Slashdot Mirror
No, Oreos Aren't As Addictive As Cocaine
Daniel_Stuckey writes "If you give a mouse a cookie, you can spend all day following it around the house while it wants to do a bunch of tedious activities. Or, you can trap it in a box, keep feeding it cookies, and then make the outrageous claim that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine. Students at Connecticut College opted for the second option, and the consequences that ensued were much more annoying than making some arts and crafts with a darn mouse. Fox News reported that a 'College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs,' Forbes explained 'Why Your Brain Treats Oreos Like a Drug,' and a ton of other sites ran with the story as well. Here's how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down. Mice were placed in a maze, with one end holding an Oreo and the other end holding a rice cake. The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture."
Cookies are delicious delicacies
If you apply your favorite peanut butter, then the it holds the notoriously fractious cake together better.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
there's nothing worse than having little bits of cookie up your nose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Give_a_Mouse_a_Cookie
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Seems reasonable that when you lock an animal (including humans) in a shitty little box it's going to over indulge in activities that work on the pleasure centers of the brain. However, given freedom and a wide range of stimuli it might be less susceptible to addiction as we have defined it. See the controversial Rat Park study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park) which showed evidence that when researchers gave lab rats a suitable and pleasurable living environment opiates were no longer addictive.
And you can't even be mad at this one since it is done by undergrads.
you know what IS as addictive as cocaine?!!
Also Who Moved My Cookies? If the cookies in a particular cookie depot get stale, mice will seek new cookies. Lilliputians, on the other hand, will pout and piss and moan about cookies losing their taste, rationalizing their lack of action based on imagined dangers out in the maze.
I saw this on Reddit a while ago, and most people either believed it or thought it was bullshit for other reasons. Reading how an experiment is conducted is usually the first thing I do. It's like a crap detector built right into the study.
Proof? They both seem to result in crazy people making stupid decision.
My reasoning is unassailable.
The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.
Of course, amongst women, the opposite behavior is seen. At least the ones I know. Does this mean that the tasteless discs with a styrofoam-like texture are actually highly addictive? No. Which means it's easier to get addicted to an abstract ideal about beauty than it is an Oreo cookie. Surprised, I am not. In other news, find me a picture of this professor so I can photoshop him into a new meme along the lines of "I don't want to live on this planet anymore." I'd be ashamed if my students arrived at such a far-fetched and obviously wrong solution, and I allowed them to publish it... it would make me wonder if I'd managed to teach them anything at all...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
As a white male I could get addicted to being in between 2 gorgeous black girls. Where do I sign up?
Clearly, what they demonstrated was that the mice would go for the item with the highest density of calories & fat.
Duh...
Now make it really interesting, replace rice patty with a peanut butter cup. And it's an all out rat race.
..Fox News
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
He's developed his own measure for it: The percentage of people who will develop the disease of dependency, based on the DSM-IV guidelines, if they use a drug. . . .
"According to that, the most chemically addictive is nicotine because one third of people who use it during their lifetime will develop dependency," he said. "For cocaine, it's 20 percent. For heroin, it's 23 percent."
So by that standard, Oreos = 0% addictive.
Oh, well.
in his "cargo cult science" address, referring to dealing with subtleties invalidating results from having rats run through mazes.
I'd always though he wasn't quite right about that. This should shed some light on the issue, no?
I read on the Internet that they are....
...the either have a war on food, or legalize drugs.
Silence is a state of mime.
So...they have the requisite skills to be Phd. wielding Psychologists/Psychiatrists then.
Watch the ADHD/ADD diagnosis rates climb even higher in the coming years.
"Fox News reported that a..."
I got here through a series of tubes
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
Not the headlines!
So in other words...WTF??
(P.S. I'm not really educated in any of this kind of stuff and don't really know what I'm talking about - so don't bother correcting me)
What's the white stuff in an Oreo, Alex?
So, it's basically an example of the "science news cycle:"
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
I can go without Oreos but not coke.
You know more than a few people must have thought that when this piece of shit excuse for a "study" made its way into the headlines. Just how many years now will I - or the great minds of /. - have to go around correcting morons who will repeat this shit, having never bothered to read the article, learn about the source, to critically analyze the source, to think about the study, to see what, if any, corroborating evidence was subsequently discovered or not, and checked for any retractions or clear refutations? Beyond that, what the fuck ever happened to journalism?
