Quoth Wired.com: "Who in their right mind thinks it’s OK to eat soup while driving a two-ton projectile?

To be honest, I don't feel this is something young people should give much thought to. When you are young, there are more pressing problem closer to home. First among them, for most healthy people, is finding a mate and raising your offspring. Youth is a more animalistic phase of life: Although our brains were quite active, there was little room for using them to organize our lives. But as we grow up all over again, the circle that concerns us grows wider, and we become aware of how our choices influence society and the whole planet.

( Saving the planet at the table )

-or rather, it just feels that way. This happens from time to time, my brain creating the illusion that I have recently binged on candy. I suppose it is the body's way of saying "carb reserves are full, thank you". My stomach, on the other hand, is screaming for food. I wish my stomach and my brain had some way to talk together and work this out. Failing that, I wish there was some sort of edible cardboard that I could eat that would simply make the stomach content and not have any other effects. Actually, there probably is such a thing, with the millions of dieting women filling the rich world. But perhaps they like the discomfort. I never understood either women or dieting anyway.

When I was a boy, back on the farm, one of our animals caught ill and we called for the verterinary. Unfortunately he could only conclude that the poor beast be put out of her misery. So the unavoidable question came up for a literally poor farm household: Might the meat be edible? That's when the veterinary gave us the words of wisdom that have stayed with me for somewhere like 40 years since:
"You may eat the Devil himself, if only you cook and fry him enough."

I haven't gone quite that far, but today I cooked and thoroughly fried a generous portion of pickled cabbage. (Surkål, for my Norwegian reader.) Admittedly I added a bit of rice noodles, raisins and even a little oil-preserved sundried tomatoes. But mostly pickled cabbage. Note to self: Less cabbage, more noodles if we try this again.

But at least I cooked and fried it thoroughly.

I bought my favorite potato salad before this weekend. Grill potato salad with maize-corn and barbeque spices. It is only available in the summer, unfortunately. So, about eating it... On Saturday I didn't because it was too hot. (I need to heat these things until the fat runs out, since fat makes me violently ill. Besides, it greatly improves the taste.) It was so hot, I was mostly drinking juice and water through the day, and some yogurt. No frying for sure. Then on Sunday, my stomach hurt (as it tends to do if I sleep on my right side the night before - I am not sure this is normal, but it's been like that for some years). So I couldn't eat anything that day either. And now on Monday, the weather is cool and my stomach doesn't hurt - but my guts are running wild. I have only eaten small portions of mild stuff all day. So the salad is still not opened. I wonder if fate is going to make a sport out of this and see if it can keep me off the salad until it spoils in the fridge...

How Food Diaries Work (Time)
I haven't done this myself, but evidently it helps people who struggle with keeping their weight down without having any medical disorder. I wonder if it is not related to the way people eat less if they are facing a mirror while they eat. (By all means try this at home.) I think of it as a way of increasing consciousness. Hard to go wrong with that. More about that later, Light willing.

I just read an interesting little article in Norwegian on the topic of ecological food (which I believe is usually called organic food in English, or at least in American). This is food that is grown without synthetic fertilizer and without pest or weed poison. Instead, natural fertilizers are used, weeds are pulled manually or mechanically, and pests are deterred by planting certain types of plants together that repel pests, as well as using hybrid strains of cultivated and wild sorts that are naturally resistant to pests and diseases. Most customers of these products are probably vegans, but there is also some ecological milk production, at least there is here in Scandinavia.

The article questioned the morality of farming methods that give less than 60% of the crops you could have gotten from the same area, in a time where food is getting scarce.

