Your daily dose of Slashdot

I just read a fascinating article that was linked from Slashdot today. You guys probably know I'm a fan of radio that really says stuff, like the BBC World channel. Slashdot had a story that linked to a transcript of a radio program of Australia's (?) ABC Radio. The program is called Health Report.
The program was about a new villain in the battle against obesity. I'm interested in this stuff, because of obvious reasons. When I weighed myself this morning I did notice I'm back to 95 kilo's and my America-gained pounds have disappeared again (huzzah!); however, I'm still nowhere near my 80 kilogrammes perfect weight.

The program spoke of, as Slashdot puts it, "Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic". Now don't start screaming "fruit is good for you"...there's other stuff that fructose is used in. Most American foods have corn syrup added to them. Guess what that's mostly made of?

Anyway, if you've got a spare moment to read this, I can wholeheartily recommend it (link at bottom of blockquote). Here's some interesting bits.
(Leptin is a hormone that is being produced when insulin levels are high (more fat, more leptin) and prods the brain to eat less and exercise more. It's explained in the transcript, but I thought this was enough info to bore you with for the moment.)

Robert Lustig: We took these kids who developed massive obesity after brain tumours; these kids have a tumour in the area of the brain which controls energy balance, the most common of which is called a cranial pharyngioma, and once these kids are treated, that area of the brain is now dead, it cannot see leptin. When you can't see leptin your brain is starving, and so what it does is it increases your food intake because you need to eat more -- even though there's plenty of leptin, you can't see it, so it's like it wasn't there -- and it also reduces your sympathetic nervous system in order to actually make you feel lousy and to burn less energy.
[...] So we see these children with brain tumours who can't see their leptin and we asked the question -- could we somehow influence this disastrous feedback cycle? What we did is we gave a drug called Octreotide and we knocked down their insulin levels with this medicine and all of a sudden, not only did these kids stop eating, they started exercising spontaneously, they just did it. Two kids started lifting weights at home, one kid became a competitive swimmer, one kid became a manager of his high school basketball team, running around collecting all the basket balls.

Norman Swan: So you're postulating that insulin was having an influence on the brain itself.

Robert Lustig: Right, by getting the insulin down instead of the energy that they were eating being forced to fat, the energy that they were eating could now be burned by muscle, could now be burned by the rest of the body, made them feel better.

[...]

Norman Swan: One way of proving this would be to put you on a fructose free diet, has anybody done that?

Robert Lustig: Well no one's done it yet. In fact we're trying to do that, in fact we're actually going to be working with the Atkins Foundation here in America to actually do a fructose withdrawal experiment to try to actually answer that question directly.

[...]

Robert Lustig: If you look at the Atkins diet, the Atkins diet was no-carb, high-fat, no-carb and it worked. We look at the Japanese diet, high-carb, no-fat, it also worked. When you put them together you get something called McDonalds and clearly that doesn't work. So the question is what is it about the Japanese diet, even though they eat all of this white rice, that still allows this phenomenon to be OK? And the answer is very simple -- it's called fructose, because fructose is really not a carbohydrate. [...] So a Japanese diet yes, they're eating a lot of white rice but they are also eating a lot of fibre in all of their vegetables and they are not consuming any fructose. There is no fructose in the Japanese diet whatsoever, but there is now, and childhood obesity has doubled in Japan in the last ten years whereas adult obesity hasn't moved.

From: ABC's 'The Health Report' - presented by Norman Swan. Transcript here
Dr Robert Lustig is Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Got British?

I was in a puncher for a quid with a numpty and a rat-arsed chancer when things went pear-shaped and a ranker dropped a clanger, grabbed me by the kecks and said it was too much faff to actually get a ha'penny from the nutter. I told him to stop mithering, kicked a moggie and went home. I just feel like a skint spod who threw a wobbly. I still say the twonk is a bit up himself.

I've been meaning to learn some proper British for ages. Here's:
- A list of words not widely used in the States,
- Some spelling differences between the two,
- and an article on the grammar differences.