November 28, 2013 • 32 mins
Gluttony Revisited: When does mere appetite transform into disorder? And what are we to make of the monstrous "sport" of competitive eating? Join Robert and Julie as they revisit one of the sins from their "Seven Deadlies" series (CLICK HERE to explore the other six) just in time for Thanksgiving.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
it is Thanksgiving two and so we would like to
revisit a past episode for you today. That's right. It
(00:23):
is one of the seven Deadly sinned gluttony. And if
you do not live here in the United States, or
if you're just not celebrating Thanksgiving, just luxuriate in the
fact that it is one of the seven Deadly sins.
And there's lots of really interesting information about food, diet,
the way that your body responds to food. Yeah, this
(00:44):
was an episode that we did as part of our
Seven Deadly series where we took each of the seven
Deadly sins and we looked at some of the scientific
research behind that topic. Creed, wrath of lust, what have you.
We had all seven of them, and this was just
one page. But it's one page that's deaf only worth
revisiting for the most glaton talk, at least in the
American tradition. So we thought you guys might enjoy this today.
(01:08):
Um again, if you're in the United States, you're listening
to us, and you're listening and thinks, I think, happy
Thanksgiving and thanks to everybody. We appreciate you. This is
if we were going around the dinner table right now,
we'd say thank you, thanks for our stuff to blow
your mind listeners because they're awesome. It makes me think
(01:29):
goes on Futurama. They have there's a robot called Heatonism
bot and uh. He his legs are the legs of
like a reclining chair. It's like in a reclining state
with a bowl of grapes on his chest and has
a very Roman air to him. But yeah, so so
gluttony is is the sin that's typically associated with like
massive consumptions of food, being really into food, enormous feasts,
(01:50):
feast without end and uh. If we look to the
pages of Dante's Divine Comedy, we see we see gluttony
show up in both Inferno and purgatory. An inferno the
pit of the eternal suffering. At the center of the planet.
We see a circle. This is the third circle guarded
by Sarabus, the three headed dog. You know, the dog
(02:10):
is a good symbol of gluttony. So, and a dog
with three mouths let's like triple glutton eia. But but
in this circle, it's it's kind of interesting because it's
not what if you're not familiar with Dante, it's it's
not quite what you might imagine for a punishment of gluttons.
Uh all right. So you have rain hale and snow
falling just like crazy rain hale and snow, all right,
(02:32):
and it's just pummeling the gluttons who are just they're
just like held to the ground by it. And there's
just mud everywhere, so they're they're wallowing like pigs in
this mud that's kind of that may or may not
be excrement. There's that they're described in very dog like terms.
And so this is where the gluttons are punished. Um
and but that is part of the human condition, right
(02:52):
and um as uh worth Well says, Gluttony is not
a secret vice. You can see it all over you
and on the surface. You know, we discussed in the
past with the most recent one, we did envy, and
we're talking about how India is not a fun sin.
Gluttony is is one that, at least on the surface,
seems a lot more fun because because I mean, I
(03:14):
don't know about you, But I I really like food,
Like food is not just something I'm just kind of into.
I really enjoy an excellent meal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And
we're going to talk about the reason why we really
really enjoy it, our hardwired ye and to actually over
enjoy it sometimes. Yeah. And the thing that gets me
about gluttony is that there's this level of gluttony that
(03:34):
we encounter an inferno and impurgatory, this this medieval idea
of just you know, obsessive feasts and all this, but
there's like a space age level of gluttony that is
only possible in this day and age. Like it's a
level of gluttony that was unimagined in Dante's time, well exactly.
And and and let's even say like Henry the eighth right,
(03:56):
could that's that's someone who could afford to be gluttonous, right,
how a bunch of resources? Yeah, he was, finger was
a master glutton. I would I would imagine it's fair
to say that. I always think of him with like
huge turkey legs in both hands, just waving them around.
But in today's world, we can all be Henry the
eighth Right. I mean, gluttony is at our fingertips everything
that we've ever wanted, particularly food wise, um libations available.
(04:20):
You can at least be a glutton on you can
as far as bad food goes, you can, and you
could actually be a professional glutton if you wanted to.
And this would come into play in competitive eating. Yeah, yeah,
this is what I'm talking about. Competitive eating. There are
these different levels of your enjoyment of food. There's sort
of like, I'm eating because I need nourishment for my body,
(04:41):
and then there's this level I'm eating because I really
enjoy these tastes and I enjoy the sensation of eating,
and I'm I'm enjoying the sound a purely since level.
But when you start looking at competitive eating, it's it
seems devoid of either of those things. It is eating
purely for the act of eating. Like and you hear
some comments like one of the dudes we're gonna talk
(05:02):
about here says that he got into it because he
really likes chicken, and if he really likes that, like
he likes the flavor of things. But still, there's no
way you're enjoying the flavor of like thirty eight hot
dogs in a row, you know, and you're certainly not
eating that for your your well being. It's something completely
removed from those two necessities. Well, it's eating to an
absolute obsessive degree, to the degree um And I think
(05:24):
most people are familiar with Takaro Kobayashi. He is the
usually a person that you think of when you think
about stuffing like three dred and sixty three hot dogs
in your mouth and under an hour, um and getting
paid handsomely for it. But who the person we're going
to talk about today. His name, um, well, actually he
(05:45):
goes by a wing a door and he just referred
to him. He his specialty are his chicken chicken wings.