( I disagree... )

I felt like getting a couple banana yogurt anyway. So while I was at the shop, I picked up a few packets of dried pasta, and a couple boxes of canned vegetables. Stuff that can stand a few years without spoiling. It was more like because I could carry that much anyway. It's not like I'm stocking up for a food shortage, you know. There won't be any of that up here in Norway. Well, not for any foreseeable reason at least. Asteroid hits, Iceland exploding, that kind of stuff could be a problem. But not just the usual stupidity. I mean, so what if some countries decide to stop exporting food to keep it for their own citizens? Norway is exporting a lot of fish, which we could keep as well if they want to play it that way. And there is a lot of terrain that can be used to produce food if people really needed to. But food has been so cheap for so long that we have had to pay farmers as if they were state employees to make them stay on their farms. Paying a little more for the food is only healthy. My countrymen are starting to get a little chubby as it is.

But anyway, I just happen to like pasta. And vegetables.

Memories of your last meal can help you stay thin - New Scientist (mostly subscriber content).

"Suzanne Higgs and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, asked a group of women students to take part in a biscuit taste test, having previously given them a set lunch. Before the test began, Higgs encouraged half of the women to write a detailed description of their lunch, while the rest were asked to recall their journey to the campus.
After the taste test, which had been designed to hide the true nature of the study from participants, each woman was invited to eat their fill of the remaining biscuits. The women who had recalled their lunch ate fewer biscuits than those who recalled their journey, Higgs found."

It is widely assumed that thinking of food can cause people to eat more. But it seems that thinking of food you already ate can cause people to eat LESS.

I happened to know one guy who had a brain damage that caused him to forget most of his life. He filled the blank with steadily new imaginary exploits, though. But more to the case, he also forgot his meals soon after he had eaten them, and would then proceed to eat again. And again. And again. It is pretty amazing. Until then, I thought there were sensors in the stomach that measured whether you were full or not. But evidently these play only a minor role, while the brain plays a major role.

In any case, I present you with this valuable piece of knowledge because I care. ^_^ Live long and prosper!

Soaring food prices? Let them have potatoes!

It is 3 years since the Easter when I got violently ill for two weeks and finally found out that I could no longer digest fat. (It had probably been building for a while, since I see similar symptoms in old diary entries, just not as often and as extreme.)

I haven't talked with the doctors about it ever since I found out. Perhaps there is a cure - but if I am cured, I will almost certainly return to my normal eating habits and my normal weight (which has probably increased in my absence - it tends to increase gradually until our 60es). More important than the weight is the percentage of calories taken as fat - if this is low enough, the body will not waste fat on plaques in the arteries. Less than 10% and the plaque actually starts dissolving. O_O I don't think I eat quite that little fat, but it is probably gradual rather than an on-off switch.

This entry brought to you by having to put half my dinner in the fridge because I ate a few snacks earlier.

I start cooking food in the kitchen, then wander off to the home office (other side of the house) and forget about the food on the stove, until the Invisible Hand clicks on me and sends me back to the kitchen. This has happened several times this holiday. O_O

"A second theme is response to changes in diet caused by the domestication of plants and animals. One example of this is variation in LCT, a gene involved in the metabolism of lactose, a sugar found in milk. All human babies can metabolise lactose, but only some adults can manage the trick. That fact, and the gene involved, have been known for some time. But Dr Moyzis's team have worked out the details of the evolution of LCT. They suspect that it was responsible for the sudden spread of the Indo-European group of humanity about 4,000 years ago, and also for the more recent spread of the Tutsis in Africa, whose ancestors independently evolved a tolerant version of the gene."
The Economist

"According to the World Bank, the grain needed to fill up an SUV would feed a person for a year."
- The Economist, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420

For the third time in a week, I went to the medical center at Tangvall and had my blood sugar tested after 12 hours without food. I could have tested it myself, you know, but this is something my doctor has come up with. In addition to these snapshots, he will look at the amount of sugar bound to my hemoglobine, a measure of long-term blood sugar. It does not take divine revelation (I assume) to predict what he will find: That the fasting blood sugar is well within the normal range, while the long-term blood sugar is disturbingly high. Why will this be so? Because I eat incessantly. Normally I wake up and eat breakfast, then go to work and eat breakfast again, then a bit later it is lunch, and a couple hours I start snacking before I go home and eat. After eating I snack until the evening meal, then snack a little before I go to bed. I eat like a sparrow: They eat something every few minutes. ^_^;

This is not a mystery, it is my inability to digest fat anymore. (Except in tiny amounts, such as the fat in bread or milk) You need to eat literally twice as much carbs to get the same energy. Of course, most people don't eat only fat. But they get a disturbingly large part of their energy from fat. I know after I discovered the source of my illness, I was amazed over and over by just how much fat there was in my favorite foods.

