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Life & Times Transcript

4/03/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Drug wars and a rash of kidnappings are keeping tourists away from Tijuana. Can a crackdown on crime bring them back?

David Shirk>> Two prominent cartels in northern Mexico have essentially been dismantled.

Antonio Martinez Luna>> Criminals need to understand that they cannot affect ordinary people. They cannot affect our people. They cannot take our streets.

Val Zavala>> And then, they're the latest thing in the world of counseling, but they aren't licensed therapists. Should life coaches be regulated?

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It sounds like 1930s Chicago. Kidnapping, dirty cops, dumped corpses, but the city is Tijuana and authorities estimate that a third of the four hundred murders in that city every year are by organized crime, drug cartels fighting for control. Well, now it's starting to detour tourists and the Mexican government has taken an unprecedented step. Saul Gonzalez went to the border to see if it will work.

Saul Gonzalez>> Residents of the Mexican border city of Tijuana haven't seen anything like it, military checkpoints on the outskirts of town where soldiers search vehicles for drugs and guns, units of heavily armed national police agents patrolling the city's commercial heart and stopping people for impromptu pat-downs, and the temporary seizure of all firearms carried by Tijuana's local cops to see if any of the weapons have been used in crimes.

These efforts are part of recently elected Mexican President Felipe Calderon's new national crackdown on crime and drug trafficking in his country, a crackdown backed up by the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police to Mexico's most violent states and cities such as Tijuana.

Antonio Martinez Luna>> It sends the message that, if anybody is involved in organized crime, we're going to get them.

Saul Gonzalez>> Antonio Martinez Luna, a strong supporter of President Calderon's public security initiatives, is the Attorney General of the Mexican state of Baja, California where Tijuana is located.

Antonio Martinez Luna>> Organized crimes or criminals need to understand that they cannot affect ordinary people. They cannot affect our people. They cannot take our streets.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, on Tijuana's streets, a lot of blood has been spilled in recent years as rival drug gangs have fought each other and the authorities. Last year, more than three hundred people were murdered in the city and a recent rise in kidnappings has also rattled Tijuana's residents. Anxiety over security has even damaged Tijuana's free-wheeling, anything-goes image that usually attracts so many tourists to is clubs and bars.

Efrain Perez>> We're missing many Americans. We're really missing them.

Saul Gonzalez>> Efrain Perez is a nightclub doorman and bouncer in the city's red light district.

Efrain Perez>> We are losing money. We are losing sales. This has to change. I don't know if it's next month or this week, but it has to change.

Saul Gonzalez>> A few miles away in the upscale Rio district, restaurant owner and chef, Miguel Angel Yagues, says that crime has gotten so bad that some Tijuanans with money have taken permanent refuge across the border.

Miguel Angel Yagues>> Many of my friends have left here and gone to San Diego. That's just because of the security situation. There are many people who run their businesses from the United States. They don't want to come here.

Saul Gonzalez>> Last October, concerns about spiraling crime and violence prompted activists to organize a mass march through the streets of Tijuana. It displayed grassroots outrage over the city's growing body count and the local police's inability to stem the tide of violence.

The public's confidence in law enforcement's ability to protect and serve citizens is so low that it's estimated only one in four crimes is even reported. There's also a widespread public perception that many local cops are really working for the drug cartels as their eyes, ears and muscle on the street.

Alberto Capella Ibarra>> All of the police agencies, it's assumed, have committed acts of corruption.

Saul Gonzalez>> Alberto Capella Ibarra is President of Baja, California's Citizens Advisory Committee on Crime.

Alberto Capella Ibarra>> There's a very close relation between members of the police and criminal groups. How otherwise could they act with such impunity and freedom on the bands of criminals in this city? It shows how authorities are intimately involved with them.

Saul Gonzalez>> Local officials understand the suspicions and say they hope that federal authorities, who will stay in Tijuana as long as needed, will keep police agencies on a tight leash.

Antonio Martinez Luna>> That's very important, a lot of control.

Saul Gonzalez>> Control and oversight?

