The Twinkie Manifesto

PAUL KRUGMAN
November 18, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/krugman-the-twinkie-manifesto.html

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.

Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.

Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.

The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?

Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America.

Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.

Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.

There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.

Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 19, 2012, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Twinkie Manifesto.

Who Killed Hostess Brands and Twinkies?

Helaine Olen
11-16-12
http://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/11/16/who-killed-hostess-brands-and-twinkies/

I’m sure you have, by now, heard the news. Hostess Brands, the company that gave us such remembered childhood treats as Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Devil Dogs and other baked foodstuffs that have fallen into disfavor in our more gourmand age, announced today that it would be closing for business, effective immediately.

More than a few observers say they know who to blame for the demise of the iconic company: the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International union, which represents thousands of striking Hostess Brand workers who have refused to accept a new contract that would do everything from slash their salaries to their retirement benefits.

Hostess has been sold at least three times since the 1980s, racking up debt and shedding profitable assets along the way with each successive merger. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2011. Little thought was given to the line of products, which, frankly, began to seem a bit dated in the age of the gourmet cupcake. (100 calorie Twinkie Bites? When was the last time you entered Magnolia Bakery and asked about the calorie count?)

As if all this were not enough, Hostess Brands’ management gave themselves several raises, all the while complaining that the workers who actually produced the products that made the firm what money it did earn were grossly overpaid relative to the company’s increasingly dismal financial position.

So now an estimated 18,500 workers will join the nation’s unemployment rolls. But while Hostess Brands might soon become a forgotten name from the past, it’s unlikely such a fate awaits such signature products as Twinkies. Company executives have already asked for bankruptcy court permission to begin the process of selling off their famed product lines to other companies.

Finally, a personal note: A few years ago, my husband picked our children up from a playdate at a home where, he said, it seemed like more food was banned than allowed, there was no television, and it was all too politically correct in the way all too many middle class childhoods are today. My husband’s response? Before bringing the boys home, he stopped in at a local grocery and introduced our ecstatic children to fine products of Hostess Brands. “Yodels,” he told me, “never tasted so good.”

Professor who lost weight on Twinkies...

http://www.naturalnews.com/030616_junk_food_diet.html

Professor who lost weight on Twinkies only proves that even nutrition educators can be Ding Dongs
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Over the last month or so, the mainstream media has been making a huge deal about Kansas State nutrition professor Mark Haub who lost 27 pounds eating mostly Doritos, Twinkies and other junk food while drinking Diet Mountain Dew. But as usual, they're misrepresenting the story.

You can lose weight on chemotherapy, too. And most chemotherapy patients lose all kinds of weight due to the mass poisoning of their bodies with synthetic chemicals. Does that mean chemotherapy is weight loss medicine, too? (Don't laugh, I've seen similar conclusions written up in the mainstream media...)

Virtually anything can be promoted as a "weight loss miracle" in the following way:

The cashew diet?

Consider this: You can lose weight by starving yourself (by eating nothing). That promotes rapid weight loss as long as you stick to it -- which is, of course, nearly impossible to do for very long.

If you're fasting and living on nothing but water, suppose you gulp down one cashew once a day. You're still going to lose all kinds of weight because you're severely restricting your calories. Does that mean you've made some great discovery about a "cashew diet?" Of course not. It just means you're burning a lot more calories than you're consuming.

What if you pop a Tic-Tac once a day while you're fasting? Have you now discovered some amazing "Tic-Tac weight loss diet?" Nope. You're just fasting with a Tic-Tac.

It's the same story with Slim-Fast. Can you lose weight on Slim-Fast even though it's made primarily with processed table sugar? Sure you can! Just go a severe calorie-restriction diet, and drink some Slim-Fast from time to time. Heck, you can lose weight eating Halloween candy if you restrict your calories!

The nutrition professor who lost 27 pounds was simply on a calorie restriction diet (a partial fast, if you will) that included a slew of processed junk food. Did he discover some miracle junk food diet? Nope. He just controlled his calories while poisoning himself with junk food chemicals and artificially modified food ingredients.

Weight loss alone is no measure of good health

The really important part of this story, of however, is realizing that weight loss alone is no measure of good health. When you see people withering away from the effects of chemotherapy and radiation for cancer treatments, you don't think to yourself, "Gosh, I wish I could be that healthy! Look how amazingly healthy they are!"

No, you think to yourself, "That person is dying!"

And then there's the whole nutritional side of this story. Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Oreos are called "junk food" precisely because they represent the nutritional equivalent of garbage. They lack virtually all naturally-occurring plant-based phytonutrients and deliver almost no natural minerals or vitamins. Instead, they're made of processed, modified, factory-fabricated food ingredients that are linked to diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. And that's not to even mention the aspartame in the Diet Mountain Dew this guy was chugging.

Perhaps that's why even this nutrition professor, while living on a "junk food" diet, was smart enough to take a multivitamin, eat a serving of vegetables and drink a protein shake each day. So even he wasn't "living on junk food" as the headlines claim. He was supplementing his diet with at least some source of nutrition because he knew junk foods were going to leave him nutritionally deficient.

It would be a totally different story if he lived on junk foods alone. In that scenario, he would very quickly become deficient in key vitamins, and he'd find himself in a hospital being treated for serious diseases as a result.

The mainstream media, of course, completely fails to understand the real story here, and they've been reporting this as some sort of "junk food diet breakthrough" that suggests people can live on Twinkies and Ding Dongs while somehow losing weight and getting healthy. But we've already done that experiment in America, and the results are clear: Two-thirds of the population is overweight, and diabetes rates are soaring. Cancer is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and Big Pharma can't wait for the coming wave of Alzheimer's patients either. All that disease is promoted in part by the consumption of processed junk foods.

