The True Cost of Eating the Big Mac

For those with a penchant for economics, the concept of purchasing power parity and the big mac index is probably like motherhood and apple pie.  For the rest of us, we’ll leave it at that and get on with what I found to be a really interesting article I came across in the Economist (yes, I’m a closet economist).  UBS published an interesting study that looked at how long the average worker had to work in 73 countries to make enough money to buy a Big Mac.  I would say it’s not a surprise to most of us that Chicago (along with Tokyo and Toronto) was at the top of the list with 12 mins.  Compare that to Nairobi where the average worker had to slog it out for over 2 and half hours to savor that special sauce laden patty of bovine perfection.

What happens when you factor the time to burn that Big Mac off?

A typical Big Mac boasts about 480-500 calories.  Using the workout editor on FiVi.com, I wanted to highlight what you would have to add to those 12 minutes to burn off those calories.  Assuming you were a 175 lb male, it would require you:

walk briskly for 110 minutes

jog for 32 minutes

run up stairs for 22 minutes

swim for 60 minutes

irish folk dance for 80 minutes

Of course, everyone knows that you can’t have a Big Mac without super sizing your meal to include a large fries and gallon of coke.  So just take my numbers and multiply them by 3….and then enroll in a celtic dance school.

In the meantime, if you’d like to see the original article click here

The Spread of Health Behaviors in Social Networks

As the founder of a social networking site designed to help foster healthy lifestyles, I could not have asked for a more germane study in support of what we are trying to do.  The Framingham Heart Study is one of the most famous social network studies in the academic world.  Essentially, a stash of papers found in a storeroom were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects started in 1948.  The primary focus of this data set was for risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease.  What Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH; A. James O’Malley, PhD; Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD did was take this study and expand upon it to look at the affect of your social network and risks associated with obesity.

The following image is from an article in Wired Magazine and show the virulent characteristics of obesity in human populations.  Essentially what the researchers did was map out BMI for the population in Framingham over time and looked at the relationship that defined that population.  The key finding is that it’s very hard to stay lean if you are surrounded by obese people, hence the clumping of obese groups of individuals.  What is the most shocking is that if you have a friend that is obese, your chances of being obese jumps to 171%.

Without getting too much into statistics and correlation, causality, and externalities…I think there is something that is very intuitive with the assumption that our friends do have an influence on how we live and what we do.  I would say with a lot of confidence that positive behaviors can be infectious and they do become more powerful the larger the group.  Unfortunately the same goes for negative behaviors.

It’s important to recognize the influence our friends have on us and to think about who we want to affect that in line with our personal goals.  Group mandated change is one of the most powerful motivators out there…and new online capabilities can be a wonderful enabler.  Get together with your friends and form a friendly competition around who can lose the most weight or log the fastest time.  Share success stories, tips, and press each other on.  I’m not revealing any great mystery but there is something to hearing it again.

Here is the link for the original study…click here

Here is a link for the book that came out of this study….click here

And here is the link to fivi.com where you can form a positive habit forming group …click here