Posts By: DWMG

Italian Fashion Line Under Fire For Selling Drug-Themed Clothing At Nordstrom, Saks

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A Moschino pill-themed shoulder bag, which sells for $1,095.  (Moschino.com)

Moschino, a high-end Italian clothing company, is known for its provocative branding. But drug addiction activists say the fashion line has taken its marketing too far by selling pill-themed items at top U.S. department stores, claiming it glamorizes prescription drug abuse.

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The company recently debuted its “Capsule Collection SS17” line featuring an oversized prescription drug bottle shoulder bag — valued at $950 — and a smilarly-themed mini dress for $950 among other drug-inspired products.

“WARNING! Do not take medication on empty stomach,” reads a red label across the front of the dress. “KEEP ALL CAPSULES OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN.”

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The $995 Moschino Capsule minidress and $950 pill bottle shoulder bag on display at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The clothing and accessories, selling at upscale department stores like Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, have drawn fierce criticism from drug addiction advocates, doctors and parents nationwide who charge the fashion makes pill popping look “chic and cool.”

“It’s promoting drug use,” said Randy Anderson, an alcohol and drug counselor in Minnesota who started an online petition calling for the merchandise to be pulled from shelves at the Mall of America and other locations.

“Im really disgusted that any retail store thinks this is OK, especially when our country is going through what the CDC has called a drug overdose epidemic,” he said.

Anderson cited an alarming trend known as “Skittles Parties,” in which teenagers raid their parents’ medicine cabinets and bring whatever prescription drugs they have on hand to a home where they pool them from a communal bowl. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that in 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than in any year on record.

Opioids, such as OxyContin and Vicodin — which are prescription drugs — and heroin — an illegal opiod — killed more than 28,000 people in 2014 alone, according to the CDC. At least half of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid.

“While there is definitely a need for pills for many people in many situations, this ‘Capsule Collection’ makes it appear that pills are always a good thing when the reality is that thousands of people are dying every year from prescription pills,” said Judy Rummler, whose son, Steve, died in 2011 from such an overdose.

The Moschino pill-themed line was reportedly created by American celebrity fashion designer Jeremy Scott, who is based in Kansas. In an email to FoxNews.com Wedneday, the company defended its fashion, saying, “There was never any intent to promote prescription drug abuse.”

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(The “Just Say MoschiNO” short dress is selling online for $295. )

“The Moschino capsule collection was inspired by a play on the word ‘capsule’ translated literally as a collection of ‘capsule-themed’ products,” the company said. “A lesser exposed but equally relevant piece of the collection clearly states ‘Just say MoschiNO’ referencing the ‘Just Say No’ anti-drug campaign.

“We are disheartened to hear that there has been a misunderstanding of the underlying theme of the collection,” the email said.

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A $695 backpack, also part of the Capsule Collection, is on display at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

A prominent display of the Capsule Collection line at Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship store in Manhattan drew mixed reactions from customers Wednesday afternoon.

“We are a generation of pills and this line cleverly mocks America’s obsession with prescription drugs,” said one sales associate, as she clutched the bright, over-sized drug bottle shoulder bag in her hands.

“It makes you stop and look and start a conversation about it,” said the woman. “And it captures Moschino’s sarcasm.”

One customer said the clothing line could “help the stigma” surrounding mental illness and prescription drugs, while another claimed it was offensive and only “glorified” drug use. 

A spokeswoman for Saks did not immediately reply to a request for comment, while a Nordstrom representative confirmed the store is carrying merchandise from the Moschino line.

“At this time we are one of several retailers that offer items from this collection,” Nordstrom spokeswoman Tara Darrow said in an email.

“We’ve heard from some customers who have concerns and we’re sorry they’re disappointed,” Darrow said. “We appreciate the feedback.”

Chris Johnson, an Emergency Room physician and critic of the line, said his first reaction to the clothing was confusion.

“I am not certain what impact the creative team at Moschino was trying to make. On the one hand, we are trying to de-stigmatize disease, particularly mental health, and so if people need medicines to help them function in their day to day life, then by all means take them,” said Johnson, who is based in Minneapolis.

“The problem becomes when we start to identify people by their med list — that to be an authentic American means to be medicated,” he said. “My worry with such fashion statements is that it creates the idea that a person needs to be on medicine first and foremost.”

“That seems to be the problem with this clothing line,” he told FoxNews.com, “Not that medication is inherently bad, but that it is seen as a staple of life and that something is wrong if you are not taking prescriptions.” 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/10/05/italian-fashion-line-under-fire-for-selling-drug-themed-clothing-at-nordstrom-saks.html

Doctor: Low-fat diets stuffed with misconceptions

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(CNN)Normally, science advances by trial and error. When an experiment fails, researchers question assumptions, formulate new ideas and then design better studies. But the field of nutrition is having a hard time of this when it comes to the low-fat diet debacle.

As noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, conventional wisdom used to be that cutting back on fat would make us lean and healthy. However, things have not quite worked out that way, and Americans are struggling to adjust to a new dietary reality.

