Saturday Cat Fluff

Good thing we don't drink alcohol around our house. DH poured a glass of Diet Coke the other day, and the cat (Slick) jumped up on the counter and started drinking it. Slick also likes lemonade. We've decided that if we want something to drink, it'll have to be in a can or a covered glass/bottle of some kind if we don't want to share it with Slick. He also licks the moisture off the side of cans of soda in the summer time when they first come out of the fridge. Weird cat, he is.

My son's puppy, Max, is hilarious when he's eating Pringles (he likes the dill pickle ones). Put a whole chip on the floor, and he steps on it to break it up into pieces before he eats it. Then he sits down and looks at you, waiting for you to give him another one, which he then steps on, breaks, and eats. If you tell him he's had enough, he will look at you, cock his head, and then you have to tell him again that he's had enough. Then he'll either go lay down or find a toy for you to throw for him. Smart dog, for only 3 1/2 months old.

Scientists try to stop hunger with retooled foods. WTF?!?!

This is just the result of one of the false assumptions made about fat people. We eat too much because we don't know when we're full.
Want to lose weight? Try eating. That's one of the strategies being developed by scientists experimenting with foods that trick the body into feeling full.
FAIL
Right, I'm so fat and stupid that I can't tell when my stomach is full, so I don't know when to stop eating. Therefore, my food needs to be modified to trick my body into feeling full. Give me a fucking break.

At the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, England, food expert Peter Wilde and colleagues are developing foods that slow down the digestive system, which then triggers a signal to the brain that suppresses appetite.
"That fools you into thinking you've eaten far too much when you really haven't," said Wilde. From his studies on fat digestion, he said it should be possible to make foods, from bread to yogurts, that make it easier to diet.

So you're going to suppress appetite, so people will eat less food. I wonder how long that will be effective? I mean really, isn't that what dieting is? Eating less food? We all know how long your body lets you get away with that. Do they really think that they can fool the body, indefinitely, into existing on fewer calories than it really needs? If they do, they aren't living in the real world.

But Bloom warned that controlling appetite may be more challenging. "The body has lots of things to prevent its regulatory mechanisms from being tricked," he said.
For instance, while certain hormones regulate appetite, the brain also relies on nerve receptors in the stomach to detect the presence of food and tell it when the stomach is full.

Um, yeah, that's what I thought. But you're going to continue trying to trick one of Mother Nature's creations. Ain't happening, people.

Other experts worry about how such foods might be regulated once they are available. "If you have this magic bullet, how do you control who gets it? What do you do about anorexics or female adolescents?" asked Peter Fryer, a chemical engineer at the University of Birmingham who also researches modified foods.

I don't think they're worried at all about regulation of these foods simply because they want every fat person to eat them and magically become thin (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen). The thing is, they don't want thin people eating them and getting even thinner (or do they?). It's another way to rag on and discriminate against fat people for something that they really don't have a lot of control over.
And what the hell is up with this worry about "anorexics and female adolescents"? Like those are mutually exclusive? Do only young girls worry about body image? Do only young girls have eating disorders? Is anorexia the only eating disorder worthy of notice? I really don't think they give a rat's ass about eating disorders or fat peoples' health, because if they did, they wouldn't continue to try to find ways of fucking with Mother Nature's design. She had a reason for creating a diversity of bodies, and so far, no one has been able to safely, permanently, successfully alter that. Get a clue, people, our physiology is too complex to ever learn everything there is to know about it (because just when you think you've learned it all, Mother Nature is going to throw you a curve ball and set you right back to where you started). So keep right on trying, I don't think you're gonna be successful (you have about as much chance of that as the cellulose dog does of surviving chasing the asbestos cat through hell).

"Dieting is an awful bore and most human beings are very gullible," Bloom said. "We need all the help science can provide."

Dieting is an awful bore? What about the fact that it usually doesn't work, not safely and not permanently? Boring is the best you can come up with? What about stressful? What about dangerous? What about unhealthy? What about futile? No, all you can come up with is boring.
Most human beings are gullible? Really? Brainwashed is more like it. When you're bombarded, day after day after day, with lies about how fat is going to kill you tomorrow unless you buy this diet or have this surgery, and that if you're fat, you must be stupid, ugly, un-sexy, smelly, gluttonous, and on and on and on with the foul descriptions, it's really difficult to have any kind of self-esteem. Makes it harder to resist the lie that if you just try this diet, this surgery, this supplement, you'll magically become thin, beautiful, smart, have a sparkling personality, and everyone will love you. That's not gullible, that's brainwashed and beaten down into the dirt so deeply that you'll do anything to attain that FOBT. But guess what? After a while, people figure out that it's all lies, that being thin isn't a magic passport to Utopia, that they can learn to love themselves as they are, and figure out how to be the best person they can be without torturing themselves to become thin. Yeah, fuck that FOBT, because the only fantasies I want are in the books I read, not ones pushed on me in real life.

Brain's reaction to yummy food may predict weight

This seems like just another way to blame fat people for being fat.

Drink a milkshake and the pleasure center in your brain gets a hit of happy — unless you're overweight. It sounds counterintuitive. But scientists who watched young women savor milkshakes inside a brain scanner concluded that when the brain doesn't sense enough gratification from food, people may overeat to compensate.
FAIL
Yep, that surely has to be the reason. Food doesn't taste as good to some people, so they have to be eating more in order to enjoy it and that makes them fat (but what about thin people who gorge themselves on food on a daily basis and never gain a pound? What's the excuse for them, I want to know, dammit).

A healthy diet and plenty of exercise are the main factors in whether someone is overweight.
FAIL
Oh yeah, tell that to the fat people who eat a healthy diet and exercise on a daily basis and are still fat. Healthy diet and exercise don't do jack shit to keep you thin or make you thin if you're genetically predisposed to be fat.

But scientists have long known that genetics also play a major role in obesity — and one big culprit is thought to be dopamine, the brain chemical that's key to sensing pleasure.
FAIL again.
Gee, ya think? But that's not the only gene related to fat, so you can't blame it all on that one gene.

"This paper takes it one step farther," said Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institutes of Health, a dopamine specialist who has long studied the obesity link. "It takes the gene associated with greater vulnerability for obesity and asks the question why. What is it doing to the way the brain is functioning that would make a person more vulnerable to compulsively eat food and become obese?"
MASSIVE FAIL
This assumes that everyone who has this gene is a compulsive eater who automatically gets fat from eating too much food. This could be true of a very small number of fat people, but it certainly is not true of all fat people.
Still, it could have important implications. Volkow, who heads NIH's National Institute of Drug Abuse, notes that "dopamine is not just about pleasure." It also plays a role in conditioning — dopamine levels affect drug addiction — and the ability to control impulses.
So now you're saying that fat people have no ability to control impulses, otherwise they wouldn't over-eat and they therefore wouldn't be fat? Yeah, right. As Miss Conduct said "if you think fat people have no self-discipline, consider the fact that they haven’t killed you yet."

But if doctors could determine who carries the at-risk gene, children especially could be steered toward "recreational sports or other things that give them satisfaction and pleasure and dopamine that aren't food ... and not get their brains used to having crappy food," said Stice, a clinical psychologist who has long studied obesity.
"Don't get your brain used to it," he said of non-nutritious food. "I would not buy Ho Hos for lunch every day because the more you eat, the more you crave." FAIL again
This is ONE gene related to being fat, what about all the other genes that are related to being fat? And I'm sorry, but forcing children to play recreational sports if they aren't interested in them is just going to make them hate the idea of any kind of exercise, which sorta kinda defeats the purpose, don't ya think? Not to mention that no amount of exercise is going to permanently make a naturally fat child thin, ain't happening, people.
And as for non-nutritious food, I don't think there is such a thing. Every food out there has some nutrition to it, even if it's minimal. I also don't know anyone who eats HoHo's for lunch every damned day (boring, if you ask me, to eat the same thing every day, day in and day out). How do you get used to eating crappy food? I don't care how often you eat crappy food (and by that, I mean food that doesn't taste very good, I don't know what Stice considers crappy food), just because you eat it all the time doesn't mean you ever get used to it, or come to like it or enjoy eating it (I know I NEVER EVER got used to eating my mom's breaded tomatoes, no matter how often she forced me to eat them, nasty slimy things they were, and to this day, I refuse to eat them).
So this is one fucking gene out of how many that are related to being fat? And fixing this one gene is going to end the "obesity epi-panic"? I don't think so. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Mother Nature made us a diverse species for a reason, and it's not nice to fuck with Mother Nature (she'll get you in the end if you do).