Or at least if I don't suddenly fall terribly ill over the next couple days.

I cooked the brussels sprouts for like 10 minutes (the voice in my head said 7, but I am a cautious guy) and they were certainly cooked through, but still not destroyed. I cooked and fried some penne (pasta) and raisins as well, and stir-fried it all briefly with low-fat bacon cheese, then ate it with a little lingonberry. It would probably have been OK without the lingonberries, since I had all the other stuff. (Including some garlic salt. I love garlic. And onions. Yumm.)

For some obscure reason, brussels sprouts actually taste kind of good. Another sign that I am growin old, no doubt. Scientists say that the taste buds for bitter become less sensitive as we age, more so than the rest. Presumably this is an adaptation to the lower calories consumption as we age. We can now make do with low-energy foods like leaves. Dudes and dudettes, if there was a fast-food kitchen in town selling freshly cooked brussels sprouts, I'd totally buy it all the time. Yumm. Especially if they came with onions or garlic. I wonder if this will actually crop up when the population ages sufficiently? So far there are mostly burgers and pizza.

You know what I mean: Brussel(s) sprouts. In Norwegian and Danish they are poetically called rose cabbage, but that is utterly non-descriptive. Baby cabbage it is, then.

These cuddly little veggies are evidently popular among the elderly British (and near universally hated by the kids) but here in Norway it is a typical holiday food. So I was pleased to see that the local supermarket is stocking them now. I bought a box (400 gr) in the fond hope of having them for dinner together with jam of vaccinium vitis-idaea (lingonberry, cowberry), a good combination in my memory. However, this would depend on me being able to cook them properly. I know they were delicious the way Superwoman's family used to cook them, but unfortunately I no longer have any connection with the family to ask for details. I am led to believe that there are two competing ways of cooking them:
1) To make a cross-cut at the stem side and cook them briefly, or
2) to keep them whole and boil them through.

But it won't be today. I have to finish the bananas first before they turn brown, and I can only eat so much plants in one day. The baby cabbages should keep a little while in the fridge though.

Today I bought a bag of potato chips marked "caffeine free". Actually I was looking for another brand but it wasn't there, and I liked the humor. I use the potato chips in my dinner, incidentally. I can only eat small amounts of fat without getting sick, so I would not be able to sit down and munch a large quantity of chips. I can use some in my dinner instead of other fat, though. Today I made a fried pasta & low-fat cheese dish, starting with a bottom of crushed potato chips. Not bad, but I need to improve the seasoning, it was too bland.

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9682588
A small but probably statistically significant study shows that after being introduced to various farmer's markets, women can point in their direction more accurately than men, despite the men claiming to be more certain of the direction. Even more amazing, the single variable that most increases accuracy is the caloric value of the food. Calorie-dense food is remembered better, regardless of whether they claimed to like it or not.

Another hammer blow to the idea that boys and girls are born identical.

Known fact: If you are hungry when you shop, you will buy more. Not only when shopping for groceries, but pretty much anything. But not least groceries, of course.

Less known fact: Knowing the above will not keep it from happening.

Newly discovered fact: Eating two sugar gummi bears before leaving home is not enough to stop the hunger shopping effect.

Further experiments are in order to find out whether it is the blood sugar at all, or the feeling of emptiness in the stomach, or perhaps the level of fat and proteins. (Unless, of course, I can somehow convince Google to show me the relevant research. But eating mass quantities of gummi bears seems like a preferable option over Google.)