DailyDirt: Believable Dieting

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Maybe you're not eating meat today or perhaps planning to avoid various foods that aren't kosher for Passover. (Or you're blissfully eating whatever you want...) People follow a lot of eating guidelines based on all sorts of issues -- religious, ethical or other. There are all kinds of diets: to lose weight, to prevent high blood pressure, to save animals' lives, to kill fruits. Whatever diet suits your fancy, you might want to check out some of these stories on dietary restrictions and food beliefs.

• Food labels could have a placebo effect -- making your body produce more or less of a hormone called ghrelin (depending on whether or not you believe the food you just ate was high or low in calories). Body metabolism might be adjusted significantly based on how unhealthy you thought your last meal was, but it's not clear what the long term, practical effect is. [url]
• Can you lose weight by only eating ice cream for four days straight? Sure. And apparently, consuming almost an order of magnitude more than the recommended amount of daily saturated fat won't kill you immediately. [url]
• One 38yo man claims to have eaten nothing but pizza for the last 25 years. Exclusively cheese pizza, with oregano as his only added topping. Tomato sauce is a vegetable, right? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: diet, dietary restrictions, food, ghrelin, ice cream, metabolism, pizza, placebo

DailyDirt: Playing Tricks With The Mind

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The human brain is a pretty interesting contraption. And generally, we learn about how it works when things "go wrong" with it. The results of brain mapping are pretty fascinating -- especially when we find out that many humans have common brain areas that perform the same tasks. Armed with this information, we can try to trick ourselves and hack our own thoughts. But even if we can't quite figure out how our brains work, the odd cases of various brains gone awry are interesting to see. Here are just a few examples:

A woman who knows no fear has been studied at the University of Iowa. Researchers say, "It is quite remarkable that she is still alive." [url]

One Vietnamese man hasn't slept in decades. Unfortunately, he doesn't like taking MRIs, so it's tough to say what's going on with him. [url]

A few people have really really good memories. Not being able to forget things doesn't quite seem like a comic book superpower, but maybe it should be. [url]

Harvard researchers show that the placebo effect works even when patients are told they're being given sugar pills. This study actually just proves how bad doctors are at running control experiments (... or maybe that some patients really don't trust anything a doctor tells them.) [url]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation sounds like a cool way to turn off parts of your brain. But becoming an idiot savant probably isn't as appealing as it sounds. [url]

Filed Under: brain, mind, placebo, transcranial magnetic stimulation