If processed junk food caused healthy weight loss, America would be the healthiest nation in the world. Clearly that's not the case, which means the real Ding Dong in this story is the nutrition professor himself who has set a terrible example for the nation to follow and has only offered wrongheaded encouragement to the junk food industry.

Why not just cut off his own leg and announce that "amputation promotes weight loss" too?

It reminds me of the old joke. An overweight woman says to her friends, "I just lost a hundred and ninety pounds of useless fat."

"How'd you do that?" her friends ask.

"I got a divorce."

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
Madison Park, CNN
November 8, 2010
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Nutrition professor's "convenience store diet" helped him shed 27 pounds
Haub limited himself to 1,800 calories and two-thirds come from junk food
Haub said it's too early to draw any conclusions about diet

(CNN) -- Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

"That's where the head scratching comes," Haub said. "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we're missing something?"

Despite his temporary success, Haub does not recommend replicating his snack-centric diet.

"I'm not geared to say this is a good thing to do," he said. "I'm stuck in the middle. I guess that's the frustrating part. I can't give a concrete answer. There's not enough information to do that."

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

Families who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, so they often rely on the kind of food Haub was eating.

"These foods are consumed by lots of people," he said. "It may be an issue of portion size and moderation rather than total removal. I just think it's unrealistic to expect people to totally drop these foods for vegetables and fruits. It may be healthy, but not realistic."

Haub's body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent. This posed the question: What matters more for weight loss, the quantity or quality of calories?

His success is probably a result of caloric reduction, said Dawn Jackson Blatner, a dietitian based in Atlanta, Georgia.

"It's a great reminder for weight loss that calories count," she said. "Is that the bottom line to being healthy? That's another story."

Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said she's not surprised to hear Haub's health markers improved even when he loaded up on processed snack cakes.

Being overweight is the central problem that leads to complications like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, she said.

"When you lose weight, regardless of how you're doing it -- even if it's with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers improve when weight loss has improved," she said.

Before jumping on the Ding Dong bandwagon, Blatner warned of health concerns.

"There are things we can't measure," said Blatner, questioning how the lack of fruits and vegetables could affect long-term health. "How much does that affect the risk for cancer? We can't measure how diet changes affect our health."

On August 25, Haub, 41, started his cake diet focusing on portion control.

"I'm eating to the point of need and pushing the plate or wrapper away," he said.

He intended the trial to last a month as a teaching tool for his class. As he lost weight, Haub continued the diet until he reached a normal body mass index.

Before his Twinkie diet, he tried to eat a healthy diet that included whole grains, dietary fiber, berries and bananas, vegetables and occasional treats like pizza.

"There seems to be a disconnect between eating healthy and being healthy," Haub said. "It may not be the same. I was eating healthier, but I wasn't healthy. I was eating too much."

He maintained the same level of moderate physical activity as before going on the diet. (Haub does not have any ties to the snack cake companies.)

To avoid setting a bad example for his kids, Haub ate vegetables in front of his family. Away from the dinner table, he usually unwrapped his meals.

Haub monitored his body composition, blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose, and updated his progress on his Facebook page, Professor Haub's diet experiment.

To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits. Once he started adding meat into the diet four weeks ago, his cholesterol level increased.

Haub plans to add about 300 calories to his daily intake now that he's done with the diet. But he's not ditching snack cakes altogether. Despite his weight loss, Haub feels ambivalence.

"I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it's healthy. I'm not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it's irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn't say that."

Haub's sample day

Espresso, Double: 6 calories; 0 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Centrum Advanced Formula From A To Zinc: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Little Debbie Star Crunch: 150 calories; 6 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Diet Mountain Dew: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Doritos Cool Ranch: 75 calories; 4 grams of fat

Kellogg's Corn Pops: 220 calories; 0 grams of fat

whole milk: 150 calories; 8 grams of fat

baby carrots: 18 calories; 0 grams of fat

Duncan Hines Family Style Brownie Chewy Fudge: 270 calories; 14 grams of fat

Little Debbie Zebra Cake: 160 calories; 8 grams of fat

Muscle Milk Protein Shake: 240 calories; 9 grams of fat

Totals: 1,589 calories and 59 grams of fat

Mascot Memory – Twinkie the Kid

http://www.retroland.com/retroblog/icons/mascot-memory-twinkie-the-kid/

Mascot Memory – Twinkie the Kid
By Eric
Oct 18, 2010

One third of the trinity of Hostess snack cake mascots, he’s the rootin’, tootin’ crème-filled cowboy, ready to save the day and offer up a tasty Twinkie to anyone who needs a little yummy goodness in their lives. Today, let’s take a look back at this memorable mascot that has graced every box of Twinkies (and more than a few television commercials) since the 70s.

Along with his confectionary comrades, Captain Cupcake and Fruit Pie the Magician, Twinkie the Kid has been spreading the word about Hostess snacks since he first appeared in 1971. With a 10-gallon hat, kerchief and cowboy boots, he has saved the day ever since, most often with his formidable lasso skills – the sign of an authentic cowpoke if there ever was one.

Granted, a bit of controversy has always surrounded “The Kid”, as some consider it less than wholesome to use cartoon characters to make junk food appealing to children. But it takes more than a little bad press to bring someone like Twinkie the Kid down. His legendary sweet disposition and legacy as a wrangler of wrongdoing have lassoed the hearts of millions. When it comes to true legends, Twinkie the Kid takes the cake.

If you have fond memories of the many Twinkie the Kid commercials over the years, we welcome your comments. Meanwhile, we’ll all just continue to sleep well at night, knowing that Twinkie and pals are on the job, continuing to ensure that our snack treats don’t fall into the evil hands of rustlers and thieves.