Signs That Your Kids Watch Too Much TV

Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

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Last night my 9-year-old daughter was literally in tears because we would not buy her a Burger King BK Triple Stacker for dinner.

800 calories and 54 grams of fat!

Sigh.

Smoking Conquered; Obesity Is Next

In this screen capture from a Family Guy episode, a young "Death" wears a T-shirt that reads "Smoke Cigarettes." From many popular culture references such as this, it is evident that most people realize the health dangers from smoking. A recent Gallup poll suggests that Americans are now realizing the dangers of obesity.

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Regular readers know that I have spent the better part of the past two months indirectly fighting diabetes. Not for me, but for rural Hispanics in West Texas.

We are currently testing public service announcements (PSAs) that we created over the past few weeks.

In the current experiment, we are showing the anti-diabetes PSAs along with some filler PSAs about smoking, AIDS, marijuana, and cocaine.

During an experiment the other day, master's student Wes Wise remarked that the battle on smoking was pretty much won. Now, he predicted, more efforts could be targeted toward obesity and related health problems.

Turns out that many Americans are at least acknowledging the danger of obesity. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans acknowledge that being significantly overweight is just as harmful to your health as smoking.

Of those polled, 83% said being obese was "very harmful" to your health, whereas 79% of Americans said smoking was "very harmful" to your health.

When we surveyed rural West Texas Hispanics earlier this year, we found that about half were overweight according to the Body Mass Index, and another quarter were overweight. That's more than two-thirds of those polled.

Echoing the diabetes problem, many of our experimental participants are self reporting family members with serious diabetes-related health problems. Many of the participants report having lost a loved one to diabetes.

According to the Gallup poll, 28% of Americans report that obesity has been a cause of serious health problems within their family. I would venture to guess that this number is higher among our populations of rural West Texans (of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic descent).

Although we will learn something from the current endeavor, PSAs will not be enough. Our focus group data has shown that there are two major causes of the current eating concerns: economy of time, and economy of money (thanks again to Wes Wise for coining these terms).

It's faster and cheaper to eat at the dollar menu. You can walk out of McDonald's absolutely stuffed for about $3.21 in Texas. Just order two double cheeseburgers and a 99-cent order French fries.

It's a lot of food. It's also a lot of grease. I just looked up the nutrition facts online. Each 99-cent double cheeseburger has 440 calories, 23 grams of fat, and 11 grams of saturated fat. Those 11 grams of saturated fat represent 54% of the recommended daily allowance for a 2,000 calorie a day diet. The medium fries add another 380 calories, 20 grams of fat, and 4 grams of saturated fat.

So your $3.21 bought you 1,260 calories, 66 grams of total fat, and 26 grams of saturated fat. With that one meal you have 128% of the saturated fat you were supposed to eat for the day.

It is almost impossible to get that much sustenance for that little money in any other fashion. And when you're broke with a lot of mouths to feed -- and I've been there -- it's difficult to look at the single bunch of broccoli that the $3.21 will buy.

Add to the fact that for most people, those fat and carbohydrate grams taste really good. There's a reason they taste so good: you get the most energy (i.e., calories) per gram with those molecules. When you're just trying to survive, fat and carbs keep you alive.

When I was a little kid, our house backed up against the old Missouri River bluffs, and much of that land was a park. Since the bluffs made a cliff, it was basically our private park since no one climbed the cliff to get there.

My father used to like to photograph the wildlife, so one day he put out a dog food bowl full of bacon grease. The animals went crazy. I believe raccoons would just lay by the bowl lapping up that congealed bacon grease as if it were pure heaven. Scavenging from trash cans had never tasted so good! [If dad will send a picture, I will post it here].

Their bowl of bacon grease is our dollar menu and all-you-can-eat buffet. You cannot get much more appetitive than that. And unlike illegal drugs where you can get arrested right now, the danger from overeating is distant. Your heart does not stop today. You do not have a stroke today. You do not lose your foot to diabetes today.