And there's a documentary film by Errol Morris called l
Wing a Door and like a seven minute deal. Yeah,
it's not very long, so actually pretty it's worth checking out.
Will link to it on the blogs are on the Facebook.
But it focuses on this five time champion of the
(06:06):
Philadelphia Wingboll Bill Simmons, and how he prepares for these competitions.
It's just insane. Yeah. I would be tim to classify
him as a power glutton. Yeah, yeah, power you can
think about a power lifter. He has that kind of
powerlifter vibe. Except he's he's only lifting things enough to
stuff in his mouth right, right, and stuff to the
(06:28):
degree that it's just purely unholy, unholy. And they talk
about this actually in the documentary, to to the extent
that he says that he has almost accidentally eaten one
of his digits his fingers. Yeah, like he says that,
he claims that his hands are covered with scars because
he'll just he'll get so into the I guess he's
you know, he's achieving flow. He's a transcendent experience for him.
(06:51):
But it's to the point where he's biting his hands
and leaving scars because he's eating chicken wings. And this
he's a state of mind right, uber focused. Let's talk
about how he trains. Okay, he eats fifteen pounds of
food to day when he's training, and he drinks three
gallons of water day just sending his stomach right at
(07:11):
the point of that. And ten pounds of tutsie rolls
a week. Yeah, this was especially grow test because he's
not just eating one and then swallowing it. Now he's
he's throwing him in his mouth and forming them into
a massive baseball sized mass of tutsie rolls a giant
tutsie roll cut. Is that the word like a like
a cow choose its cut. Well, then that there's some
(07:32):
vomiting involved there, he's not doing that, right, Well, we
don't really know. Well, I mean he's doing some vomiting,
but not in this situation. So he's he's chewing these
tutsie rolls up in there, his baseball size mass in
his mouth and then he swallows that. And he says
it's all about a strengthening his jaws so that he
can really chomp and chomp during these competitions, but also
like widening his esophagus right right, And he likens it
(07:56):
to a snake swallowing a rat. Yeah, he's like, you know,
if you're eating for you know, your own enjoyment, then
you should totally chew your food. But competition it's different. Story,
Like chewing is for chumps. Yeah, chewing is for chumps.
And and and not only that, he's such a pro
that when he masters this, he moves on to dog bones, Yeah,
(08:17):
masticating them normal when and I'm equating a baseball made
out of tussi rolls, there's normal human food here. But
but but this becomes just too mundane for him, so
he moves on to his dogs chew toys and he
ends up like, what is a five pound bag competition
of raw hide bones? Yeah, and he says he claims
(08:38):
that he never gets full and that he feels that
he has an eating disorder. Yeah, because five pound bags
of raw hide bones like these are this. If you've
ever been around a dog cheeling one of these things,
these are those things that the dogs chew and it
makes that loud clacking noise that makes your own teeth hurt.
That's what this guy works on. Yeah. Yeah, and um
pops I actually has a really interesting article on competitive
(08:59):
eating and you're talking about what actually happens when when
you're doing this to your body. And they say that
muscle stretch when they relax right in the stomach, and
when we eat a big meal, our stomach muscles relax
so much that they send a message to the brain,
which interprets the signal to me and hey, you've got
a full belly. Um that our brain stops us from
eating anymore. That's what normally happens. But they say a
(09:20):
good training regimen for competitive eating deadens this communication, causing
the signal to the brain of the brain itself to
become less responsive to the large volume of food. And
this is according to Douglas Seidner and the program director
for Clinical Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic. So it's kind
of mind over matter. Yeah, yeah, it's mind over matter,
(09:41):
mind over mind over anything. That you eat yourself into
a numbness and you deaden your urge to stop eating,
which is just incredible, incredible, It's one way way to
put it. L winged or he's pretty amazing and he
has some or when he is his I'm not sure
if he's active at the moment, but when he is active,
(10:01):
sometimes he is accompanied to the eating platform, gluttony, ringing,
whatever you wanna call it by he has. He has
a valets who are called the wing at, the wing at. Yeah,
so if anyone is particularly taken with this man, you
can probably get in touch with them and see about
becoming a wing at and be one of his wing women. Yes, yeah,
And that not only do they cheer for him, that
they actually sort of ore backup counters for him, right,
(10:24):
don't they sort of? From from what I remember, they
actually are counting the amount of food items that he's
stuffing down his goalet and helping to corroborate his win. Yeah,
because you're gonna need somebody to keep track of that.
I mean like when I'm swimming or doing yoga. You know,
it's like I can't keep track of how many laps
or how many some citations I've done. It's like I
need somebody else to tell me. Now we're at number
(10:45):
five because I'm gonna get wrong. So you need some lambts. Yeah,
I need some to keep to keep track. But the
reason why I bring it competitive eating is because this
actually sort of informs the conversation on gluttony and not
only just gluttony, but obesity and um, how our body
actually responds to eating. This is really pretty fascinating. Physician
(11:06):
Jene Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory and his colleague
Nora Volcyl observed that ABC and drug addiction alter the
same brain circuits UH. In their studies, Wang and Volcal
found that both drug addicts and obese people are usually
less sensitive to dopamine's rewarding effects. So as we all
remember dopamine as a neurotransmitter and delivers the high that
(11:29):
we feel, um our brain perceives and we eat food
or we were to say if you have drug addic
or to have some cocaine. Um. So this means that
both drug addicts and um obese people have to chase
after a stronger dose of food or drugs in order
to get a decent bump of that dopamine. Yes, that
(11:50):
whole trait chasing the dragon type thing. We've all heard
examples of it with like an extreme case like like heroin,
where you an individual individual have that first uh taste
of heroin and it'll be this amazing, just overpowering experience,
but they never get that same experience again like the
rest of their lives then is assuming they I mean
and hopefully they're able to get away from it, but
(12:13):
if they don't, the rest of their lives is about
chasing that high, chasing that that dragon that they met
that first time. Right, And it's really interesting to see
this in food and obesity and and see that this
increased or excessive stimulation just creates more decent citation with dopamine.