Antonio Martinez Luna>> Exactly. Now they have to provide more security for the people who live in Baja, live in Tijuana, and for the tourism.

Saul Gonzalez>> And more security in a clean way?

Antonio Martinez Luna>> Exactly, definitely. There's no way this could go back. We cannot go back to where it was happening.

Saul Gonzalez>> While most Mexicans see corruption and crime and the country's general climate of fear as crises, Mexico's growing personal security industry see them as opportunities. At Tijuana's Blindado Seguro-Total Shield Company, customers come to have their cars and trucks armored with enough steel plating and other protective material to drive through a war zone. The cost of the automotive makeover ranges from thirty to eighty thousand dollars. The company's president is Carlos Guerrero.

Carlos Guerrero>> This is a high-end job, a level five that can protect you from automatic weapons.

Saul Gonzalez>> Guerrero says that customers want the kind of protection he can provide after they've already had a close call with crime.

Carlos Guerrero>> They come here because they've been the victim of a kidnapping and they now want protection. There are American clients who want an armored vehicle to cross into Mexico. That's why we have an office in the United States. And it can be a local client who uses his car to travel to his business or home here in Tijuana.

Saul Gonzalez>> At his restaurant, Yagues often sees the foot soldiers of Mexico's personal protection business close to his customers.

Miguel Angel Yagues>> All the business people or those who have money who are scared bring security. Everybody has guards, bodyguards, all of them with weapons. There are times when we have one table outside with ten armed bodyguards around it waiting.

Saul Gonzalez>> As for Mexico's wider war against its drug cartels, experts such as David Shirk of the Trans-Border Institute generally agree that the government has scored some major victories in recent years.

David Shirk>> Two prominent cartels in northern Mexico have essentially been dismantled. Their top leadership has been either imprisoned or killed off over the course of the drug war and those groups are beginning to lose their grasp on power, lose their ability to control these markets and territories for moving drugs.

Saul Gonzalez>> The problem, though, is as drug kingpins like this man get either extradited to the United States, jailed in Mexico or killed, violence frequently increases as henchmen and lieutenants battle to take the boss's place.

David Shirk>> There's always a drug trafficker either within your organization or outside your organization who wants to move up the ladder because the profit potential at those very high levels is enormous.

Saul Gonzalez>> Attorney General Luna says that the total elimination of Mexico's drug cartels is impossible, but without a concerted federal response, the traffickers would only get stronger and bolder.

Antonio Martinez>> We know that we're not going to eliminate drug trafficking. We cannot live with it, but it's there and it's been there for a long time. It's bigger than us.

Saul Gonzalez>> Mexico's president, who has proposed a twelve percent increase in public security spending and ordered ten thousand soldiers transferred to the national police force, has vowed no truce in the government's offensive against organized crime. For Life and Times, I'm Saul Gonzalez.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> It seems like every few weeks, there's a headline in the paper about food. Trans fats are now outlawed in New York. For a while, we couldn't eat spinach and, of course, fast food makes us obese. But what do we really know about our food? Well, now we have some answers in a book called "The Gospel of Food". It's by USC Sociologist, Barry Glassner. Glassner argues that Americans take their concern over healthy eating to unnecessarily extreme levels.

Barry Glassner>> I was really surprised when I did the research for this book at how many myths we have about food and how uncertain really a lot of the knowledge is. You know, if you notice, one year, one food will be on the positive list and the next year it will be on the negative list. I think a lot of what we think we know, we just don't really know.

One that we believed for a long time was that, if you ate eggs, it was going to raise your cholesterol. It might for some people, and eggs were off the list for a long time, but eggs are incredibly nutritious. If you look over about the last twenty years, we've gone from relatively low egg consumption because everybody was afraid of it to now a pretty normal kind of level and treating eggs as normal, even good for you.

Val Zavala>> So that's not a problem in your estimation?

Barry Glassner>> I think that's one where we got completely off balance by some advice which, by the way, at the time was not backed up very well by scientific evidence.