So you eat from the dollar menu today. You'll eat right tomorrow. Sadly, for too many Americans that healthy eating tomorrow never comes.

I'm not picking on McDonald's. They claim to be committed to Hispanics, and I am sure that they mean it. But combining the dollar menu with any economically disadvantaged population does not and cannot encourage healthy eating.

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Our research project is funded by the West Texas Rural EXPORT Center, however, opinions shared here are solely my own.

I'm Done Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood

Update: Chili's chicken ranch sandwich tasty as always.

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So long, Applebee's.

It was fun while it lasted. Reasonable food at reasonable prices. Balloons for my kids. The Brewtus beer when I was an undergraduate.

Applebee's was one of the first chain restaurants in Las Cruces, so we'd eat there as undergraduates. We also spent many happy hours there after working at the NMSU student newspaper.

To tell you the truth, I always liked Chili's better. The food is a lot better. In fact, we may have to go to Chili's for lunch today.

But until this week, Applebee's was a Kansas City (metro area) company. And I'm a Kansas City guy. Born and raised.

[ More fountains than any place other than Rome! ]

So I felt some loyalty to Applebee's. In part, I still have Sprint cell phone service largely for this reason.

Anyway, this week it was announced that IHOP is buying Applebee's for $2.1 billion.

What? IHOP?

I hate IHOP.

Their food is mediocre and overpriced, and their service is worse. And now they want to franchise out most of the company-owned Applebee's restaurants.

Great! Lousy service!

Actually, to be more fair, the franchising means completely unpredictable service.

Take McDonald's, for example. You might walk into a McDonald's and get great service. But if you walk into a McDonald's in Lubbock, Texas, Santa Rosa, N.M., or Roswell, N.M., the service will be awful. In fact, the average jellyfish would provide better service than McDonald's employees in these three cities.

Even worse, IHOP is headquartered in Glendale, California. No loyalty there.

So, my kids' love for your 2 cent balloons and my hometown roots used to get me in the door.

That's over now. Just another corporate takeover killing off the identity of a brand. I get profits. I am a capitalist. But to me, as a consumer, almost nothing good ever comes from these giant mergers.

Indirectly, perhaps, I get some benefit from my retirement mutual funds. But as a consumer, I see little benefit.

3 Year Old Gets It: Brands Belong to You

When I was a teen-ager, they opened a new dining establishment out in the southern part of Overland Park, Kan. (an upscale suburb of Kansas City). I believe it was on Metcalf Ave. The novel part of this restaurant involved combining a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Taco Bell, and a Pizza Hut in a single building.

We called it Ken-taco-hut.

This novelty lured me there exactly once.

This is somewhat amazing because my full-time high school occupation was driving. As my grades could attest, I didn't do much studying. If I was awake and not either in school or at my parents' advertising agency, I was driving.

My father was kind enough to supply me with a series of nice vehicles and a gas card (my mother probably thought it unwise). So we drove.

And we drove in the neighborhood of the Ken-taco-hut fairly often. But we didn't stop. Why? Well, then as now, the combination of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC is just not that cool.

As teens, we didn't eat much Pizza Hut or KFC (unless the parents bought it), and if we wanted Taco Bell, there were more convenient ones at which to stop.

Thus, the take-home point is that we were loyal to Taco Bell. That was our brand.

It seemed kind of cool to stick one in a building with two other restaurants (this was years before they started sticking Subways in gas stations), but not cool enough to deal with the extra people.

We were the consumers. We decided what brands were important to us. The brand belonged to us. That's what makes it a brand and not just a stupid logo.

Yum! Brands still does not understand this. Still.

I was watching the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, which is not surprisingly located in Kentucky. Yum! Brands also is located in Kentucky. As I see it, the Derby, KFC, and bluegrass pretty much exhaust the state's potential (I forgot Ashley Judd. My bad). So, not surprisingly, Yum! Brands was a major sponsor. The logos were everywhere.

"Idiots," I thought.