And then yeah, again that vicious circle kicks in and
you've got increased desire and decreased payoff. At the same time.
(12:35):
I have to say I did have a really good
like brunch sandwich of this place, and then they caught
it a Napoleon complex. I don't know why, but but
it had breathe and uh bacon or Canadian bacon, I'm
not sure, like fig spread and it sound like this
really nice toasted bread. The first time I had it
was amazing, and then I went back to have it
again and it was it was, it was all right,
and then just like each time, it's like a little
(12:58):
a little further removed that original experience. My own meager
comparison to that was the sandwich on stilts or something. No,
I'm just trying to figure out why they're telling it
that the Napoleon. I don't know. It's really one time
I had to order it and there was a short
person at the table and it was really kind of
weird because I was like, I'll have that sandwich. You know,
(13:19):
you just made it even more like yeah, even more
of a server was like what sandwich that sandwich of
the Napoleon, the really short one serve on stilts. To
make it feel better, it would be cool if it
were on stilts. Well yeah, My point is the sandwich
was dope, and that it actually I mean yeah, nice,
(13:40):
nicely done. So, um, Whang looks into this problem of
obesity and addiction, and he actually asked him of his
volunteers in a study to come hungry. Oh, is this
the torture experiment? Horrible? It's horrible. He asked them to
describe their favorite meals while he heats up that meal
in a nearby microwave so that the waft of the
(14:03):
smell of it, let's say, the Napoleon sandwich is clearly
being transmitted to their brains. And then they show a
pet scan of the volunteers brains during this whole process,
and they see that the motivation part of their brain
goes nuts okay, and then the orbital frontal cortex, which
is implicated in a decision making, also lights up. And
(14:23):
then they find that in the brains of obese people,
the regions that regulate sensory information from the mouth and
the tongue are even more active than than other people.
And they figure out that sensory processing is elevated. Um,
this is the oh that tastes good part, right, but
the reward sensitivity is a lower So now this reminds
me a lot of our podcast about children and Halloween.
(14:46):
Candy and about how children experience sugar, you know, in
a kind of different sensory realm than adults do and
than most adults do. And in this experiment really highlights
this this idea that that obese and of Jules or
individuals with this sort of with this heightened appetite. I mean,
they are experiencing the food in a different way, which
which is which I think is a helpful way to
(15:09):
look at it, because it's easy for someone to to
look at someone else's problems with food um and or
weight and say, oh, what's the matter with you? Why
can't you control yourself? Why why don't you just one
slip the pizza instead of four? You know, But but
if you if you think of it in terms of
a different sensory experience, it becomes harder to really have
that kind of judgmental attitude. I think, yeah, absolutely, I
(15:30):
mean understanding that the brain is actually getting rewired so
that it has less control um in these situations. And
in fact, this was explored even more by a New
York Time short are called called the fat Trap, and
what they found is that weight loss and weight control depends.
It still depends, of course, on the simple equation of
eat less and exercise more, right, But for some people
(15:52):
it's a lot more complicated. Right, So we talked about
the brain being changed in that instance. Um. They were
talking in This are All The Fat Trap about something
called post diet syndrome. And it's essentially a state that
your body enters once it's lost at least ten percent
of its body weight. It becomes biologically altered. It's really fascinating.
(16:13):
There's a guy named Joseph Proyeto and he's a physician
of the University of Melbourne, and he kept wondering why
his really really motivated and committed patients would gain back
at least eleven pounds of the on average thirty pounds
that they had lost. And these guys were like super diligent. Um.
The patients that he was working with, they had food diaries, Um,
(16:34):
they still exercise, they did all of this stuff. Um.
And they were on a localori diet essentially at first.
But you know, they followed up with him for a
full year and he kept thinking to himself, why do
they keep gaining this back? Um? And journalist Tara Parker Pope,
who wrote The Fat Trap, started to think about this too.
In her the context of her own life, and she
(16:55):
started to look at all these different factors um that
could be responsible for the never ability of weight gain.
All right, Hey, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back more glutton. All Right, we're back
talking about the post diet syndrome. The body has has
(17:20):
realized that something is a miss, and it's trying to
replenish the stores and it breaks down in some interesting way.
It's the research has found that there's a gastric hormone
called grilling, often dubbed the hunger hormone, and it's about higher.