Damn it all to hell, I need an Oreo. (1.86 Stuf please)
If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll want a glass milk.
If you give him some milk, he'll want more. If you give a mouse more milk, he'll develop a taste for human blood.
If he develops a taste for human blood, he'll become a vampire. If he becomes a vampire, he'll have to make followers.
Now, if he makes some followers, they'll need to feed. If they feed too much, the national guard will be called out.
If the national gaurd is called out, they, too, will become fodder for the vampires. If the national guard fails, the President will call in a nuclear strike.
If a nuke is dropped, hundreds of thousands of people will die. America will become a nuclear wasteland and collapse.
With no one to keep the rest of the world's nukes in check, every crackpot nation will launch their own.
Eventually the entire earth will be destroyed. And that's why I had to kill Daddy.
He was giving a mouse a cookie. Sleep well, sweetie.
and Michelle Obama chose "have a war on food".
This while her husband was mandating the mass burning of vegetables.
> The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture."
Hey, I happen to like rice cakes. They're nice and crunchy, and they taste good. With a little cinnamon. And powdered sugar. And peanut butter. And then drenched with maple syrup.
Yes, the diet is coming along fine, why do you ask?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Which seems to indicate that there is some basis for comparability between the two, even if they are different, and further research is needed.
"the articles from this symposium provide evidence that neurological similarities exist in the response of humans (6) and rats (7,9) to foods and to drugs. Two of the reports (6,7), as well as our own work (14–16), suggest that even highly palatable food is not addictive in and of itself. Rather, it is the manner in which the food is presented (i.e., intermittently) and consumed (i.e., repeated, intermittent “gorging”) that appears to entrain the addiction-like process. Such consummatory patterns are associated with increased risk for comorbid complications as well as relapse and make treatment particularly challenging. The topic of food addiction bears study, therefore, to develop fresh approaches to clinical intervention and to advance our understanding of basic mechanisms involved in loss of control."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2714380/
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Not peer reviewed, but it won't matter. Moochele Obama will latch onto this like a (well you know), and will start proclaiming that this is "proof" we need to restrict sugar, carbs bla bla bla. Stuff like this, with the 30 second attention span of the average person, makes it easier to control them.
I don't think anyone has truly considered the ramifications of superintelligent pandimensional projections appearing as mice and influencing our experiments... How else would you program a global scale quantum supercomputer made up of sentient neural network applications? Consider that to us, any observable differentiation between themselves normal laboratory mice would directly collapse the delicate superposition of science and fiction...
Ergo: The more important question is: WHY do the mice want you to think they like Oreos as much as cocaine? Could it be to lessen the stigma against consuming mind altering stimulants to that of a biscuit? Clearly, we are being overclocked.
IDK about you, but you don't want to be anywhere near me when my Oreo supply runs out...I'll cut you, bitch! I'll cut you deep! :)
Seriously, though, at first I thought this was a legit test, but it's pure BS. A better* test would be three groups of mice in three mazes: Cookie vs Cocaine, Cookie vs Rice Cake and Cocaine vs Rice Cake. Guess what? Bet'cha rice cakes would be considered more addictive than cocaine as well, allowing us to draw the conclusion that...mice like food, the more calorie-rich, the better.
*but not very much better
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
There are a lot of "addictive" qualities of many of the food products we ingest. Many of them are engineered to delay the "satisfy button" in our systems so that we eat more. (The common response to this problem is people asserting "eat more slowly" and "drink more water") and to that I say... uh, no. In a busy life, one doesn't always have time to pause and "enjoy" food. Eating is sometimes an interruption of whatever it is we are doing... fun, work, whatever. We are not always at leisure to determine how much time we have to eat. And of course my experience in the military didn't help forming bad habits did it? (But here's a mystery -- military food seems a lot more satisfying and healthy than civilian food... could also be the exercise regimen... I dunno. But some foods are easier to get fat on that others. It's not only about carbs and calories it's about the source of them and the way they are prepared... if you eat raw wheat, you will get less "stuff" than from processed wheat right?)