Almost a year ago, I decried Yum! Brands for wasting $2.7 million in Kentucky Derby publicity by using their obscure logo instead of one of their flagship brands.

Free advice. And they ignored me.

Shortly after Street Smart won the race, NBC went to commercial, and Yum! had a montage of their three major brands. About that time, my three-year-old daughter walked in the room.

"Taco Bell," she said. "Mommy, I saw Taco Bell."

She gets it. She cannot read yet. But she recognizes Taco Bell instantly.

Allow me to try to impress upon you how amazing this really is.

We have lived in Lubbock, Texas, for just over 10 months. We have eaten at Taco Bell exactly once in that 10 months. Once! You see, Lubbock also has Taco Bueno and Taco Villa. So there are not too many Taco Bells. There are so few Taco Bells that Texas Tech doctoral student Wendy Maxian threatened not to come here unless we actually had a Taco Bell.

We do not drive by a Taco Bell on the way to my daughter's preschool, and we do not drive by one on the way to my work. We do not see it that often.

And the next-to-last time my daughter ate at Taco Bell, she was barely two and a half years old.

But she had instant recognition for the brand in a video montage.

Imagine the impression that could have been made with a well-thought-out advertisement for one of the brands.

Yum! Brands' logo means nothing to her. Or me. Or you. We just do not fall in love with conglomerates.

I love Ben & Jerry's ... not Unilever.

I love Dr Pepper ... not Cadbury Schweppes.

I love Tide ... not Procter & Gamble.

You get the point. My 3 year old gets the point. Kevin Roberts gets the point. Sadly for stockholders, a bunch of Yum! Brands marketing executives completely miss the point.

This means that I will probably be writing this same post next year at this time.

Chinese Food Interesting Memory Trigger

The International House at San José State University provided sleeping quarters for journalism interns for two weeks in summer 1997.

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Last week I pulled up to the stop sign at Sunrise Point Road and Mission Road in Las Cruces, N.M. It made me think of a similar stop a decade earlier.

In May 1997, I packed up my white Pontiac Sunbird to head for San José, Calif. My dad was my travel partner as I headed out to participate in the center for editing excellence as part of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship.

Some of my college buddies had come by the house the night before and written farewell messages on the cars' windows. That gesture made it even more difficult to head out to California -- especially considering that my wife, Emily, was staying at NMSU for summer classes.

My dad and I drove to Bakersfield, Calif., that day and onto Modesto the next day. My actual internship was with The Modesto Bee, and I had to find an apartment before heading to San José.

It was one of many great road trips with my dad, but as always it was over too soon. I dropped dad off at the San José airport and headed over to San José State for my two week copy editing boot camp.

On the first day, we were given a stipend for food. We tried a lot of inexpensive restaurants in the eclectic neighborhood around SJSU. I found a little hole in the wall Chinese restaurant on San Fernando Street just a few blocks from Dwight Bentel Hall, our newsroom for the time being.

As tends to be my habit, I get into habits, and I must have eaten at that little place eight or 10 times during the two weeks. They served a great kung pao chicken with zucchini that I could never find after leaving the silicon valley.

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Ten years later I am living in Lubbock, Texas. My life took many twists and turns during the past decade, most of which I could never have imagined while embarking on a journalism career 10 years ago.

One day over the winter, I heard my colleague Tom Johnson talking about Chinatown restaurant here in Lubbock. We tried it, and sure enough, they have what I would call San José-style kung pao chicken.

As you might surmise, that was on the dinner menu. When combined with last week's stop sign and today's chat with a student about graduation, I have been flooded with memories. It's been a great 10 years, and 1997 was a great summer. But the thought that comes up again and again is, "where in the world did 10 years go?"

Holiday Tour Travels South of Border

Today's trip took us to Palomas, Chihuahua, Mexico. We had a great lunch at the Pink Store, and walked around town in the near 70 degree temperatures.

Here you can see some arbitrary people eating in the Pink Store. I recommend No. 5, the Pancho Villa Platter!

