What's Good to Eat?

Does it seem that every single day somebody releases new, disturbing, and often conflicting information about what you should or shouldn't eat? Many people I know are so frustrated, they've resolved to ignore health aspects altogether... and just eat whatever they want. That's not smart. Great nutrition isn't rocket science. Common sense tells you what's good to eat: foods that are high in nutrition, that fill you up, that taste great, and won't make you fat.

I like to keep things simple. Here are six choices which have guided me to great health and significant weight loss. I choose foods that are:

* Relatively low in fat
* High in fiber
* Contain lots of moisture
* Are brightly colored
* Have very little added sugar
* Are as "close to nature" as possible

There's synergy among these six guidelines. You can't just take one and focus on it fanatically, to the exclusion of everything else. For example, about ten years ago "low fat" was all the rage. Manufacturers rushed out hundreds of low-fat products: cookies, salad dressings, dairy products, frozen dinners, etc (the "Snackwells Decade"). You know what happened. As a nation, we became fatter rather than thinner. To compensate for the loss in flavor caused by removing fat, manufacturers added sugar and other high-calorie ingredients.

Bottom line: it's more important to count calories than fat grams. That's why I say "relatively low fat." A certain amount of dietary fat is important both for good health and to control appetite. But fat carries a heavy payload: nine calories per gram (that's why just one ounce of cooking oil contains over 200 calories). For comparison, carbohydrates contain only four calories per gram. Unfortunately, highly processed carbs like white flour and white sugar cause those wild insulin / blood sugar swings that lead to craving and bingeing. If you want to fill up without spreading out, include more fiber in your diet. Non-soluble fiber – the kind in whole grains, vegetables, and legumes – has zero calories per gram. It passes right through us. "What good is that?" you may say. Plenty. Because it's indigestible, fiber's bulk first fills you up, then "brooms out" the toxins from your digestive tract (one of the primary reasons why a high fiber diet helps prevent colon cancer). Fiber also "buffers" the sugars and starches you eat, and slows their absorption into your bloodstream, moderating harmful insulin / blood sugar spikes.

Foods high in moisture, like fruits, vegetables, and cooked whole grains, also contribute to a feeling of fullness – without a heavy calorie load. And if you choose brightly colored fruits like berries and vegetables like green/red/yellow peppers, you'll also pick up a healthy dose of antioxidants.

A word about sugar: a teaspoon of sugar (white or otherwise) in your morning coffee won't do you any harm. However… even if you don't stop at Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts every morning, there's tons of added sugar in your diet. There's hidden sugar in almost every processed food product you buy. Take ketchup for example. It may not list "sugar" on the ingredients label, but right after tomatoes comes corn syrup. In case you didn't know, CORN SYRUP = SUGAR. Likewise, sucrose, maltose, fructose, or any other "ose" is sugar. Manufacturers have become very shrewd at hiding behind these sugar pseudonyms, often breaking up the total added sweetener into several of these terms, so that "sugar" isn't the very first ingredient listed. (Ingredients are listed in descending order of prominence by weight.) They know if you can see *sugar* is the main ingredient, you may not buy the product.

A relatively recent "advance" in food science is HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). Manufacturers like HFCS because it's cheap and easy to process. Unfortunately for us consumers, HFCS is no health food. Consuming it will cause an especially rapid and dramatic rise in blood sugar levels… and a corresponding unhealthy swing in insulin production. Knowing this, I go out of my way to avoid HFCS and other "far from nature" ingredients.

Regarding "natural," there's one exception worth making... if you like cola and other soft drinks. Regular soda contains an astounding amount of sugar. Meanwhile, "advanced" artificial sweeteners like NutraSweet® (aspartame) and Sucralose have been repeatedly shown to be quite safe after exhaustive studies and long widespread consumption. Still… pure water is best. It's the ultimate zero calorie "back to nature" beverage.

How I Lost My Fear of Spandex
(and started to raise money to fight M.S.)

I used to be like you. I'd drive by a group of "serious" bicyclists in their colorful jerseys and "too tight" spandex shorts and would think, "I'm really OK with riding in my baggy shorts!"