There's another hormone associated with suppressing hunger called peptide double y,
and it also ends up leveling out pretty low. Levels
(17:42):
of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism,
also remain lower than expected. And then you have a
whole host of other hormones that are associated with hunger
metabolism and they're all significantly changed compared to pre dieting levels. Yeah,
it's sort of cocktail that your cocktails of hormones um
that get messed with in this post diet state, right,
(18:02):
so that that graylon is higher, that hormone that tells
you that you're hungry, so you're more activated in terms
of like, hey, I'm feeling kind of hungry in your
post diet scenario. And again the left in and the
peptide why why are both decreased, and those are the
things that helps suppress your appetite. Another odd finding is
(18:24):
that in some post diet subjects, muscle fibers were acting
like slow twitch muscles, and slow twitch muscles are are
actually responsible for less burned calories, So you're seeing this
other weirdness happening in the post diet scenario. And then
there's again going back to the brains with post dieters
um They were studied by researchers Rudolph Libel and Michael
(18:46):
Rosenbaum at Columbia University, and f m r I was
used to track the brain patterns of people before and
after weight loss while they looked at objects like grapes,
gummy bears, chocolate, broccoli, cell phones, and you yos to
put in a couple of non food items right and
after weight loss. When the dieter looked at food, the
scan showed a bigger response in the parts of the
(19:07):
brain associated with reward and a lower response in the
areas associated with control. Again, that's the same thing that
we were talking about before, and the implication is that
the body induces cravings by making the person feel more
excited about food and giving him her less willpower to
resist high calorie treat the body wants to reset at
the higher weight. So I mean, how this actually susses
(19:29):
out is that it really gives someone who's in a
post diet scenario caloric disadvantage. And what I mean by
that is that you could be subject a for instance,
who is two hundred and thirty pounds and you're eating
three thousand pounds or three thousand pounds. That's a lot,
that's even more than l winger door um three thousand
calories a day. But then you drop down to one
(19:51):
and in order to maintain a weight of a hundred
and ninety pounds, you eat twenty three hundred calories a day.
You're counterpart who has not been in a dieting scenario
who is weighs a d nine pounds, actually could have
two hundred and fifty to four hundred calories more per
day than you to just maintain their weight. So that's
(20:13):
what this is. This is how this is all sort
of shuffling out, is that you know, when you're in
this post diet state, which by the way, it could
last up to six years. Um, your body really is
not going to burn as many calories and automatically wants
you to reset as opposed to your your your counterpoint
who isn't dieting at that same weight, So you have
(20:34):
to burn more and more calories. And this, I think
is the sticking point of why people continue to creep
up on the scales throughout their lives or yo yo
diet because your your body is sort of working against you. Yeah,
and it really it really becomes an issue of like
sort of me versus body and which is which is
kind of a false idea because we are our bodies
(20:55):
and as we discussed before, what our guts doing affects
what our brain is doing to a level the you
can't just cut one off from the other. But it's
also not the situation of, um, I am you know
this is all about me, I am going to lose
this weight. It becomes this this knee and what I
want versus the needs of my body and the the
sort of the ideas of my body and it's not
(21:15):
our body just trying to be terrible to us. I
mean how we evolved, right, Like we have these you know,
big thick brains that require a lot of energy. It's
sort of like the Firefox of browsers, right, takes up
a lot of energy. But it makes sense that we
have gluttony hardwired into us because at some level we
need it. Our brain evolved for us to eat an
(21:36):
excess in order to survive. Yeah, I mean we we
live in a an environment now that is rather far
removed from from what we originally evolved into where we
can go and we can in most most of our
listeners anyway, you're in a position where you could go
out today and you could probably eat just as much
as you possibly wanted to. There's there's there's nothing that
(21:57):
would stop you, and our bodies aren't really a volved
to deal with that, righties, we didn't know that buckets
of chicken were just available for you know, the drive through.
We had to forge for this stuff. Now did we
mention this? The Elingador, the Errol Morris originally shot the
videos an extra because he was he was shooting a
promotional video for KFC Kentucky Fried chicken. We didn't talk
(22:20):
about that. That's fascinating. So he was like, this is
the dude, because I mean, I guess this was I
forget the exact time from, but I guess this was
in that era of the double down where KFC is
like unhealthy food for the win, let's let's market it
this way. So so Morris is like, this is this
is the dude, This is the patron saint of double Bounce.
(22:42):
So he shoots this video with him and so he's like,
this dude is so interesting. This is such a fascinating
glimpse into really the heart of gluttony. My words, not his. Uh,
he had to shoot this tim and it extra where
he's just talking to wing a door about about it
and I love that. And as you had mentioned earlier
when we were talking about this, but um, you have
to see him in action with the wings getting his
(23:03):
glutton chops on Clinton chops. Yeah, which is I guess
what you call the smears of orange hot wing sauce
that are on the side of your face when you're
fully engorging yourself on chicken wings. Yeah, as a vegetarian,
because I've never had glutton chops, I might have had
soy glutton chops. Are there soy based or do you
think they're vegetarian or vegan eating competitions? No, but you
(23:28):
know again, if someone's out there and they want to
explore that, there you go, there's an idea. Yeah, I
think it's just sort of antithetical to the whole vegetarian
vegan thing. Yeah. I could be wrong, though, I think
it tends to be. Well, so let's talk about the
future of gluttony, because there's always a future for Yeah.
