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Employers in Europe may soon have a duty to create reserved car parking spaces for obese staff, or adjust the office furniture for them as BBC reports that the European Court of Justice is considering a test case of a male nanny who says he was fired for being too fat - a ruling that could oblige employers to treat obesity as a disability. Employment expert Audrey Williams says the judges would have to decide "whether obesity itself should trigger preferential rights, or should only impact where an individual, due to obesity, has other recognized medical issues. Employers would have a duty to make reasonable adjustments to the workplace or working arrangements," says Williams. "This might include a review of where the employee is located and their seating arrangements, or even preferential access to car parking."
The US Equal Opportunity Commission already defines obesity as being a disability, under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act. In a recent case involving morbid obesity, a Texan employee who weighed more than 680 pounds received $55,000 in compensation for being dismissed. In October 2009, the man was told to report to human resources where officials told him the company had reached the conclusion he could no longer "perform his job duties because of his weight and he was therefore terminated," the suit said. Ronald Kratz, who had gotten two promotions and high performance ratings over his 16-year-career, insists his weight did not interfere with his ability to perform his job duties as a parts sorter. Kratz, who lost over three hundred pounds since he was fired, has not been able to find another job despite sending out numerous applications, and his unemployment benefits have run out. "It has been really hard on the family."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @01:36PM
Most fruit juices are sugar in disguise. There are about 20-30 different ways they name sugar. Ever wonder why apple juice is in everything? It is sweet (because of the sugar) and most importantly cheap and has tons of natural sugar and easy to mask with other flavors. Something like pure cherry juice would be borderline bitter. Maraschino cherries are sweat because they soak them in corn syrup. So they start with 90% apple juice add in 8-9% grape juice then add in a couple of tea spoons of cherry or whatever 'flavor' they are looking to sell you.
Eating an apple is good. As the fiber is good for you and vitamins in the skin too. Drinking a glass of apple juice over a coke is debatable which is better (maybe the apple by a nano hair). A glass of apple cider would be better for you. But that is also usually considered bitter by people raised on sugar diets.
Look to sugar. That is where most people gain weight as your body easily turns it into fat storage. It is in everything from your bread to your drinks. Good rule of thumb stay out of the middle of the store and go down the edges. That is where the bulk of processed foods are. Processing usually means taking something cheap that tastes like paste and give it a good flavor and sell it for double or even triple for good margin.
If you think you are buying 'real' juices look again. You will see most of the time they are selling you apple juice blended with grape juice. A real litter of pomegranate would probably cost 15-20 bucks. There are basically 3 juices most people really buy, apple, grape, and orange. 99% of the remaining juices out there are blends with the good stuff burnt at the factory to run boilers. The 'good stuff' tastes like paste and people do not want to buy it.
A few go as far as to blend in a few teaspoons of processed sugars (usually one of the crystalline forms). To bump the sweetness. For example would you consider molasses to be sugar? It is 100% sugar. It is a byproduct of making sugar white and granular. Yet they do not have to call it sugar. They have fought long and hard to hide it from consumers.
It is why I am heavily invested stock wise in food processing groups. As people think they are eating healthy when in fact they are eating processed foods with sugar in it. The adkins fad a few years ago was the only one to actually put a scare into the food companies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @04:49PM
Maraschino cherries are sweat because they soak them in corn syrup.
Yeah, and pickles are bitter because they're soaked in vinegar. I fail to see the relevance of candied cherries to a discussion of proper fruit or fruit juices.
There's definitely a segment of the population who fail to make a distinction between sugar, the chemical present in all food, and sugar as a refined additive to foods. These people are prone to marketing ploys like "No added sugar" in honeyed, juiced, or agaved foods. Most of us would rather see comprehensible ingredients on our food than a mass spectrogram, and we know that sweet components like honey means a lot of simple carbohydrates, even if it's not labeled "sugar."
The reason orange, apple, and grape juices are popular is that those are naturally the sweetest juices. In fact, when most people say "juice" they mean one of those. I'd bet that if you just say "juice" to most people, they immediately think "orange juice."
This whole thread is an argument between people who know that fruits are primarily mono- and di-saccharides and think of fruit juice as sugarwater, and people who know that fruits are mostly mono- and di-saccharides and think that the food industry will add refined sugar to those juices to make them sell better.