Passing by Montauk Lighthouse...
only 115 miles left to go!

Sure, I'd go for the occasional Sunday ride, but nothing remotely "serious." That changed early last spring. I volunteered to serve on the committee organizing a charity bike tour to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I'd been serving on the Board of Trustees for the Long Island Chapter for a number of years and knew this was an important annual fund raising event. I figured I'd just help out organizing it...

Then somebody on the committee said, "You're riding in it, right?" Uhhh... me... riding 150 miles in two days? Hadn't planned on doing that!

Long story short: I trained all summer and completed the 150 miles (actually 160 -- due to some "bonus miles" picked up after a wrong turn somewhere east of Wainscott). Not only did I come to greatly appreciate the value of a good pair of spandex bike shorts (something to do with not chafing), I personally raised a lot of money to provide vitally needed services to people with Multiple Sclerosis and to support research to find a cure for this devastating disease.

Many Urbach Letter readers responded to a last-minute e-mail appeal from me and together, we raised $4,122. My team (The Long G'Island Express, captained by Paul Langer), raised $27,625, the second highest of all teams in the 2008 event.

And I'm doing it again. The 2009 bikeMS Twin Forks Ride is coming up on September 12th and 13th on the east end of Long Island. I've begun to train again but won't wait until the very last minute to ask for support this time!

Raising funds for the MS Society is critically important right now. The economy stinks and donations in general are way down compared to even a year ago. Not only are essential research projects going unfunded, vital services to people with MS have to be cut. For people whose lives are already made difficult by a myriad of disabilities, these are painful cuts to endure.

I've therefore made a commitment to redouble my efforts to raise funding and promote awareness of the National MS Society's mission. Make no mistake: I AM GOING TO BUG YOU FOR A DONATION! The amount doesn't matter. Even though many folks donated $25, $50, or even $100 apiece last year, I recognize that times are tough and will be happy to see incoming donations of any amount. Even five or ten dollars will help.

Therefore, while this message is fresh, please click this link right now: www.RideTeamV.com, and support me as I ride for those who can't. Thank you SO much.

They do however offer a very comprehensive set of assembly instructions and all parts are labeled...

Even this Gentleman must now do a D&B on his clientele.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 6, 2009:
First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye

Summary:
Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.

Our newest usability study — in preparation for the new Writing for the Web 2 course — tests how well users understand the first 11 characters of a website's links and headlines. For example, we'd represent this article by the "First 2 Wor" string. (Note how the guideline to show numbers as numerals lets me squeeze more meaning into this tiny stump of text.)

Why test text that's so severely truncated? Because online reading is often dominated by the F-pattern. That is, people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the "F" — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text's left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list.

On Web and intranet pages, lists occur in many places, including:

* Search engine results pages (SERP)
* Lists of current or archived articles, headlines, press releases, and other news items
* Product listings on category pages
* Table of contents (ToC) listings
* Question lists that serve as ToCs at the top of FAQ (frequently asked questions) pages
* Bulleted or numbered lists, checklists, task steps on a help page or job aid, etc.

Users typically see about 2 words for most list items; they'll see a little more if the lead words are short, and only the first word if they're long. Of course, people don't see exactly 11 characters every time, but we picked this number to ensure uniformity across the sites we tested.

The full text of these short items is microcontent, so this study targeted nano-content. Similar principles apply to both links and headings, but we tested a set of links — again for uniformity.

User Research
Our study included 80 people broadly distributed across age groups, gender, and education.

Younger (<30 years) and college-educated users were over-represented among the test participants. However, because these groups can be expected to have above-average reading skills — and, in the latter case, spend more money online than less educated users — that small skewing shouldn't invalidate the findings. Indeed, whatever difficulties such test users encountered would be even more severe for a broader audience.

We tested 20 different links, one from each of the following 20 sites: Accenture, Amazon.com, Ann Taylor, AT&T, Barclays Bank (UK), Bell Canada, Chase Bank, Dell, Direct.gov.uk, Fidelity Investments, Free Application for Federal Student Aid (USA), Freestyle Media (Australia), Fujitsu, Intel, Norwich Union (UK), Northwestern Memorial Hospital, RMC Labs (Australia), Streamline Solutions (Australia), Topshop (UK), and Xerox.