I mean, you know what, I guess that we've reached
(23:48):
the space age of gluttony with the eating competitions, But
I think humans could be grosser. I think we have
it in ourselves to to do more. Well. I think
that you know, there's there's the stability that we could
actually create the vomitorium. Right. We used to think that
in room in times that there was something called vomitorium
that we we'd eat and maybe there was a vomitorium,
but it was it was not a place where you
(24:09):
throw up your food so you can eat more. It
was just an architectural flourish, I believe. Yeah. Yeah, the
people mistook for like this big communal place where you
just threw up after you yea, which is a factlessness
idea that doesn't exactly exist. But in the future we
might actually be able to manage food in a way
that we could overeat and in a way get rid
(24:30):
of all of this access and that is through lefton. Again,
we talked about left in as being something that could
uh that is very helpful and appetite suppression, and scientists
at Columbia University have conducted several small studies looking at
whether injecting people with lepton can override the body's resistance
to weight loss and help maintain a lower weight. And
(24:50):
this is in a few small studies, left injections seemed
to trick the body into thinking it's still fat and
after left in replacement, and this is really interesting. Study
subjects burned more calories during activity and in brain scan studies,
left in jecton's appeared to change how the brain responds
to food, making it seem less enticely. So you would
like stick a syringe of lefton in one end and
(25:12):
a meatball sub in the other, and they would they
would balance each other right, right, They just can'cel each
other up. But of course this is a sort of
a new treatment and not something that's been widely studied,
and it is probably years away for use. Right. Tooking
for cheese steak, why did I go from meatball? Cheese
steak as much grosser? Do you think that's more glenn
Is than meatball? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it basically the same.
(25:33):
Both are lots of meat and some cheese on giant
pieces of bread. But there's something about the cheese steak
that's a little vialer. I guess maybe because it's protein
on protein, I guess. Yeah. It seems like there's a
show I was watching and it was like they were
profiling these different chefs and their favorite foods in different cities,
and like every city has its own cheese steak. I
(25:54):
feel like I've been this rant before, but I have
a thing against cheese steaks. All right. I think we're
gonna have to have a Science of TI Sticks podcast
coming up. Um. Here's another thing that is that on
the cusp of our understanding and perhaps harnessing this information,
something called brown fat. There are fat cells that consume
calories and release heat. Yeah, and if you're not driving
(26:16):
or riding a bicycle or anything like that, you can
you can probably reach up around your neck and you
can sort of feel yourself a little a little brown fat, right,
because that's where the human body tends to store it
doing it right now? Yeah, Yeah, you have a nice
little padding there. Um. It is important because researchers actually
think that, um, this could help turn white fat into
(26:39):
brown fat and you could actually burn more calories. And
you could possibly do this by exercising. They have seen
in subjects that exercise can create brown fat out of
white fat. Yeah. And this brown fat is remarkable because
rather than storing excess energy, the fat actually burns through
it right. Yeah. And and previously we kind of only
thought it was like a rodent or human new born thing.
(27:00):
Rats are babies one of the you know, they were
the only ones who who are really that into it.
And we would and generally if you would see a
lot of brown fat in the human, an adult human,
it meant that there was some sort of did generally
there was some of the kind of health ailment going
on that unbalanced things. Yeah, but they have a much
better understanding and this, I mean, this is only like
three years old information right now we're still figuring out. Yeah,
(27:21):
like the that they even figured out that brown fat
exists in adult humans, and again to go back to
the rodents. Um. At first, you know, they thought, okay, well,
rodents can't shiver and they use brown fat to keep warm,
and so do human infants, who also don't shiver very well.
And then they thought, well, once humans lose their brown
fat after infancy, the shivering response kicks in and we
no longer have a use for the brown fat. And
(27:43):
that is not true. Um. They actually found that younger
women have more brown fat than say, older men, Thinner
people have more brown fat than um than larger people.
Uh So they're still trying to figure it out and
figure out how to actually copulated for own use. That's
one of those things could be problematic though, because the
(28:04):
people who have the most active brown fat are generally
individuals with cancer or hyper thyroidism. So right, and again
hypothrotoism in cancer, assuming that you probably have whittled down
to a weight that's not that is no longer healthy. Right.
So yeah, it's got its limits, but that could be
an interesting future in terms of fighting off gluttony. Another possibility.
(28:27):
This would be far future, and I feel like I've
mentioned this example before, but an Ian m Banks culture series.
The denizens of the culture who you know, they've been
genetically advanced to the point where they can they can
release random drug like chemicals into their body just by
thinking about them. Uh, they have these you know, the
benevolent robots that look after them. But they can also
(28:48):
bypass food or beverage. So like if an individual wants
to have another cocktail but doesn't want to feel the
effects of that cocktail, they can bypass it straight through.
Well not straight through, well, that would have be the
effects of that cocktail later on, I mean, you still
want to hit the reward center, right, I think they
would just you would get the taste would be like
chewing a food and then spitting it out, or I
(29:09):
guess it would be a little they would get like
a little bit of the I got the impression it was.
It was like, I want to enjoy this food, but
I don't want to actually digest it and I don't
Or I want to enjoy this beverage, but I don't
want to actually take into the alcohol into my system.
So it's like they have a separate line just for
purely recreational food and beverage. I like that's just like
(29:31):
two different digestive systems in a way, but the one
digestive system doesn't really work. I'm just trying to think
how we can fit this center our own little uh
worldview in the future possibility of having few different digestive systems. Yeah,
I mean, of course, there are other possibilities to in
terms of the future of gluttony, like imagine being able
to plug yourself into a virtual environment where you just
eat all you want. Yeah, with that, with that, say,
(29:53):
you you know, I wonder if that would chick in
again with the reward center and openmine, if that would
be released. I don't know, situation. Maybe maybe it's it's
such a far future possibility, like you would have to
we're talking, we would be talking more than just like
strapping in some goggles and some haptic gloves and you know,
going through a city made out of cheeseburgers. It would
you would have to have a much more like neurologically
(30:14):
plugged in system for that to take place. And by
that point, who knows what else would have figured out? Well,
and then do you think in that realm that more
people would become competitive eaters? That's my question. Maybe, but
it would be a crazy like the competition would just
be off the charts. I mean, how would you even
clock that? I don't know, I don't know somehow someway
Interestingly enough, you know this will come out like a
(30:36):
couple of weeks later, but that we were recording this
on ash Wednesday, for a lot of people will go
into like some sort of Lenten fasting or saying I'm
not gonna eat fried foods except on feast days kind
of a thing. So that's kind of that's that's kind
of perfect. Yeah, talking about sins and lent and gluttony.
