What kind of smiley face is that? Is your commitment to morbidity that strict?

Two words: Zapp & Roger.

The figure you quote of 20 minutes/day of sun on the hands and face at midsummer is for people with skin who is not UV tolerant (generally, people with light skin). Someone with UV tolerant skin can require hours of sun exposure to get the same Vitamin D production.

Moreover, it is virtually impossible to obtain sufficient Vitamin D from diet alone. Fortified milk is enough to prevent rickets in children over the winter months, but to match the production of Vitamin D from summer sunshine means ingesting prescription supplements.

Read more here (with citations and everything).

I just don’t understand if you embrace the black culture that it’s Ok and cool thing to do, but if you become a metal head or Alt-rocker type you are called whitewashed or sellout.

But if you’re into both styles there’s always Judgment Night. (Oh, the stories I could tell you about having all my Anthrax and Metallica tapes stolen from me at Sikh Youth Camp by NWA rocking idiots who’d never heard of Paris or YZ.)

Kulvir @ #148, though–sorry, call me insensitive but most contemporary R&B blows (“check Ralph Tresvant for sensitivity”), and it has for going on 30 years. I say “most” because I’ll make an exception for Prince, Sharon Jones, Jill Scott, D’Angelo, Eryka Badu, and yes, even Amy Winehouse. (Though those artists, I think rightly, might try to distance themselves from the overproduced synthesized rubbish that passes for R&B by calling their genre “soul.”) Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis and cheap synthesizers almost ruined a style of music made great by the likes of Marvin Gaye, The O’Jays, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, etc.

Also, it’s nice to make your acquaintance, Deemz.

Whites are not the root cause of all evil in America

Fine, I’ll take the bait. You’re wrong, “whites” are the root cause of all evil in America, because “white” is shorthand for the vested, power-bearing elite in America. I am making a distinction, now, between “Anglo-American,” “Irish American,” “Italian-American,” “Polish-American,” “Scandanavian-American,” “Jewish-American,” etc., and “white.”

Race is a social construct. There is no “white” race. A people are “non-white” as long as they are marginalized. When a “race” doffs its hyphen and graduates to “white” (i.e. a deracinated state), that means they have become assimilated into the mainstream power-structure which is indeed the root of ALL EVIL. Now that the white hoods have deemed us safe and non-threatening, East Asians and Desis, in my opinion, are well on their way to achieving “whitehood” in America.

Disclaimer: I am exaggerating and simplifying for rhetorical effect because I think my point would be lost without that exaggeration. Carry on.

As an aside, where I come from “PSA” means public service announcement, but I hear in the medical community it means something entirely other.

Btw, I’m sorry, but I’m a terrible person, and this made me laugh! You sound like a parody of yourself and some of the more vocal anti-oppression commentators here. Oh noes, the White Scientists are trying to subject Brown People by spreading lies about their increased susceptibility to obesity and Type II Diabetes!!

Areem: Where are your statistics? I’ve only read evidence contrarian to that what you post. Have you read the Scientific American special on Famine and the Obesity Epidemic?