Restaurant Calories

Restaurant Calories

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 234 , Segment 4

Episode: Disney and Gender, Restaurant Calories, Walden in Farsi

  • Feb 18, 2016
  • 18:20 mins

Guest: Susan Roberts, PhD, Senior Scientist and Director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University  Big chain restaurants with their promises of sheer quantity – bottomless fries, endless breadsticks, super-jumbo shrimp. And like Pavlov’s dogs, we salivate. It’s literally in our genes to crave more food than we really need.  Plates at chain restaurants are huge, partly because we demand it. Skimping on portions is a surefire way to get a bad customer review on Yelp.  So, if you’re trying to keep a diet in check, you’re probably better off avoiding the chains and going to a locally-owned-one-of-a-kind eatery, right? One with a reputation built on something other than endless, bottomless servings.  But some really comprehensive calorie analysis of popular meals in locally-owned restaurants and chains in San Francisco, Boston and Little Rock found restaurants in general are just bad for our waistlines.

Other Segments

Disney and Gender

17 MINS

Guest: Carmen Fought, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College  Disney’s princesses have come a long way since Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Ariel and Belle and Mulan and Merida and Anna and Elsa are so much more capable and independent than the damsels-in-distress of the classic Disney animation era. Much better role models for girls, many of us would agree.  But, a couple of linguists have been analyzing Disney’s catalogue to get beyond the basic storyline of these princess films and they’ve discovered that while most of them feature strong heroines, men do 50 percent, of not more, of the talking and, in some cases, as much as 90 percent. The gender gap in both roles and dialogue is striking, when you start looking at the numbers.

Guest: Carmen Fought, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College  Disney’s princesses have come a long way since Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Ariel and Belle and Mulan and Merida and Anna and Elsa are so much more capable and independent than the damsels-in-distress of the classic Disney animation era. Much better role models for girls, many of us would agree.  But, a couple of linguists have been analyzing Disney’s catalogue to get beyond the basic storyline of these princess films and they’ve discovered that while most of them feature strong heroines, men do 50 percent, of not more, of the talking and, in some cases, as much as 90 percent. The gender gap in both roles and dialogue is striking, when you start looking at the numbers.