(31:00):
That you have it a little slice of stuff to
blow your mind past to have with those three slices
of pie that you had for Thanksgiving dinner and dessert.
We hope that the information helps you to understand the
gluttony that you part took off today, or help you
to understand the gluttony that you dodged, but inevitably someone
you know indulge again. Do you want to find us,
you want to talk to us about this topic and others,
(31:20):
you can head on over to stuff to Blow your
mind dot com. That's where you'll find all seven of
those uh seven Deadly's episodes there there for your listening pleasure,
including this one. If you want to listen to it
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(31:41):
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of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Could
be per
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
it is Thanksgiving two and so we would like to
revisit a past episode for you today. That's right. It
(00:23):
is one of the seven Deadly sinned gluttony. And if
you do not live here in the United States, or
if you're just not celebrating Thanksgiving, just luxuriate in the
fact that it is one of the seven Deadly sins.
And there's lots of really interesting information about food, diet,
the way that your body responds to food. Yeah, this
(00:44):
was an episode that we did as part of our
Seven Deadly series where we took each of the seven
Deadly sins and we looked at some of the scientific
research behind that topic. Creed, wrath of lust, what have you.
We had all seven of them, and this was just
one page. But it's one page that's deaf only worth
revisiting for the most glaton talk, at least in the
American tradition. So we thought you guys might enjoy this today.
(01:08):
Um again, if you're in the United States, you're listening
to us, and you're listening and thinks, I think, happy
Thanksgiving and thanks to everybody. We appreciate you. This is
if we were going around the dinner table right now,
we'd say thank you, thanks for our stuff to blow
your mind listeners because they're awesome. It makes me think
(01:29):
goes on Futurama. They have there's a robot called Heatonism
bot and uh. He his legs are the legs of
like a reclining chair. It's like in a reclining state
with a bowl of grapes on his chest and has
a very Roman air to him. But yeah, so so
gluttony is is the sin that's typically associated with like
massive consumptions of food, being really into food, enormous feasts,
(01:50):
feast without end and uh. If we look to the
pages of Dante's Divine Comedy, we see we see gluttony
show up in both Inferno and purgatory. An inferno the
pit of the eternal suffering. At the center of the planet.
We see a circle. This is the third circle guarded
by Sarabus, the three headed dog. You know, the dog
(02:10):
is a good symbol of gluttony. So, and a dog
with three mouths let's like triple glutton eia. But but
in this circle, it's it's kind of interesting because it's
not what if you're not familiar with Dante, it's it's
not quite what you might imagine for a punishment of gluttons.
Uh all right. So you have rain hale and snow
falling just like crazy rain hale and snow, all right,
(02:32):
and it's just pummeling the gluttons who are just they're
just like held to the ground by it. And there's
just mud everywhere, so they're they're wallowing like pigs in
this mud that's kind of that may or may not
be excrement. There's that they're described in very dog like terms.
And so this is where the gluttons are punished. Um
and but that is part of the human condition, right
(02:52):
and um as uh worth Well says, Gluttony is not
a secret vice. You can see it all over you
and on the surface. You know, we discussed in the
past with the most recent one, we did envy, and
we're talking about how India is not a fun sin.
Gluttony is is one that, at least on the surface,
seems a lot more fun because because I mean, I
(03:14):
don't know about you, But I I really like food,
Like food is not just something I'm just kind of into.
I really enjoy an excellent meal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And
we're going to talk about the reason why we really
really enjoy it, our hardwired ye and to actually over
enjoy it sometimes. Yeah. And the thing that gets me
about gluttony is that there's this level of gluttony that
(03:34):
we encounter an inferno and impurgatory, this this medieval idea
of just you know, obsessive feasts and all this, but
there's like a space age level of gluttony that is
only possible in this day and age. Like it's a
level of gluttony that was unimagined in Dante's time, well exactly.
And and and let's even say like Henry the eighth right,
(03:56):
could that's that's someone who could afford to be gluttonous, right,
how a bunch of resources? Yeah, he was, finger was
a master glutton. I would I would imagine it's fair
to say that. I always think of him with like
huge turkey legs in both hands, just waving them around.
But in today's world, we can all be Henry the
eighth Right. I mean, gluttony is at our fingertips everything
that we've ever wanted, particularly food wise, um libations available.
(04:20):
You can at least be a glutton on you can
as far as bad food goes, you can, and you
could actually be a professional glutton if you wanted to.
And this would come into play in competitive eating. Yeah, yeah,
this is what I'm talking about. Competitive eating. There are
these different levels of your enjoyment of food. There's sort
of like, I'm eating because I need nourishment for my body,
(04:41):
and then there's this level I'm eating because I really
enjoy these tastes and I enjoy the sensation of eating,
and I'm I'm enjoying the sound a purely since level.
