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Eat Lots; Digest Little
varp writes: "Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine have
figured out a way
to reduce body fat even though you keep pumping yourself with
all the grease you can lay your hands on while sitting on the
couch and doing nothing. Next wish: Please, please identify the
gene which can cause my arteries to choke."
Then the doctor told me I was pregnant.
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
The researchers employed a novel technique that used a virus tagged with a green-glowing jellyfish protein to visualize the feeding circuit in the brain of a mouse.
The nutritional results are interesting, although practical application in humans is years away. The interesting thing is the use of more stuff from those green-glowing jellyfish. They've used it in plants and monkeys, and now viruses. Who would have thought that glowing jellyfish could end up being so useful?
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
If jellyfish are used in this process, don't you think most people will be freaked? Though it must work because when I have jellyfish on the brain I can't stomach food either. I wish I knew how the virus thing worked, though.
Stop to consider this for a moment. The western world is rich, with little need for the average human to have to do strenuous work for a living. They can afford to eat all they want, without having to do anything to work that food off. They keep adding fuel, without ever reving their engine. Digestion is a simple system really.
The human body is designed through years of evolutionary development to want to store up fuel as fat. Cyclical weather patterns with the accompanying cyles of feast and famine, insured that those who could store up more energy during the feast periods would fare better during the famine. The problem is, you can't continually add food without burning it off. You can't keep storing up for ever. The western world sees a continuous feast, without ever seeing the famine.
Enter these guys who have a goal of putting a hole in the fuel tank. Instead of stopping the pump, or driving the car for a while, their goal is to let the fuel pour out on the ground. This is ludicrous in its simple-minded short sightedness.
This may be a good technique for some troubling cases, but a much better solution for the majority of people is to push back from the table and get off their fat asses. I say this as a person who has lost 50lbs in the past year, and went from barely being able to run a mile in 12 minutes to running a 6:30 mile and winning a wrestling tournament this past weekend.
Westerners need to drop the idea of loosing weight, and start concentrating on making the body burn the fuel it takes in. This type of solution may make you tip the scales at a lower point, but it won't make you any healthier. There is a lot of evidence that increase flow rate of the blood does a lot of the work of cleaning arteries. How will sitting on the couch eating '0-calory' chips increase blood flow.
In summary, this type of drug is the type of 'no-pain' cure-all that my fellow American like. It hides the current, annoying symptoms, while totally ignoring the overall systemic problems. For those who doubt this, here are other examples of simple, cure-alls for systemic problems:
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If you're interested in losing fat, the simple answer is to stop putting on fat. The slightly longer answer is that your body adds fat when insulin is secreted by the pancreas, and to stop that secretion you can stop eating carbs (the trigger for insulin secretion).
See Sugar Busters, Atkins diet, or Protein Power at your local bookstore for more info.
Dancin Santa
Sounds like wasted food to me...
...
Effects.
We produce extra food to not be used
This costs us labor and fuel that could be applied to other more usefull projects.
This requires us to use land and fisheries that would not be needed and could otherwise be used or left wild.
For every X hours of farm work, X2 people are injured and X3 people are killed...
I once saw an article that indicated ~27% of the food produced in the US is wasted, think about it, we use a third more land, a third more fuel, maime and kill a third more people than needed to keep ourselves fed.
This has nothing to do with tree hugging, and everything to do with wasted lives and opportunity. And yes I do not stockpile food to let it go bad.
My fridge is usually empty at the end of the week, and I have a policy of not letting food sit unused for more than two weeks... It's called JIT (Just in Time) for the home.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I have a body-builder friend who has studied hard up on biochemistry. Anyway, he put me on a protein diet that works brilliantly. I lost 18kgs (40lbs or so) over about 12 months without being very strict. I work too much to exercise too, so I could have done an even better job.
The basics of this low-carb diet is that carbs are used for energy (running, etc) so if you eat carbs and don't use the energy then you store it as fat.
Cut out carbs and eat more fat because what you eat most of is used for your energy.
Without carbs your body will go into ketosis but you shouldn't stay in ketosis for too long. Lay off carbs for say 7-10 days then pig out on pizza and anything you want for 2 days. Then do it all over again. Some similar protein diets won't tell you to pig out once a week and that can get dangerous to yout body coz ketosis shuts down your organs.
I'm a bit of a workaholic (wake up, sit at computer for about 14-16hrs, do it again next day) and cutting out carbs makes you think much clearer and you don't feel tired after eating coz there are no carbs. You just want to sleep all day when you're on carb-days tho.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
There is a herbal extract that causes the body to over-metabolize fatty acids, as well as stimulate the premature release of fatty acids from fat cells (this is good). They are these honking gelcaps and you take 2-3 of them a day usually before you eat.
Controlled studies showed on average that subjects lost 1 pound of body fat per month without a change in diet or excercise.
A search on google will find you a bazillion hits, most of them trying to sell you stuff.
A jar of 60 gelcaps costs around 10-15 canadian dollars, price may vary where you live.
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