This sounds promising. I have read more words written by Vladimir Nabokov than by anyone else, by a large margin. A few days ago I was watching American Idol and thinking about how I have come to enjoy singing more because of the judges’ evaluations. It reminded me of reading Nabokov’s commentary to Eugene Onegin when I was in college. In his commentary, Nabokov passed judgment on many lines of poetry — “this is beautiful,” “that is awful.” Studying those remarks — what did he see? — made me read in a new way forever.
Month: February 2008
How Many Calories are in Your Blood?
Any idea? Here is a helpful comment by SixtiesLibber on the SLD forums:
When you get your fasting blood sugar tested, it’s supposed to be below 100. And it should almost never go above 200. Well, I finally checked and found what what those numbers mean, that’s 100 milligrams per deciliter. That’s kind of a weird measurement but it’s actually the same as 1000 milligrams per liter or 1 gram per liter. In other words, normally your blood has only 1 gram of glucose (sugar) per liter. (A liter is almost the same as a quart.) Adults have something like 5 quarts of blood in their bodies. So at any one time you only have about 5 grams of glucose circulating in your blood. That’s the equivalent of about 1 teaspoon of sugar or one-third of a piece of “squishy white bread.”
Answer: Not many.
Calorie Learning: Procedure
In the first experiment, I created a butter mixture with a random flavor and spread it on two pieces of bread, which I ate and rated.
To create the butter mixture with a random flavor, I took 1/2 stick of butter and heated it in a microwave until it was soft. Then I randomly selected four of the 11 Penzeys spice blends and mixed 1/2 tsp of each into the butter.
For each trial, I spread a thin layer of the butter on two pieces of the bread, which was at room temperature. I ate them in a minute or so. I rated how good they tasted on a scale where
90 = very good
80 = quite good
75 = good
70 = somewhat good
60 = slightly good
50 = neutral
40 = slightly bad
I’ve used this scale to rate food dozens of times. Sometimes the rating changes with successive tastes; if so, the assigned rating is the maximum.
After eating the bread I waited at least an hour before eating anything else or brushing my teeth in order to to eliminate interference from other smells.
I did no more than one trial per day. On most days I did a trial.
To find other posts in this series, use the Calorie Learning category.
All About Nose-Clipping
Over at the SLD forums, Heidi555 posted these useful links:
1. Nose clipping ditto foods to extinguish cravings
2. Conditioning Appetite Suppression
3. Nose clipping lots of food really works – it’s easier!
This is about as far from the “losing weight is just a matter of calories in versus calories out” dogma as you can get. Last week at a dinner I sat next to a young doctor who said exactly that. I said nothing.
Thanks, Heidi.
Omega-3 and Sports Injuries (part 4)
Anonymous writes again:
I got caught in a nasty achilles lock the other day–it’s an MMA [mixed martial art] submission move–and while trying to escape, I accidentally dislocated my fibula at the knee. It made a LOUD popping noise, to the point where everyone in the gym stopped. It popped it back in immediately, and other than some instability, it felt OK. Thankfully there was a doctor there (by chance–he does MMA and was in my class). He spent like 15 minutes examining my knee and said that other than some stretched ligaments, it was fine. His quote (I’m paraphrasing):
“That’s amazing. You should need reconstructive surgery right now. I don’t know how that happened, you must have rubber ligaments.”
I told him about taking 4 tablespoons of flax seed oil every day, and he was shocked, and said he was going to research it to see if that could be why I got so lucky. Told him to Google you, it’s all there.
The injury happened Friday. Today (Tuesday) the doctor looked at my knee again in class, and he was amazed not only at the lack of swelling, but that I was able to roll today (not full speed, just lightly).
I have played sports my whole life and have had at least half a dozen various knee injuries. Things like minor cartilage tears, hyperextensions, strains, etc.–none that were this major (a dislocation of a bone at the joint). Of those injuries, I was out longer and recovered much slower than I have with this one. I know this isn’t proof of anything, and I don’t know how much the flaxseed oil has had to do with what happened, but even the doctor is shocked.
More about omega-3 and sports injuries here and here and here.