Anyway, back to addictive food qualities. I there are some well documented secrets of food that people should be made aware of. Among these is the fifth flavor sense. So after "sweet" "sour" "bitter" and "salty" there is a "new one" that the Chinese have known about for centuries if not millennia. It's called "savory" but the Chinese have another name for it... we also know it as "MSG."
And there's lots lots more to know about food and eating and how it all works.
The whole "rice cake" argument doesn't negate the whole study. They didn't just monitor the behavior of the rats, they measured the chemical release in the brain and compared it to the release of the same chemicals in the brain after ingestion of cocaine.
From TFA ( http://www.conncoll.edu/news/news-archive/2013/student-faculty-research-shows-oreos-are-just-as-addictive-as-drugs-in-lab-rats-.htm )
"They used immunohistochemistry to measure the expression of a protein called c-Fos, a marker of neuronal activation, in the nucleus accumbens, or the brain’s “pleasure center.”
“It basically tells us how many cells were turned on in a specific region of the brain in response to the drugs or Oreos,” said Schroeder.
They found that the Oreos activated significantly more neurons than cocaine or morphine."
1. Scientist does science.
2. Scientist opens his mouth about the science he did.
3. All other scientists call him a worthless cunt.
4. Science suppressed. Scientist exiled.
5. Start from one again.
Proving once and for all that science is both politics and religion.
the ones with a serious interest in cookies were the students. Anyone care to guess the relative risk of a mouse vs. a human, as seen by an Oreo in the study?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Addiction" has two meanings.
1) A PHYSICAL addiction where removal of access to the substance has clear PRIMARY effects on the chemistry of the patient.
2) PSYCHOLOGICAL addiction, where the patient craves and needs regular access to the substance in ways that can be measured statistically with a group of such people, but cannot be directly linked to a biochemical process.
One might assume that 2 is the same as 1, if only our scientific understanding were better, but this ignores the fact that Humans have complicated mental processes as well, and that there is no good reason addiction cannot also result from how we think, feel and perceive.
Anyway, the word 'addiction' is misused, especially in the USA. Most people can give up using most soft and hard drugs will no ill effects. Fat Americans are fat because they are addicted to the pleasures of eating certain foods. How many people get fat because they each too much wholegrain bread?
Most Humans like reliable sources of pleasure, and will frequently return to those sources if they are cheap and convenient. Is it an addiction because you do 'it' a lot, or because doing 'it' seems to interfere with other things in life?
If a food item is 'nice', and many people will not get bored eating that item over and over, do you want to label it as 'addictive'.
And do NOT turn to animal experimentation for a 'better' answer. Anyone with a cat will tell you they quickly learn to "live to eat", NOT "eat to live", just like most of their owners.
Are these kids retarded? You would expect better from a 3rd grade science project.
The only useful information from that experiment is that rodents also like to eat the cream filling first, then the cookie.
Now what starts with the letter C?
Cookie starts with C
Let's think of other things
That starts with C
Oh, Cocaine start with C, too.
And other things that start with C?
Oh, who cares about the other things?
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me.
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me.
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me
Oh, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine starts with C.
Me thinks Oreo is delicious cookie.
And Oreo's white addictive stuff
Between two chocolate wafer
Make me think of of cocaine
Oh and big white moon also look like giant Scarface plate of Cocaine
But you can't snort that, so....
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me, yeah!
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me
C is for cocaine, that's good enough for me
Oh, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine starts with C, yeah!
Cocaine, cocaine, cocaine starts with C, oh boy!
Cocaine, cocaine, cocaine starts with C!
...have put an Oreo at one side of the maze and a line of cocaine at the other if they really wanted to see which was more addictive?
From
Not conclusive, but not as trivial as its being made out to be
http://www.conncoll.edu/
Neuroscience major and Science Leader Lauren Cameron ’14 was awarded a Keck Grant, which provides summer research stipends in the sciences to qualified students, to work with Schroeder to continue the research over the summer. They used immunohistochemistry to measure the expression of a protein called c-Fos, a marker of neuronal activation, in the nucleus accumbens, or the brain’s “pleasure center.”
“It basically tells us how many cells were turned on in a specific region of the brain in response to the drugs or Oreos,” said Schroeder.