As the list shows, we tested sites from 3 continents representing a wide range of sectors, including B2B, e-commerce, financial institutions, government, health care, and technology.

We tested two tasks:

* Users were shown truncated links, one at a time, and were asked to predict what they'd find if they clicked on the link. In addition to the 11 characters, we showed users the site's name and a brief site description for additional context.
* Users were shown a list of 10 truncated links, 9 of which were distracters chosen from 60 other sites that weren't otherwise part of our study. We gave users a scenario, asking them to choose the link that would lead to the requested information. For example: "Find information about how to listen to your voicemail messages on your iPhone."

Best Links
Ann Taylor's e-commerce site won this study with the best 11-characters lead. The full link text read "Gift Cards & E-Gift Certificates" and the first 11 characters were "Gift Cards " (including the space after the second word).

85% of users were able to predict where this link led after seeing only the first 11 characters, and 100% of users successfully picked this link (despite the 9 distracters) when asked to "purchase an Ann Taylor gift certificate for a friend."

Barclays Bank scored well for "New custome" (full link: "New customers apply online now"), at least for the task of picking the right link from among the 10, which 95% of users did. And 75% of users had a fairly good idea of where the link would lead when they saw the first 11 characters in isolation.

What characterizes both of these winning links? There's money at stake, so designers are under a mandate to keep it plain and simple, so that the site can make money. Gift certificates are a big revenue source for e-commerce sites, and new accounts are a lifeline for online banking. When users identify and click the right link, both companies can score a win.

The two winning links also showcase principles for effective Web content. Both links

* Use plain language
* Use specific terminology
* Follow conventions for naming common features
* Front-load user- and action-oriented terms

Worst Links
There were a lot of bad links. In fact, for 35% of the links, users who saw only the first 11 characters hadn't the faintest idea of where the links would lead.

The very worst link was from Chase Bank: on its tested link, the initial 11 characters, "Introducing," had no meaning. The full link, "Introducing Chase Exclusives Special Benefits for Checking Customers," is not much better; we're still clueless as to what those "exclusive" and "special" benefits might be.

Not surprisingly, none of the users had a reasonable prediction — or even an inkling — about where "Introducing" might lead. And, when we asked users to pick a link for "Locate any additional benefits you may be eligible for as an existing Chase checking customer," only 15% picked "Introducing" from a list of 10 links.

Links at Directgov ("Working while you study: paying tax") and Xerox ("Profit Accelerator Overview") tied for the second worst. One user actually had a reasonable prediction of where "Profit Acce" would lead, so Xerox didn't lay an egg in the first part of the study the way Directgov did. On the other hand, 25% of users correctly picked the Directgov link from the 9 distracters in the second part of the study, whereas only 5% of users did so for Xerox.

These links are infected by 3 nasties that cause bad content usability:

* Bland, generic words
* Made-up words or terms
* Starting with blah-blah and deferring the information-carrying text to the end

Guiding Users to the Correct Links
It's admittedly harsh to judge a website's design on only the first 11 characters of its links. So, if you replicate this research with your own links, don't cry if you score below Ann Taylor.

Users don't need to predict a link's destination with 100% accuracy based solely on its 11 leading characters. In real life, links aren't truncated on the page. Even if users see only the first 2 words or so during their initial scan, they can immediately read more if their eyes stop on the link.

Thus, only the full link text needs to provide the full information scent:

* Allow users to confidently predict what they'll get if they click.
* Be clearly differentiated from the other links.
* Not be misleading or promise too much.

Nanocontent (first bit of a link) just needs to be good enough that users will sniff the most promising links in full.

Still, low scores in this type of study indicate that you haven't written your site's content for the way users read online, as proven by eyetracking research and many other usability studies. If you score really low, you need an urgent rewrite.

This interesting featrure was written by Dr. Jakob Nielsen. I thought it was interesting to read about.