Addendum. He uses Whole Foods flaxseed oil without lignans.
Calorie Learning: Materials
These are the supplies I used in my calorie-learning experiments:
1. Wonder bread. I wanted bread with as little flavor as possible
2. Unsalted butter. Unsalted because the spice blends have salt.
3. Eleven Penzeys Spices spice blends. In particular, Baking Spice, Cake Spice, Chicken Taco Seasoning, Jerk Pork Seasoning, Poultry Seasoning, Mural of Flavor, Sate Seasoning, Southwest Seasoning, Sweet Curry (regular), Tuscan Sunset, Venison Sausage Seasoning. Each has 5-15 different spices. For example, Jerk Pork Seasoning contains paprika, allspice, ginger, cayenne pepper, sugar, nutmeg, black pepper, garlic, thyme, lemon grass, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, and mace. Baking Spice is a mixture of two kinds of cinnamon, anise seed, allspice, mace, and cardamom. Combining a few of them should produce a flavor unlikely to resemble any familiar flavor.
Lewis Carroll on Mercury and Autism
From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:
The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.
From Chapter 12 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
`No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’
`Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’
`Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
Eerily prophetic, no?
My Theory of Human Evolution (gift card edition)
The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt and will no longer honor gift cards. In the comments section of the Consumerist post about this, several people apparently fail to understand why gift cards exist:
Another reason why cash is a better gift than gift cards.
This is just a good example why you should never buy a gift card.
Did anyone ever NOT know that gift cards are stupid?
The real lesson here, as Consumerists know, is don’t buy gift cards. They are a bad deal even if the issuer doesn’t go bankrupt.
This is the low-rent version of the deadweight cost of Christmas idea, which I discussed earlier. At the risk of stating the obvious, the perfect gift shows you know a lot about the recipient; cash shows you know nothing. A gift card shows you know a little — where the person likes to shop. They are less wasteful but less gift-like than ordinary gifts, more wasteful and more gift-like than cash. Gifts are supposed to be wasteful. This is why they are nicely wrapped. (Curiously no commenter called gifts stupid, a scam, etc.) In evolutionary terms, gift-giving traditions evolved because they increased demand for seemingly “useless” stuff. Gifts that went unused and expensive wrappings weren’t actually useless; they helped artists and artisans make a living. They were research grants for material science.
Calorie Learning: Background
The discovery of flavor-calorie learning (in rats) was no surprise. It was another example of flavor-consequence learning, which was well established. In the 1950s, John Garcia had found that if you make a rat sick after exposing it to a new flavor, it will avoid that flavor. Flavor-consequence learning belongs to the larger category of Pavlovian learning (also called classical conditioning), the sort of learning where an animal learns that an unimportant event (such as a bell) predicts an important event (such as food). Pavlovian learning belongs to the larger category of associative learning, which also includes action-event learning, such as a rat learning that bar presses produce food pellets. The action is pressing the bar; the event is getting a food pellet.
My Ph.D. was in the field of animal learning. Almost all animal learning research is about associative learning. When I taught introductory psychology, however, I found it hard to take advantage of my expertise because most of the research had little real-world relevance. The big exception was Shepard Siegel’ s work on drug tolerance and craving. Tolerance and craving are due to Pavlovian learning, Siegel argued. Flavor-calorie learning, happening at every meal, might have been another exception had anything interesting been known about it — but nothing was.
The usual terminology is to say that in a Pavlovian-learning experiment, the animal learns to associate the CS (conditioned stimulus, such as a bell) with the US (unconditioned stimulus, such as food). In flavor-calorie learning experiments, the flavor source is the CS, the calorie source the US.
Assorted Links
1. Gary Taubes speaks at Stevens Institute of Technology. This page curiously links to itself.
2. Ticket cameras increase crashes. The opposite of what was promised. They have just been installed in downtown Berkeley.
3. Humor and the boss-employee relationship. Not exactly self-experimentation, but close.
4. Sherwin Nuland on being treated for severe depression. His doctors recommended that Nuland receive a prefrontal lobotomy. A resident said: Let’s try ECT.
Thanks to Dave Lull.