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Smarter Children Through Food Supplements
An anonymous reader writes "Baby rats (mmm...baby rats) fed a little extra choline in utero popped out with brain cells dramatically bigger and faster than pups who didn't receive the supplement. Duke University researchers say the implications are profound for humans and the future of learning."
Oh, by the way......all of what I said above and.......First post.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
So now we get to find out if overclocking the brain
with choline will lead to nasty side effects?
I would think that some percentage of Slashdotters would understand that a child who isn't challenged by schoolwork could turn into an outcast of some sort or, worse, could refuse to do work altogether. They will think of petty homework and tasks such as character charts and subjects such as The Renaissance as beneath their intelligence. I am going through a personal hell not being able to concentrate in my classes. It's all so uesless to me. Why am I reading this book? Why am I doing this math problem? I'm a writer. I need to write freeform! Anyway, that's basically the mindset of a kid who has given up on school.
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
Choline is a naturally occurring nutrient found in egg yolks, milk, nuts, fish, liver and other meats as well as in human breast milk. It is the essential building block for a memory-forming brain chemical called acetylcholine, and it plays a vital role in the formation of cell membranes throughout the body.
Someone needs to read Brave New World
Thousands of parents will be rushing out and getting these supplemets, trying to "help" their unborn children.
10 years from now, a crime wave is going to hit. A bunch of Super intelligent, yet hyperactive and ruthless 9 year olds, with ultra fast reflexes and photographic memory, but total lack of self-control and morals, begins their master plan of taking over the world.
Hey, this may be an interesting Movie plot....
People, I recommend against fooling with the brain until we actually know what we're doing. But Parents are insane anyway (looking into a mirror.)
or ephedra (cardiac arrest anyone?),
Careful, Ephedra works exactly the way it's supposed too(As a bronchial dialator and constricting agent). The people that experience negative effects either abuse it(read: take TOO MUCH) or shouldn't be taking it due to a prior condition. Yes, I take ephedra, and have on and off in cycles for 5+ years(now am 24). Do your own due dillgence and see what works for your body.
I can make the smae statment about aspirin: give 10000mg to an 80 yr old with low blood pressure and see what happens....
-k
You can buy choline in almost any of those stores which sell vitamins and nutritional supplements. I live in New York and there is one on every corner.
I read something similar about over a year ago in Science News magazine. Curious and willing to experiment on myself, I bought a jar of choline and started taking one a day.
Here's what I noticed:
First, its it's an intestinal irritant. Its sold in gelatine capusules and if you just swallow one a day, you'll be sorry after a while. I recommend opening the capsules and disolving the choline in something buffered, like milk.
You don't notice anything for a few weeks. And after you stop taking it, the effects persist for weeks.
The stuff is defintely psychoactive. I was constantly locked in deep thought. I finally stopped taking it because I got tired of thinking all the time.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Smarter children thru:
Playing with them, spending time with them.
Giving them toys, then spending time showing them how the toys work. Toys that challenge them to do something are good - like legos - stay away from "Disney type" toys (yeah, I know, it's a blanket definition. You know what I mean)
Teaching them to read - don't wait for fucking kindergarten, teach them yourself. Added benefit of getting to know your kids better. Books. Lots of books. Share the reading with them. Read to them, with them, and for them.
Answer questions. "Why is the sky blue?" Answer it. If you don't know how to, learn why it is. There are a lot of questions that a kid will ask that will require you to to know at least something about it. The hardest part is translation. I asked that question when I was very young, and my old man told me that it's because it's the color that "comes thru"; later I learned that he wasn't bullshitting me. I really appreciated that. He didn't evade the question, just tried to put it in terms I'd understand.
Which leads to
Don't ever, every lie to your your kids. Don't bullshit them. Not about anything. If they ask you about sex, don't evade the question or bullshit them - they'll find some other avenue to educate themselves, and it will likely be something that's not the best way to learn it. You might have to actually think about it to find some way to explain it to them. Do it. You might learn something, too.
Don't ever, EVER try to bullshit your kids, or evade what they are curious about. You will lose their respect and trust when they find out (and they do, eventually, and that's one of the biggest problems in the US right now, but that's a whole 'nother topic).
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
This strikes me as a bit bizarre.
Humanity already has a fairly well-known subgroup of people with brains that have more active neuronal structure, greater capacity for memory, a drastic reduction in age-related decline in cognitive/memorizations kills, and heightened sensory reactions. (Which is all wonderful to have, speaking firsthand.)
The response from the community has not been to embrace us. It has been to force us into painful "treatments" from a young age that train us to "act normal" -- to hide all signs that we're different, including strong natural interests in learning and pain at stimuli that doesn't bother sensory-average humans. There are huge organizations decrying how horrible it is that we exist at all, that actively claim it'd be better if we died of cancer, because we don't act just like "normal" people.
It strikes me as bizarrely hypocritical for one wing of science to be fighting to find a way to prevent/cure my kind, while another is attempting to learn how to intentionally create us. We're already here, we tend to reproduce reliably within families, we just need to be accepted rather than terrorized into hiding our abilities.
As well as high fat, and high a number of other things. Corelation does not equal causation. In this case they isolated choline in making the tests, which is at least proper methodolgy.
Oddly enough, working completely from memory (noncholine "supercharged"), human breast milk is the lowest in protein and fat content of any of these, as I recall ( and it's been some years since I specifically looked into this) about the same percentage as is found in brown rice.
Although remarkable omnivores, human beings are still, deep down, essentially grain eaters. It's the Staff of Life. We require far less protein than most other predatious creatures, like cats, dogs and . . . rats. The myth of "complete protein" comes from a study done on rats in the early 1930s, and debunked in the early thirties as well, although the myth has proven nearly impossible to shake. Once something makes it into print it seems impossible to unprint.
I'm naturally sceptical of animal studies applied to human beings, especially when it comes to nutrition. Our physiology is hardly unique, but it seems to have an odd sort of pliablity that gives strength. Like the reed bending in the wind. Unlike most animals we seem to be able to eat nearly anything, anywhere, and so long as it contains at least minimal amounts of the core substances of life, come out of the deal looking and acting basically the same. I'd say this is a prime reason we were able to spread across the earth. Wherever we went, we found food. A chimpanzee in the desert is hosed. A human will turn to snakes and lizards and do just fine. In the semidesert of a prarie, well, we're surrounded by the Staff of Life.
I'm with Mr. Jones on this one. Until such time as there is some real evidence of effect on human development I entirely hold my judgment, and I'm not inclined to hold my breath over it.
KFG
More on topic, changing one parameter of complex system that is possibly well tuned for what it does, but not well tuned for parameter changes, may result in a system that is far less efficient or even completely broken.
Imagine if you magically made it possible for signals to travel on ethernet faster than routers could process them. You might see an increase in congestion or in misrouted packets. This in turn could melt down the network, or at least make it impossible for anyone to use it.
I am not trying to say that this is what the researchers have proposed. I'm just pointing out that making one thing better can put stress on or even break the entire system.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Right, so you find some third-world country that is desperate for smarter people and let them guinea-pig it for us. Then, if it works, outsource all your workers to a new facility in that country and hire all the smart kids, patent the hell out of it, and then upcharge parents all over the world who want smarter babies. On the other hand, if it simply produces thousands of highly intelligent epileptics with Parkinson's Disease and giant forehead tumors, deny any involvement whatsoever until forced to confess, and then explain that the drug tested was really just a new AIDS cocktail. Isn't that how the pharmaceutical industry operates anyway?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
A smarter rat doesn't necessarily correspond to a smarter human. And human intelligence isn't necessarily related to whether the hardware is faster. By analogy, a DSP may run operations faster than a Pentium, but that doesn't make the DSP a better general purpose processor. Or, as another analogy, just upgrading the clock circuit on your motherboard doesn't just make your processor faster--it may also make it flakier. It's plausible that choline is somewhat beneficial as a nutrient during pregnancy. But I wouldn't expect miracles (if choline were that important, women would crave more of it than they do), and there is at least the possibility that an unbalanced intake actually might do some harm.
The sad thing is much of the dietary recommendations by various OFFICIAL/GOV bodies don't really have much scientific backing either.
All that worry about high cholesterol foods being bad for blood cholesterol. If dietary cholesterol really affected bloodstream, why not eat foods with high good cholesterol (HDL) then? Doesn't work that way? So why should it work the way they suggest?
Not too long ago they were saying eggs were bad for you (high cholesterol) then, eggs were ok. then now eggs are good. Fortunately my mom figured eggs and fish were good (amongst other things).
And there are recent studies that have shown that a high protein diet (even with significant fat content) is ok for blood cholesterol and can even reduce obesity.
You get the stupid diet quacks saying, "So we were right after all, weight loss is due to calorie reduction, not because of protein metabolism, low calorie carbo diets work too! etc" in response to studies showing that people eat less on high protein diets because they feel more satisfied. Doh - what do they want, people to be miserable and feel like they are starving on their "recommended" stupid low calorie high carbo diets?
They've made so many people's lives miserable with their diet recommendations.
As for ephedra, if they ban that they might as well ban paracetamol too - paracetamol is rather dangerous stuff for the rather little benefit it does (I can deal with the mild pain, aches and fever, it does hardly anything for the major stuff)- overdosing is easy and the consequences are serious/fatal.