Aliens, Enchantment Mark Christmas Eve

We spent Christmas Eve driving from Lubbock, Texas, to Las Cruces, N.M., the Land of Enchantment! It was (mostly) a great day. We had a big detour outside of Roswell for a mystery wreck, and our cat, Simon, had "issues" in the carrier.

Friends James and Phil got to experience the winds of the South Plains, as tumbleweeds assaulted our van south of Roswell.

If you're ever driving through Roswell, please do not stop at the McDonald's unless you have an hour or so to spare. That is the single most incompetent fast food restaurant I've ever encountered.


Here we cross the border from Texas into New Mexico.

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Speaking of encounters, after we left the McDonald's, we headed to the International UFO Museum and Research Center.

This was a good time, but I recommend visiting without young children. They make is difficult to read. In addition, having kids running around yelling "Is it real?" seems to insult the true believers.

When You Really, Really Hate Olive Garden

When I am bored, I like to Google arbitrary stuff, such as the word "the."

Today someone forwarded me a screen shot of a news story about the Indiana Olive Garden sickness , but the Web page had an ad for an Olive Garden give away. Hilarious, yes.

So later today I Googled "Olive Garden."

The first two results were the restaurant, but the third was this rant about how Olive Garden is the devil for pushing wine (Olive Garden's response is especially priceless).

Come to think of it, they are really annoying about the wine.

Yet therein lies the power of the Internet. Obviously people are reading the rant, or it would not be the third highest rated result. In the "old" days, you could be hurt by word-of-mouth advertising. However, these non-mass media allow for feedback. The brand is taking a beating.

Sadly, I am nonetheless hungry for Olive Garden.

You Cannot Just Decide a Brand

Two stories in Ad Age this week have drawn my ire. Both stories illustrate how corporate America just does not understand human cognition.

In the first story, Ad Age blasts AT&T for plans to trash the Cingular brand name. As part of the recent AT&T/SBC/Exxon/Mobile/Bank One/Chase merger, (grand)Ma Bell got back its wireless division.

The facts suggest that this is a bonehead move. Cingular is the largest wireless company in America. Ad Age says that $4 billion has been spent establishing the brand. It is hip and young. AT&T is old and stodgy. But in a move of perhaps unprecedented arrogance, AT&T will throw Cingular under the bus and rename it AT&T Wireless. Nevermind the consequences. Ad Age estimates that it may take another $2 billion to cement the brand change in customers' minds. $2 billion with a B.

Here's the kicker. In the merger orgy that now defines corporate America, Cingular's former parent company already bought AT&T Wireless and folded into Cingular. Now it is being folded back. This means that within a couple of years, customers will have unwillingly gone from AT&T to Cingular back to AT&T. Idiots, I tell you.

The second story is equally puzzling to me, although I admit that I might be wrong. Ad Age reports that Yum! Brands received nearly $2.7 million in exposure from its sponsorship of the Kentucky Derby. Good for it.

However, I am willing to bet that Joe Sports Fan has no idea what Yum! Brands is. Even if many people know what it is, there surely were millions of viewers who were clueless. In case you are one of them, Yum! Brands owns A&W, KFC, Long John Silver's, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.

In the world of the sane, a KFC sponsorship would make sense because it's the Kentucky Derby. But they got greedy. They wanted to promote all the brands. The problem is that Yum! Brands is not a brand ... it's a corporation. And no matter how much the corporate leaders like their company, it does not have name recognition. It's just not a brand, and all the wanting in the world cannot make it one.

At this very moment, I am trying to decide where to take my kids to dinner, and Yum! is just not part of the equation. I did not think, "Which Yum! Brand shall we eat tonight?"

Thus, that $2.7 million in exposure is -- I would bet -- wasted. You see, consumers decide what brands are. We can help them along the way. We can set up a brand to succeed. But we cannot just make some heavy handed brand because we want to. Brute force advertising is doomed to fail.