Denmark Joins Healthy Model Debate

Denmark’s fashion industry is joining the debate over ‘skinny models’, but with an approach that isn’t punitative and not driven exclusively around standards of BMI (body mass index), as is under consideration in France.

Writing for the New York Times, Vanessa Friedman is more enthusiastic about the Danish approach, which will focus on peer pressure and not what Friedman calls a ‘Big Brother’ approach to managing eating issues, which are notoriously complex and not the result exclusively of reading fashion magazines.Her point is scientifically correct.

However, Friedman never even acknowledges that a problem exists, as if the fashion industry has somehow accidentally downsized models from a size 4-6 in the days of the great supermodels to size 0 and smaller … just because … well, who knows, it just happened drip by drip, year by year.

Unlike The Council of Fashion Designers of America Health Initiative, The Danish Fashion Ethical Charter offers a code ethics that goes beyond the health of models. Models must be paid money and not in clothes for their work. Oh dear!!!

While there are no penalties for non-compliance, only companies that sign the charter can take part in Copenhagen Fashion Week. Warnings of not honoring the charter would eventually result, not only in exclusion from Copenhagen Fashion Week, but being part of an official online blacklist.

Karlie Color and Co-op Riche

Former Victoria’s Secret Angel Karlie Kloss appears in the pink in today’s new release of an ad for L’Oreal Paris. But Kloss should be wearing green, with news that she will make back more than twice her investment price on a two-bedroom West Village apartment that she purchased in 2012.

The board at her Charles Street, 12-unit building has agreed to sell the whole structure to an investor who will likely raze it. Kloss paid $1.98 million for her Manhattan home and will more than double her money, reports Manhattan real estate blogs. Total price for the 12 apartments is $59 million.

Diet Soda Sales Plummet

Financial blog Motley Fool reports that for the 10th year in a row, soda consumption declined in the US. Total sales of ‘fizzy’ beverages fell 0.9% in 2014, with Coca-Cola shipments sliding by 1.1% and Pepsi losing 1.4%.

The continued drop is not a surprise as Americans become increasingly health conscious and restrict their intake of carbonated soft drinks and other products seen as empty calories. But while soda sales are down across the board, the biggest impact from changing consumer tastes is on diet sodas. Diet Coke sales fell 6.6% last year after tumbling 15% over the two years prior. In the process, it slipped from No. 2 in U.S. market share to No. 3 behind Pepsi. Diet Pepsi sales, meanwhile, were down 5.2% last year.

Financial analysts report that Coke and Pepsi consider the problem to be aspartame and its after taste. Scientists are focusing on stevia as the solution.

The abandonment of diet sodas is a sign that consumers are not just concerned about calories. There is a growing wholesale movement in the country against processed foods — consumers are demanding greater transparency about the products they put in their bodies. While the stevia plant is natural, the idea of drinking something produced in a lab might be off-putting to consumers.

What no soda company wants to address is the brain chemistry research around diet drinks. Just last week a new study of adults over 65 concluded that drinking diet soda caused people to gain more belly fat — the most harmful location for fat — than drinking regular soda. TIME writes:

The kind that pads the abs from the inside, called visceral fat, is associated with increased cardiovascular disease, inflammation and Type 2 diabetes.

As The Atlantic wrote last fall, and AOC has written on numerous occasions, several studies around diet sodas have ‘suggested that eating/drinking these nutritive sweeteners actually leads to weight gain. That has to do with satiety signals, effects on insulin levels, changes in the body’s fluid balances, and other not-immediately-apparent downstream factors.

The evidence that diet sodas may well promote weight gain has roots as far back as the 1970s when a study of 31,940 women found that saccarin users gained more weight than non-users. An even larger study of 78,694 women in the 1980s found that users of artificial sweeteners were more likely to gain weight.