They found that the Oreos activated significantly more neurons than cocaine or morphine.
treacle, blood pudding, and clotted cream biscuits are much better than anything over here. We eat pure shit compared to the delicacies to be had in your dusty corner for the world.
Seriously, if you mean black treacle- it has a stronger taste than the golden variety, and I wasn't a big fan as a kid, but it's quite nice as an ingredient. Black pudding? Haven't eaten it for years, but I'd put it in my mouth. Clotted cream? Method of thickening cream by slightly cooking it- never tried it, but can't be that bad.
:'-(
So what have the Americans got? Skip this if you're eating lunch... One of the most genuinely unpleasant sounding- and looking- "delicacies" I've ever heard of, but fortunately never tasted. Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you... canned pork brains in milk gravy.
Yeah... I think it's going to take a lot to "improve" upon that.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
All I need to do is couch this in flamboyant, headline-ready terms, and the networks will eat it up. So to speak.
"woof".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Only to have retards down vote and foxtard you off the map.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623#comic
The white stuff, The white stuff
The first one was a sweet one
Second one was a blast
Soon I finished off the bag, ate 'em up real fast
You can see 'em in my teeth
Tell it when I talk
Had so many my pancreas just went into shock
I love the white stuff, baby
In the middle of an Oreo
I love the white stuff, baby
It's the most delicious thing I know
I've had a zillion or two
In my life, they're so right
My teeth are all rotted clear through
But who cares? What else am I supposed to do?
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, Oh Oreo
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, the white stuff
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, Oh Oreo
What's in the middle? The white stuff
The first time that I tried it
Got a big sugar buzz
Nothing gets me high as that sandwhich cookie does
But I love the filling most
I rub it on my roast
Mix it in with my coffee and spread it on my toast
I love the white stuff, baby
In the middle of an Oreo
I love the white stuff, baby
Take some with me everywhere I go
Might get a pimple or two
Well, so what? It's all right
Now Twinkies and Ding Dongs won't do
All I need... You know what it is
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, Oh Oreo
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, the white stuff
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, Oh Oreo
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, the white stuff
Oh OH OH-OH-Oh, Oh Oreo
What's in the middle? The white stuff
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wrong conclusion there. Proper conclusion is that rice cakes cure cocaine addiction.
If you give a meme cat a GIF, it will keep repeating the same motions in the animated GIF.
More than it will climb Mount Everest.
WARNING: Meme cats are addicted to the Internet and hate mountain climbing!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"...Fox News reported that a..."
That's when you know it's a goof.
There are plenty of homeless or otherwise under-employed people who could be used in real mazes to do real human testing.
...what about Nutella? You can't say Nutella isn't like crack. Excuse me while I inject my veins with Nutella flavored Nutella on Nutella cookie with Nutella sprinkles. What were we talking about?
You can dance if you want to.
After about 15 of them, you get pretty sick of oreos for about a week or so.
I am 50+ and remember my 4th grade science teacher telling me that that the theory of plate tectonics was so new that it wasn't taught when she was in school. She brought it up because she wanted us little school kiddies to understand that scientific theory evolves with the adoption of new, peer reviewed, debated, experimentally validated hypotheses that depend upon specific and consistent use of language and method. All of this together is supposed to advance the state of human knowledge and hopefully the human condition. It's plain as the nose on Rupert Murdoch's ugly puss that Fox has no respect for anything but revenue and their editorial staff can't distinguish a science from a seance or a fact from a fascist, so why does anyone waste other people's time posting the stupid crap that spews forth from this maw of mediocrity? Is it really that addictive, or is revenue the least common denominator for the Nuu Slashdot as well? An Oreo from Cowboy Neal's chuck wagon for the first cogent response?
They also give off more smell overall than a rice cake.
You're presented with a maze... one path smells like high grade cannabis, the other doesn't smell like much at all, which do you choose?
Keep it Clean! :D
The real shocker here is that there's a "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" reference on Slashdot! Proof that not all us Slashdot readers are unmarried single guys. Some of us are married with kids. I'm proud to have read all of the "If You Give A _____ A _____" books to my kids. Not high literature by any stretch of the imagination, but little kids like them and reading to your kids is a very good thing.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
... of three mice in the subway tunnel, mice prefer scavenging trash on the tracks to preservation of their own life. This makes them a poor choice for a model of anything but a crazed homeless person. Rats, on the other hand, tend to duck into a hole when the train comes, so repeating the study with them might provide some insight into human behavior.