Val Zavala>> Now another belief is connecting fast food with this epidemic of obesity that we have going. Is that not a correct connection?

Barry Glassner>> Fast food may have something to do with the obesity epidemic, but it certainly is not the explanation for it. You can see that very easily. Just look at what happened when. You know, we have this notion that we've heard from some supposed experts that the two things happened at the same time. The obesity epidemic occurred as fast food was taking off. That's not true. The signs outside of McDonalds Restaurants read "2 billion" way before the obesity epidemic started.

Val Zavala>> Meaning two billion hamburgers sold.

Barry Glassner>> Meaning two billion hamburgers sold, in the 1960s. The obesity epidemic began in the 1980s and really took off in the 1990s. By that point, fast food restaurants were everywhere. They've been everywhere for a long time. There were tens of thousands of them, so that can't really be the main explanation. Simple explanations for any of these kinds of outcomes like the obesity epidemic are bound to be wrong. It's pretty clear that it's much more complex than that.

Val Zavala>> Complex meaning there are issues of exercise and there are other factors besides fast food, which isn't good for you. You're not saying it's good for you and it's not to blame.

Barry Glassner>> Well, there certainly are issues about the quality of fast food in some cases, although the occasional meals of fast food are not going to hurt very many people unless you have a special condition. The obesity epidemic, when I looked at what's really causing it, there were a lot of surprises. For example, the anti-smoking campaigns.

Now those are good things, don't misunderstand me, but if you look at what happens when people give up smoking, typically they gain ten to twenty pounds. Well, what happens very effectively in this country at the time that obesity and weight in general went up, there was a big anti-smoking campaign that was very effective. We're fortunate it was effective, but we sociologists have a phrase called The Law of Unintended Consequences, and this was an example of one of those.

Val Zavala>> Now the latest villain on our eating table is trans fats. In fact, New York banned them from restaurants. What are they and is this just progress or are we going to find out later that, oh, it's not that much of a problem anyway?

Barry Glassner>> Well, there's certainly nothing wrong with banning trans fats in general. They're not good for you.

Val Zavala>> Okay, that much we know. They aren't good for you.

Barry Glassner>> Right, but will it do much? The answer is no. It's been advertised as saving lots of lives. The evidence just isn't clear for that. It will have some effect, but we have to take into account what the flip side of the coin is. Who will this mostly affect? The ban in New York City, for example, will mostly affect the operators of small restaurants, mom and pop operations, because they can't switch as easily.

Who will be affected by it? People who go to inexpensive restaurants, low end customers, which is mostly where these are used. So highly saturated fats, expensive animals fats, for example, will still be used in the expensive high-end restaurants. So you see, for example, now in some high-end restaurants, french fries prepared in duck fat, okay? You know, it's not like it affects everybody the same way and that's typically what happens when we legislate what people should eat.

Val Zavala>> If we follow all the rules -- which unfortunately are changing all the time -- but if we do really pay attention to our diets, won't we live longer?

Barry Glassner>> You'll probably live a little bit longer if you could figure out which ones to follow.

Val Zavala>> Oh, okay (laughter).

Barry Glassner>> There are many conflicting types of advice, right? Are carbs good or bad? Which fats are good or bad? How much of each one? You can drive yourself crazy trying to follow all these to the letter. If you succeed, from what I've been able to determine in this research, unless you have certain medical conditions where you do have to be very careful, it probably will make very little difference in the long run and there's a cost because we know that enjoyment of a meal also contributes to health.

Many nutritional experts around the world, if you look at the dietary guidelines of countries in Europe, for example, specifically say that food plus enjoyment equals health. One country comes right out and says that. But in America, we're true to our puritan roots, so we think that being abstainers, being very careful, will result in the long life, not the enjoyment itself.

Val Zavala>> Although Americans are indulging these days with, you know, cookies and ice cream and these big portions. I mean, a lot of people would say, no, we should be more puritan. We should have more discipline.

Barry Glassner>> One brilliant thing that the food industry does is it sells us both sides of everything, okay? So it will sell us foods that make us feel virtuous, what I call the doctrine of not, right? If it has less of something, it's better. The less sugar, the less salt, the less fat, the less carbs and so forth. Then if we follow that really well, then we can treat ourselves to something else and then they can sell us those, the really indulgent foods. So they went both ways. It's really quite brilliant and we pay the price.

Val Zavala>> So after researching "The Gospel of Food", did you change any of your diet or eating habits?

Barry Glassner>> Well, I have to admit that I wasn't really into very many of these kinds of fads that I talk about in the first place, but, yes, I've become much more skeptical about all kinds of food products that are promoted to me and all kinds of diets that come down the pike than I was before. Now also, I see some of what I was eating before in a very different light. For example, I routinely ate blueberries at breakfast, but that's because I like them.

Val Zavala>> An antioxidant.

Barry Glassner>> Yes, but now I think, oh, wow, they're selling them to me as antioxidants. Maybe I'm getting an added benefit anyway, but I'm going to eat them because I like the taste (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Once again, Barry Glassner's book is called "The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong".

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> It's the latest tool in our quest for success and personal fulfillment: life coaches. They aren't therapists, but they're more than mentors. They are, well, coaches, and there are tens of thousands of them unlicensed and charging as much as two hundred dollars an hour. Are they worth it? Sam Louie has our story.

Sam Louie>> Bob Pranga never imagined life could be so good. He's created a lucrative business doing something he loves.

Bob Pranga>> Generally, I'll come over and set up a Christmas tree or we'll do the mantelpiece or we'll do the entire house or we'll do the interior and the exterior.

>> "Calling Dr. Christmas. Dr. Christmas, please come in."

Sam Louie>> He is a tree stylist to the stars, decorating the homes of the rich and famous for Christmas.

Bob Pranga>> I've been managing in my career to decorate for everyone from Bob Hope and Lana Turner, you know, Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, Andy Garcia, Leeza Gibbons, Shaquille O'Neal, Kate Hudson.

Sam Louie>> Bob has even dubbed himself "Dr. Christmas" and he makes a very healthy living.

Bob Pranga>> Somebody came in and said, "Well, how much do you charge?" I gave them this ridiculous amount of money and said, "Okay, I'll come over and do that" and they said, "Okay." I thought, "Okay? Cool." (laughter)

Sam Louie>> That ridiculous amount can be as much as fifty thousand dollars. But just over a decade ago, life was very different. At that time, Bob was deep in debt as a starving actor. He scraped by on several low-paying jobs in Hollywood as a waiter, department store clerk and tour guide. He felt his life was going nowhere.

Bob Pranga>> At thirty-five years old, I panicked. You know, I cannot be a tour guide the rest of my life. I cannot be making minimum wage. I cannot be working three jobs. I'm never going to get anywhere and I'm not even pursuing anything that I really wanted to do.

Rick Tamlyn>> "What would it be like if it actually went the way you wanted it to go?"

Sam Louie>> So he turned to Rick Tamlyn, an executive life coach based in Studio City.

Rick Tamlyn>> The point of entry into a coaching relationship is usually something that has a little bit of an emergency flavor to it like, you know, "My relationship is going sour" or "Oh, my gosh, I just lost my job."

Sam Louie>> Rick has spent the past fifteen years as a coach working with both individual and corporate clients. Bob came to Rick looking for help back in 1992. Like so many of his clients, Rick sensed that Bob was feeling lost.

Rick Tamlyn>> Hungry for it and what is it? You know, looking around, what is my life about? But sad, confused, overwhelmed. You know, there's a classic song, "Is this what it's all about, Alfie?" You know, there's got to be something more.

Sam Louie>> After a few coaching sessions, it became obvious that Bob loved Christmas.

Rick Tamlyn>> The Christmas conversations kept coming up. "I love Christmas. Every year I love Christmas." He kept talking about it and it was from his heart. You could feel it.

Sam Louie>> So Rick encouraged Bob to set some goals and to follow through with them.

Rick Tamlyn>> Thus was born the concept of Dr. Christmas. He started to create a website. He started to realize, "I'm really good at decorating" because he's a great designer, sort of blended Christmas and designing together.

Sam Louie>> To this day, Bob credits a lot of his success to the support and encouragement of his coach.

Bob Pranga>> I was so busy trying to build the business and move it along and attain the next goal that I didn't really take the time to be surprised. It just seemed like, "Okay, okay, okay." It happens a lot when you have intention and you have purpose about it. All of a sudden, it just happens.

Sam Louie>> What has also happened over the past decade is the exponential growth of life or personal coaching. There are now an estimated fifty thousand coaches in the United States along with about two hundred coaching schools that have sprouted up to meet the demand. On average, they can cost up to a hundred dollars an hour.

The growth of the coaching industry has led to concern among those in the counseling field. Because there's no official government oversight or certification, critics are troubled because, in essence, anyone can call themselves a coach.

Jeffrey Youngren>> My experience has been that there are many people who label themselves as coaches who have very little training in coaching.

Sam Louie>> Jeffrey Youngren is a psychologist based in Palos Verdes. He has a doctorate in clinical psychology. Youngren says the public needs to be aware of the difference between psychologists and other mental health professionals compared to life coaches. Mental health therapists must be certified and licensed in the states they work in. But life coaches, on the other hand, are unregulated.

Jeffrey Youngren>> Regulation is really to protect the consumer. The reason we have licenses and certifications is to protect the consumer, so individuals that go into unregulated professions may not be qualified.

Sam Louie>> Rick says that he would welcome regulation of life coaches.

Rick Tamlyn>> I'm a fan of it, yeah. Bring it on. We do need to be regulated.

Sam Louie>> But until it happens, he acknowledges that there's nothing to keep someone with little or no training from declaring themselves a life coach. He advises people to try a sample session and be sure that a prospective coach has been through a reputable program.

Rick Tamlyn>> We are an organization that is governed by a worldwide regulatory agency called the International Coach Federation. They have a Code of Ethics. We have to sign it if we become a member of the organization.

Sam Louie>> But Youngren believes that's not enough. He thinks coaching is close to therapy and should be licensed.

Jeffrey Youngren>> There is a strong argument that coaching as a profession already fits under the licensing laws of many states. The definitions for psychology and marriage and family therapy might arguably include the profession of coaching.

Sam Louie>> Rick disagrees. He says that therapy is focused on the past while coaching is focused on the future and achieving goals.

Rick Tamlyn>> Whether it's weight loss or making money or whatever it is, or making a movie in this town and I want to do something creative. Lots of those kinds of conversations. It's a lot of accountability.

Sam Louie>> But Youngren predicts that it's just a matter of time before some life coaches will be held accountable.

Jeffrey Youngren>> Some of these people are going to get sued. As soon as coaches start getting sued for coaching or malpracticing coaching, if you will, it will start defining itself differently.

Sam Louie>> Critics feel there is so much overlap between coaching and counseling that coaches should have training in mental health.

Jeffrey Youngren>> Those coaches need to have some background in psychology and sociology. You just can't declare yourself to be a coach vis-�-vis a program. I think you have to have some, I would even say, post-graduate education in those areas to offer services.

Rick Tamlyn>> If I, by the way, started a coaching interaction or a coaching relationship and there's something from their past that is constantly in the way, you know, like it keeps coming up that, "Well, my mother" or "My father" or whatever it is. If it keeps coming up in the conversation, I will say, "You know what? I invite you to go talk to a therapist about that."

Sam Louie>> Whether life coaches will be regulated and licensed is still to be seen, but what is clear is that the profession continues to grow fast.

Rick Tamlyn>> My phone rings off the hook these days. "When are you available, when are you available?" I can't keep up with the demand. There seems to be some permission to talk to a coach more than to a therapist now.

Sam Louie>> As for Bob Pranga, he's met his goal of wanting to be famous at least for a moment.

Michael Corbett>> "When celebrities need a prescription for a little holiday cheer, they call the only doctor in Hollywood that still makes house calls, Dr. Christmas."

Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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