Dean Kamen Invents Stomach Pump For Dieters
You may soon have another option to lose weight other than dieting and exercise thanks to Dean Kamen. The inventor has designed a pump that can suck the cheeseburgers out of your stomach and replace it with water. From the article: "The pump was invented by Dean Kamen, the same man who brought you the Segway, and perhaps more fittingly, a breakthrough dialysis machine. This pump works by routing a tube directly into the user's stomach and then sucking out some of the gooey, masticated goodness. The user then squeezes a little plastic bag to replace that volume of stomach-stew with water. Sounds great, right? There are some catches though. It hasn't been approved by the FDA yet, and some of the users in the tests had problems with certain foods like 'cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese food, stir fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips, and steak.' Oh, also there's a tube going into your stomach that you use to pump unpuked vomit into the toilet. Participants in trial studies did manage to lose about half of their excess weight this way, around 45 pounds on average, so apparently it works."
Or at least a marketable, respectable form of bulimia.
Just not eat all those cheeseburgers in the first place? Hah! Crazy talk, I know!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why on earth would you want to suck out the broccoli? This gadget needs a fiberscopic camera that will allow you to view the semi-digested morsels and suck out the ones you don't want to keep.
Eeewww.
Seriously, EEEWWW.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Yes, and energy should somehow be extracted from it and fed back into the grid
You can't vomit regularly; you get ulcers, it becomes extremely painful, and it destroys your esophagus and your teeth.
It's as if nature were trying to tell us something...
Dieting and exercise? For suckers. Bring on the pump.
"There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America"
No, they couldn't, not unless that food could be transported to them and distributed before it became inedible. In countries with good infrastructure, that's not a problem, but those billion malnourished generally don't live in a place with good air freight service, well-maintained highways, and refrigerated trucking.
Any solution to global poverty is going to have to largely rely on bootstrapping local production. Despite importing a lot of food, most western nations export a whole lot more - they have sufficient capacity to feed themselves, and trade for variety/seasonality. Getting developing nations to the point of self sufficiency is key - anything else leaves them dependant on the developed world, which will screw them over when a drought/famine/whatever hits, and we have less excess to give.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Agreed, but many of those places have transportation (where it exists) that is configured to remove produce and resources onto boats headed for regions like Europe, North America and increasingly China. As you pointed out, that can also work in reverse WRT food... but I don't believe that is the case for all materials in general.
As I see it, any country that is not heavily bought-up by globalist Wall St. banks and aligned with NATO would inevitably appear as a threat to the West if they reconfigured their infrastructure to be self-sufficient and more self-serving. Self-sufficiency for an emerging region would necessarily have to stonewall the influences of the global banking system, because the system has a record of opportunistically creating crises which put the land and resources of so many developing countries on sale to Western corporations at fire sale prices. When the financial empire convulses because of mismanagement at its center, its the fringes that are most quickly abandoned because of a lack of familiarity or personal involvement by wealthy investors-- then they are lined up for 'austerity' programs which have much more to do with rent seeking by foreign actors than with self-sufficiency.
This looks to me to be the single most disgusting invention I've ever seen. Surely it's easier to just eat smaller meals rather than gorge, then pump partially digested food out through a pipe through your gut. I guess it tops the Segway as stupidest invention ever.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
I'm reading a lot of excuses in your post. It's gut bacteria it's pollution, it's Big Corn, it's stress. I'm not reading anything about taking personal responsibility. Losing weight means running a calorie deficit. This will make you feel bad. The only way to get though that is to get off the notion that you should feel good all the time and volutarily put yourself in a situation where you're hungry and feeling bad. that feeling will pass in a couple of weeks and it will strengthen your willpower.
It seems to me a general truth that people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior by way of their own good fortune. The line your advocating is equivalent to "Just say no to drugs" or abstinence-only sex education. You're burying your head in the sand.
It's not like people who are thin and in good shape aren't generally walking around hungry, feeling bad. People who are thin and healthy aren't starving themselves, or at least they shouldn't be. If you're walking around hungry and feeling bad, you're doing it wrong.
And aside from the list of factors that bzipitidoo gave, your talk about willpower ignored a pretty important factor: the phenomenon of "willpower" is a biological activity that has its limits. There have been a few studies that suggest that your decision-making process and ability to exercise self-control is dependent on blood sugar levels, which creates a nice little catch-22 for dieters. You don't eat, your blood sugar drops, your self-control weakens. I good way to reinforce your self-control is to have a snack to boost your blood sugar levels, but then you'd be breaking your diet.
Anyway, it's not about making excuses. It's about understanding the nature of the problem. I'm skinny, but it's not a function of discipline, self-control, or moral superiority. I eat whatever I want, as much as I want, and somehow I'm still skinny. Lucky me. I don't go around trying to pretend I'm some kind of hero, and I don't belittle people who are less lucky, who want to understand why.