This is a total misrepresentation of the study. This from the full story at Connecticut College:
" associate professor of psychology and director of the behavioral neuroscience program, and his students found rats formed an equally strong association between the pleasurable effects of eating Oreos and a specific environment as they did between cocaine or morphine and a specific environment. They also found that eating cookies activated more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than exposure to drugs of abuse. "
"They compared the results of the Oreo and rice cake test with results from rats that were given an injection of cocaine or morphine, known addictive substances, on one side of the maze and a shot of saline on the other. "
"The research showed the rats conditioned with Oreos spent as much time on the “drug” side of the maze as the rats conditioned with cocaine or morphine."
That doesn't mean the research is great, can't be criticized or by any means definitive. But the research has a lot more to support it than most of the criticism of the research here.
My wife has informed me if I am caught grinding up one more and inhaling it using a rolled up Franklin I'm divorced. God I pray I can stop. Crap, I need to do another line, the chunks kind of hurt but I need a fix.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
More likely, a partnership between Coke and Koch.
Tell that to my 6-year-old self.
Wanted to see what brand my old cat liked best. So I placed two bowls of cat food next to each other and then observed which one was emptied.
Answer: Both.
Twist: Mice hate Oreos so they eat it first and reserve the rice cake as dessert and to wash the taste away.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://dearblankpleaseblank.com/permalink.php?viewid=121526 Dear Fox News, So far, no news about foxes. Sincerely, Unimpressed
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Brewing tea is quite easy. Go to an Indian store and buy a 1kg pack. We get 1KG pack for your 300 INR in India for excellent tea. Thats less than 5$. With markup and all 1KG tea of good quality(eg. Taj Mahal) should be around 10-20$ in Indian stores in any big city.
That 1KG pack will brew around 500 150ml cups of tea for you.
Add milk and sugar to taste.
Here is the recipe. Remember this is how tea is made in India, which is kind of like the home of Tea. British just borrowed it and consider those silly tea bags as tea.
Lets say you want to make 300ml of tea(2 cups)
Take 300ml water.
Add sugar to taste. If you have a sweet tooth you would need around 4 teaspoons, otherwise most people do fine with 1 teaspoon each or 2 for 300ml. Use cane sugar.
Start boiling the water, and as you start seeing the steam coming, put in the tea leaves. Add 1.5 tea spoons
This figure is relative. Some like tea bitter, so you would need 2 tea spoons
Keep boiling the water with tea leaves. Once it starts boiling, i.e reaches around 100 degree C(violent water) keep boiling it for 1 minute or so.
By the end of a minute or so you would have 250ml water left. Add 50ml milk. Or add 70ml if you want it whiter.
Bring it to a boil(the mixture would start rising) and turn off the gas, and cover it for couple of minutes, sitting there.
Now pour the mixture from a sieve and throw away the spend leaves.
Drink and enjoy. Not expensive.
Some further tips. If you like a strong spicy flavor, add 1/4th teaspoon of cinnamon powder along with tea leaves.
If you like to have gingery flavor(excellent sore through remedy), put around 1 table spoon of crushed fresh ginger
If you like aromatic, add 3 small crushed cardamom cloves((a pack of 100 cloves costs around 3-4$ at Indian stores.
Some links
Tea -> http://shop.khanapakana.com/brooke-bond-taj-mahal-tea-15-8-oz-450-grams/ 6$ for half kg. you may find cheaper
Cardamon pods -> http://nhastore.com/Cardamon-Pods-Whole-Green-1-Pound-Bulk--P884492.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=Product_Search&utm_campaign=google_base
Remember one cup tea needs 1 clove of cardamom so even a 30$/1lb pack will last you for 500 cups or so or even more.
If you ever make a vacation to India, buy 5kg tea and store in air tight container(it will not spoil). Will cost 15$ or so. Cardamom will be 5-6$ for 1kg pack.
Once again, lemme tell you, british do not know tea. That is not tea.
