoing posted these Pringles from Singapore in Seaweed, Soft-Shell Crab, and Grilled Shrimp:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I found these ads for Matchbox via Copyranter.  In them, war toys are sold by situating small boys in realistic, not at all playful, conditions.   The blurring of the lines between pretend and real war is really interesting.  Whereas pretend war could be fun, real war is certainly not so.  And, oddly, the facial expressions and postures of the children in the ads do not suggest that they are having fun at all.  The ads seem to reveal, more than most, how play is also socialization.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.