But when you start looking at competitive eating, it's it
seems devoid of either of those things. It is eating
purely for the act of eating. Like and you hear
some comments like one of the dudes we're gonna talk
(05:02):
about here says that he got into it because he
really likes chicken, and if he really likes that, like
he likes the flavor of things. But still, there's no
way you're enjoying the flavor of like thirty eight hot
dogs in a row, you know, and you're certainly not
eating that for your your well being. It's something completely
removed from those two necessities. Well, it's eating to an
absolute obsessive degree, to the degree um And I think
(05:24):
most people are familiar with Takaro Kobayashi. He is the
usually a person that you think of when you think
about stuffing like three dred and sixty three hot dogs
in your mouth and under an hour, um and getting
paid handsomely for it. But who the person we're going
to talk about today. His name, um, well, actually he
(05:45):
goes by a wing a door and he just referred
to him. He his specialty are his chicken chicken wings.
And there's a documentary film by Errol Morris called l
Wing a Door and like a seven minute deal. Yeah,
it's not very long, so actually pretty it's worth checking out.
Will link to it on the blogs are on the Facebook.
But it focuses on this five time champion of the
(06:06):
Philadelphia Wingboll Bill Simmons, and how he prepares for these competitions.
It's just insane. Yeah. I would be tim to classify
him as a power glutton. Yeah, yeah, power you can
think about a power lifter. He has that kind of
powerlifter vibe. Except he's he's only lifting things enough to
stuff in his mouth right, right, and stuff to the
(06:28):
degree that it's just purely unholy, unholy. And they talk
about this actually in the documentary, to to the extent
that he says that he has almost accidentally eaten one
of his digits his fingers. Yeah, like he says that,
he claims that his hands are covered with scars because
he'll just he'll get so into the I guess he's
you know, he's achieving flow. He's a transcendent experience for him.
(06:51):
But it's to the point where he's biting his hands
and leaving scars because he's eating chicken wings. And this
he's a state of mind right, uber focused. Let's talk
about how he trains. Okay, he eats fifteen pounds of
food to day when he's training, and he drinks three
gallons of water day just sending his stomach right at
(07:11):
the point of that. And ten pounds of tutsie rolls
a week. Yeah, this was especially grow test because he's
not just eating one and then swallowing it. Now he's
he's throwing him in his mouth and forming them into
a massive baseball sized mass of tutsie rolls a giant
tutsie roll cut. Is that the word like a like
a cow choose its cut. Well, then that there's some
(07:32):
vomiting involved there, he's not doing that, right, Well, we
don't really know. Well, I mean he's doing some vomiting,
but not in this situation. So he's he's chewing these
tutsie rolls up in there, his baseball size mass in
his mouth and then he swallows that. And he says
it's all about a strengthening his jaws so that he
can really chomp and chomp during these competitions, but also
like widening his esophagus right right, And he likens it
(07:56):
to a snake swallowing a rat. Yeah, he's like, you know,
if you're eating for you know, your own enjoyment, then
you should totally chew your food. But competition it's different. Story,
Like chewing is for chumps. Yeah, chewing is for chumps.
And and and not only that, he's such a pro
that when he masters this, he moves on to dog bones, Yeah,
(08:17):
masticating them normal when and I'm equating a baseball made
out of tussi rolls, there's normal human food here. But
but but this becomes just too mundane for him, so
he moves on to his dogs chew toys and he
ends up like, what is a five pound bag competition
of raw hide bones? Yeah, and he says he claims
(08:38):
that he never gets full and that he feels that
he has an eating disorder. Yeah, because five pound bags
of raw hide bones like these are this. If you've
ever been around a dog cheeling one of these things,
these are those things that the dogs chew and it
makes that loud clacking noise that makes your own teeth hurt.
That's what this guy works on. Yeah. Yeah, and um
pops I actually has a really interesting article on competitive
(08:59):
eating and you're talking about what actually happens when when
you're doing this to your body. And they say that
muscle stretch when they relax right in the stomach, and
when we eat a big meal, our stomach muscles relax
so much that they send a message to the brain,
which interprets the signal to me and hey, you've got
a full belly. Um that our brain stops us from
eating anymore. That's what normally happens. But they say a
(09:20):
good training regimen for competitive eating deadens this communication, causing
the signal to the brain of the brain itself to
become less responsive to the large volume of food. And
this is according to Douglas Seidner and the program director
for Clinical Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic. So it's kind
of mind over matter. Yeah, yeah, it's mind over matter,
(09:41):
mind over mind over anything. That you eat yourself into
a numbness and you deaden your urge to stop eating,
which is just incredible, incredible, It's one way way to
put it. L winged or he's pretty amazing and he
has some or when he is his I'm not sure
if he's active at the moment, but when he is active,
(10:01):
sometimes he is accompanied to the eating platform, gluttony, ringing,
whatever you wanna call it by he has. He has
a valets who are called the wing at, the wing at. Yeah,
so if anyone is particularly taken with this man, you
can probably get in touch with them and see about
becoming a wing at and be one of his wing women. Yes, yeah,
And that not only do they cheer for him, that
they actually sort of ore backup counters for him, right,
(10:24):
don't they sort of? From from what I remember, they
actually are counting the amount of food items that he's
stuffing down his goalet and helping to corroborate his win. Yeah,
because you're gonna need somebody to keep track of that.