When british first discovered tea, they used to bew tea, throw away the water and eat the bitter spent leaves, and then complain that Indians eat such vile stuff
Tea has to be brewed, and the first 10-15 cups will not taste very good.
Slowly you will realize how much milk, or how much sugar, or how much tea leaves you need to add.
Watch some Indian youtube videos for tea making. You will find some where 300ml water + 70ml milk and mixed and then boiled. After the boil the burner is kept on slow and tea leaves are added which are then brewed on slow flame for 5 minutes.;
These are all variations. Experiment, and you will find what you really want.
And its a cheap cheap way to prepare tea.
In India we often make 10 cups, keep in a thermos, and for the next 5 hours we can keep microwaving and having. However after 4-5 hours, the taste starts going bad.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Not that it serves any purpose. But an experiment with mice is not complete unless it also includes a maze.
(In this case, of course, it served the purpose of forcing the mice to find their food by smell. I wonder what smells more strongly; a chocolate cookie or a rice cracker.)
It should be noted that the article cited states that the DSM-IV is the most used publication for dealing with disorders. In fact, the DSM-IV-TR is, despite the release of the DSM-V which is still being transitioned to. Furthermore, substance dependence is addressed within the DSM. Whether or not dependence = addiction is another matter entirely.
Find a study pointless without looking at, just state the obvious points of the research, ignore the details, belittle the researchers, and call it a day.
Who Moved My Cheese? (or cookies in this case)
Randroid Alert!
Randroid as opposed to the iRan?
In fact, I would say I can't live without food. I must be addicted to it.
Also I prefer tasty cookies over cardboard-tasting rice cakes.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The military wants to make sure they have a functional fighting force so they will ensure that the food has a high nutritional standard so it doesn't surprise me that would be more healthy than civilian food. Civilian food they want you to buy and consume more of so the companies make more money so you are dealing with 2 very different philosophies. I do hear that the preparation quality of military food leaves something to be desired but all institutional food seems to be that way.
Time to offend someone
Through my studies, I've always had to distinguish between "positive addiction" and "negative addiction", with the difference being how does the 2nd "hit" make one feel relative to the first "hit"?
Positive addiction: Each successive consumption results in a greater effect. E.g. I go to church on a weekly basis. The first time I go to church, I feel "fine" as mass concludes. After a year of going to church, I feel "great" as mass concludes.
Negative addiction: Each successive consumption results in a smaller effect. E.g. I run regularly. As I first begin to run regularly, I feel a "runner's high" after running 10 miles. After a year of running, I now need to run 26.2 miles to achieve the same "high."
Note that positive & negative are morality-neutral and are more of a mathematical construct. Similar to positive/negative reinforcement where a stimulus is added (e.g. child is given a toy; child receives a spanking) or removed (child's toy is taken away from him; child is ignored.)
Taste? When I was in, it was your basic "school cafeteria" level. On a ship at sea, it was a bit better actually... in some cases, exceptionally better. (I think that is mostly because the guys making it also have to eat it... on land, it's usually "cafeteria ladies" who serve but do not eat.)
I can't speak to the other branches of the service. Navy's at least passable.
The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.
Did this person even bother to read the story? No, they didn't reach their conclusion based on mice preferring Oreos to rice cakes. They looked for specific signs of addiction, both behavioral and physiological. And they repeated the experiment replacing the Oreos by cocaine or morphine, and found that all measures of addiction were just as high for the cookies as for the drugs.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
If you don't think that Oreos are just as addictive as cocaine, then you clearly aren't snorting/freebasing/mainlining them properly.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
I have heard similar things with the submariners having the best food but my cousin who is in the Army National Guard (Minnesota Red Bulls) regularly complained about the food quality while in Kuwait and has stated it is comparable to dorm food.
Time to offend someone
Indian premium brands like Taj Mahal are excellent for black tea too.
In India, few people use flavoured tea. However, they do flavor their tea.
If you want a lemony flavor - Just add a few drops of lemon juice(Fresh squeezed)
If you want aroma - Cardamon
If you want Spice - Cinnamon
Flavoring tea like this has better results than pre flavored tea. When you refer to Earl grey and such , I figure you are buying Twinnings?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography