Tag: study

‘I see fat people’

Australian scientists claim they’ve stumbled upon a sixth sense – but not the kind where you become Haley Joel Osment and end up having a movie career that goes nowhere. No, researchers down under have found a new flavor sense: fat.

It’s more or less a well known fact that fat is an excellent vehicle for food flavors and has a highly appealing mouth-feel. A new study, however, suggests that along with sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (essentially, the ability to detect protein), we can also actually taste fat itself.

Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, conducted a study. In the Deakin study, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree.

Here’s where it gets exciting: While all participants could detect some fat, some were better at it than others. With this in mind, the researchers then explored whether sharper fat-tasting abilities corresponded to fat consumption. They did: The higher a person’s fat-tasting sensitivity, the fewer fatty foods that person ate, and the lower that person’s body mass index was.

”I may be very sensitive to sweet tastes, while somebody else may be insensitive. This is common throughout the tastes, and it’s exactly what we’re finding with fat,” Dr. Keast told the Sydney Morning Herald. “People who are very sensitive to fat can taste very low concentrations of it. It appears [those] people have a mechanism that is telling them to stop eating it.”

Findings could lead to an entirely new approach to obesity. Dr. Keast’s team is on the case. Meanwhile, pass the butter and weapons grade lard.

A toast: To guilt!

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management researchers have learned something interesting about guilt: it makes you drink. For some reason, millions of Americans want to forget why they feel guilty, and nothing helps you forget like booze.

But did you know that undergraduates feel guilty about drinking underage and/or to excess? When shown Canadian (?) anti-drinking drinking public service ads, the teens decided they needed a drink.

American teens drinking to forget guilt-trips from our frozen, drunken neighbors to the north? Yeah, we’ll drink to that, too.

Happiness is a state (no, really)

The CDC has conducted a survey over the past four years, poling (heh) over 1.3 million people to learn if they’re happy. (Before you suddenly fiscal conservatives go crazy, remember: four years ago.)

Organized by state, it appears that Louisiana is numbah one.

Of course, part of their data was collected before Hurricane Katrina, and part of it afterwards, yet they still managed to average happiest over states like Florida, Hawaii and Wyoming, which everyone knows is called “the Happy State.”

Factors that raised states like Hawaii and Florida to the top and states like New Jersey and Antipathy (a secret volcanic island off the Jersey Shore where the government tests wild dog repellent on newborns) included climate, crime rates, air quality and schools.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a news story about a study unless someone reached startlingly untenable conclusions based on research that wasn’t present and ignores the other 48 states in between the top and bottom results: the USA Today believes faith is the the reason why Louisianna beat out New York. Well, you know what they say about ignorance.

Best way to stay healthy is to be fat

If you’ve got a few extra pounds on you, a study by the Japanese health ministry thinks you’re a-ok. People with a little belly flab at around the age of 40 outlive skinny people by six or seven years. What this tells you is that you should get the double cheeseburger for lunch.

“We found skinny people run the highest risk,” said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Medicine. “We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn’t expect the difference to be this large.”

They studied 50,000 people between ages 40 and 79 in northern Japan. At first they thought that the decreased lifespan for the skinnies was due to smoking or sickness, but even removed, the result didn’t change much. Instead, they point to their higher vulnerability to diseases.

But for you up-and-coming tubbies, don’t go crazy eating to live longer:

“It’s better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it’s good for people of normal physique to put on more fat,” Kuriyama said.

So skip the fries?

Science says Whitney Houston did not lie

Very romantic scientists at Stony Brook University in New York discovered that certain amount of married people experience “Endless Love.” They also proved that someone may or may not “Always Love You” and verified that the entire Michael Bolton catalog applies to a handful of test subjects.

For the study, they compared brain scans of couples who had been together for 20 years to those who had just reached third base, maybe made it home once. About 10 percent of the longtime couples reacted the same as new couples when shown pictures of their partners. (Another 10 percent reacted by needing a drink.)

So, if you’re in a committed relationship and feel just as strongly about your partner as when you met, great. For the rest of you, you now have to fake it because your partner will read this report.