    Could

    It’s time to acknowledge past mistakes and examine why a focus on calorie balance backfired. One explanation is that the body fights back against calorie reduction, with rising hunger and slowing metabolism, making it increasingly difficult for most people to maintain weight loss on a conventional low-fat, low-calorie diet. But colleagues and I have argued that all calories are not equal. By reducing consumption of processed carbohydrates, insulin levels fall, unlocking calories stored in fat and helping promote long-term weight loss (the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis).
    If this alternative view is right, it would mean that calorie restriction is useless over the long-term, and that weight loss treatment should focus on the type, not amount of calories consumed — the opposite of the conventional energy balance recommendation.
    But this potentially exciting scientific debate has been mired in revisionist history, detracting from a clear contest between these two contrasting hypotheses. Disregarding extensive evidence to the contrary, some claim that no low-fat advocate ever recommended fat-free junk food — it was the food industry’s fault for marketing these products and the public fault for buying them. But if the actual intention of prior dietary recommendation were to increase vegetables, fruits and whole (instead of processed) grains, there would have been no need to limit fat in the first place.
    Others call for defunding low-carbohydrate diet research because their benefits for body weight don’t seem large, but this is exactly the wrong medicine. In fact, studies of alternative diets have received miniscule governmental funding compared to research into the low-fat diet. For this reason, most studies suffer from important limitations such as use of ineffective methods to actually change diets.

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    This debate has also been unnecessarily complicated by ethical and environmental concerns about eating meat. Though these concerns are important, they rest on the false premise that all high-fat diets are inherently high in animal products. In practice, one can eat a low-fat diet with lots of lean red meat, poultry, reduced fat cheese and egg whites; or a high-fat diet with olive oil, nuts and other plant-derived fats.
    The science of nutrition is complex. But we know that the low-fat diet of the last 40 years didn’t work. In view of the human and economic toll of diet-related disease, this failure warrants a rigorous examination, efforts to mitigate existing harms and robust government funding to test new ideas.

    Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/05/opinions/debate-low-fat-diet-ludwig/index.html

    No, Hillary, young voters aren’t naive. The system doesn’t work for them | Alexander Zaitchik

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    Clinton thinks Bernie Sanders supporters, who live in their parents basements, dont know any better. Thats a dangerous blind spot

    It is among the most venerable election rituals of the smartphone era: down the home stretch, a recording surfaces containing embarrassing audio of a candidate elite-splaining politics to a room of rich, self-satisfied donors.

    In 2008, Barack Obama was caught talking in San Francisco about Rust Belt left-behinds who cling to guns and Bibles. Four years later, Mitt Romney never recovered from his hopeless 47% comments in Boca Raton. And last Friday splashed the arrival of Hillary Clintons very own basement tape, recorded at a fundraiser in a tony Virginia suburb. In it, Clinton is heard caricaturing young Sanders supporters as frustrated, fist-pounding baristas living in their parents basement clinging to their Bernie T-shirts and naive fantasies of system change.

    Sanders dutifully rose to Clintons defense over the weekend, but he also conceded on CNNs State of the Union that the tape bothered him. How could it not? Clintons comments were a bald revelation, condescending and dismissive, assuring wealthy Democrats that the millennials making noise on the left just dont know any better.

    As Emmett Rensin ably enumerated for Newsweek, young people did not support Sanders because they are, in Clintons recorded words, new to politics. They flocked to him because they have very different politics than she does. Clintons comments remind us just how different, and suggest her rhetorical commitments to parts of the Sanders platform wont find reflection in her appointments.

    And at bottom, they reveal a politician who still holds to the old Thatcher motto that defined the neoliberal eras boost phase: there is no alternative. The impacts of deregulation and free trade are real, Clinton says in the tape, but organizing for radical change is just role-play fantasy politics. As she brushed it off in Virginia, it reflects a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means.

    Clintons comments also belie an incapacity to get her head around the full meaning of Sanders campaign. The political revolution Sanders invoked was not just a plan to get college graduates out of Americas basements and into sweet lofts. In reducing the campaign to crude economism, Clinton sounds like someone who doesnt understand that many Sanders supporters dont just want a bigger piece of the pie, they want a fundamentally different kind of society. Clintons message to her donor audience was essentially one of patience, of letting capitalism work its magic: as soon as these kids start making good money, theyll fall in line behind center-right candidates. Its perfectly natural that Clinton and her audience would think this, and that everybody, as Clinton described the political class in Virginia, would be quite bewildered in the meantime.

    You can see a similar economism in media attempts to disentangle the motivations of Trump supporters. In August, much was made of a Gallup poll showing that Trumps base was statistically no worse off than other voters. For many, this was the ultimate ballast for the argument that they couldnt possibly be motivated by distress over inequality or the economic and social dislocations of free trade agreements.

    This conclusion is as wrong, and for similar reasons, as Clintons supposition that Sanders supporters would Be With Her if only theyd gotten a cushy marketing gig after graduation.

    I spent much of primary season reporting a book about Trump supporters. As with Sanders backers, their outrage and sense of injustice was bigger than their own position. Economically secure Trump supporters business owners, retirees with good pensions are still members of communities. They see nephews, daughters and neighbors suffering the same burdens as Clintons children of the recession; they generally view economic progress not in quarterly reports, but directionally, over decades.

    As with Sanders supporters, some of the Trump supporters I met have begun to think critically about the bigger picture, about systems, and wonder why we cant have some of the nice things they have in Scandanavia, such as universal healthcare. This view was especially common among Trump-supporting veterans, whose experience with war, homelessness and socialized healthcare led them to give Sanders a good listen before choosing the toxic fools gold of the other insurgency.

    If Sanders baristas can find a way to bring these people over, they might make some decent music together. Even if they have to start out practicing in their parents basement.

    Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/bernie-sanders-supporters-young-voters-hillary-clinton