I mean like when I'm swimming or doing yoga. You know,
it's like I can't keep track of how many laps
or how many some citations I've done. It's like I
need somebody else to tell me. Now we're at number
(10:45):
five because I'm gonna get wrong. So you need some lambts. Yeah,
I need some to keep to keep track. But the
reason why I bring it competitive eating is because this
actually sort of informs the conversation on gluttony and not
only just gluttony, but obesity and um, how our body
actually responds to eating. This is really pretty fascinating. Physician
(11:06):
Jene Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory and his colleague
Nora Volcyl observed that ABC and drug addiction alter the
same brain circuits UH. In their studies, Wang and Volcal
found that both drug addicts and obese people are usually
less sensitive to dopamine's rewarding effects. So as we all
remember dopamine as a neurotransmitter and delivers the high that
(11:29):
we feel, um our brain perceives and we eat food
or we were to say if you have drug addic
or to have some cocaine. Um. So this means that
both drug addicts and um obese people have to chase
after a stronger dose of food or drugs in order
to get a decent bump of that dopamine. Yes, that
(11:50):
whole trait chasing the dragon type thing. We've all heard
examples of it with like an extreme case like like heroin,
where you an individual individual have that first uh taste
of heroin and it'll be this amazing, just overpowering experience,
but they never get that same experience again like the
rest of their lives then is assuming they I mean
and hopefully they're able to get away from it, but
(12:13):
if they don't, the rest of their lives is about
chasing that high, chasing that that dragon that they met
that first time. Right, And it's really interesting to see
this in food and obesity and and see that this
increased or excessive stimulation just creates more decent citation with dopamine.
And then yeah, again that vicious circle kicks in and
you've got increased desire and decreased payoff. At the same time.
(12:35):
I have to say I did have a really good
like brunch sandwich of this place, and then they caught
it a Napoleon complex. I don't know why, but but
it had breathe and uh bacon or Canadian bacon, I'm
not sure, like fig spread and it sound like this
really nice toasted bread. The first time I had it
was amazing, and then I went back to have it
again and it was it was, it was all right,
and then just like each time, it's like a little
(12:58):
a little further removed that original experience. My own meager
comparison to that was the sandwich on stilts or something. No,
I'm just trying to figure out why they're telling it
that the Napoleon. I don't know. It's really one time
I had to order it and there was a short
person at the table and it was really kind of
weird because I was like, I'll have that sandwich. You know,
(13:19):
you just made it even more like yeah, even more
of a server was like what sandwich that sandwich of
the Napoleon, the really short one serve on stilts. To
make it feel better, it would be cool if it
were on stilts. Well yeah, My point is the sandwich
was dope, and that it actually I mean yeah, nice,
(13:40):
nicely done. So, um, Whang looks into this problem of
obesity and addiction, and he actually asked him of his
volunteers in a study to come hungry. Oh, is this
the torture experiment? Horrible? It's horrible. He asked them to
describe their favorite meals while he heats up that meal
in a nearby microwave so that the waft of the
(14:03):
smell of it, let's say, the Napoleon sandwich is clearly
being transmitted to their brains. And then they show a
pet scan of the volunteers brains during this whole process,
and they see that the motivation part of their brain
goes nuts okay, and then the orbital frontal cortex, which
is implicated in a decision making, also lights up. And
(14:23):
then they find that in the brains of obese people,
the regions that regulate sensory information from the mouth and
the tongue are even more active than than other people.
And they figure out that sensory processing is elevated. Um,
this is the oh that tastes good part, right, but
the reward sensitivity is a lower So now this reminds
me a lot of our podcast about children and Halloween.
(14:46):
Candy and about how children experience sugar, you know, in
a kind of different sensory realm than adults do and
than most adults do. And in this experiment really highlights
this this idea that that obese and of Jules or
individuals with this sort of with this heightened appetite. I mean,
they are experiencing the food in a different way, which
which is which I think is a helpful way to
(15:09):
look at it, because it's easy for someone to to
look at someone else's problems with food um and or
weight and say, oh, what's the matter with you? Why
can't you control yourself? Why why don't you just one
slip the pizza instead of four? You know, But but
if you if you think of it in terms of
a different sensory experience, it becomes harder to really have
that kind of judgmental attitude. I think, yeah, absolutely, I
(15:30):
mean understanding that the brain is actually getting rewired so
that it has less control um in these situations. And
in fact, this was explored even more by a New
York Time short are called called the fat Trap, and
what they found is that weight loss and weight control depends.
It still depends, of course, on the simple equation of
eat less and exercise more, right, But for some people
(15:52):
it's a lot more complicated. Right, So we talked about
the brain being changed in that instance. Um. They were
talking in This are All The Fat Trap about something
called post diet syndrome. And it's essentially a state that
your body enters once it's lost at least ten percent
of its body weight. It becomes biologically altered. It's really fascinating.
(16:13):
There's a guy named Joseph Proyeto and he's a physician
of the University of Melbourne, and he kept wondering why
his really really motivated and committed patients would gain back
at least eleven pounds of the on average thirty pounds
that they had lost. And these guys were like super diligent. Um.
The patients that he was working with, they had food diaries, Um,
(16:34):
they still exercise, they did all of this stuff. Um.
And they were on a localori diet essentially at first.
But you know, they followed up with him for a
full year and he kept thinking to himself, why do
they keep gaining this back? Um? And journalist Tara Parker Pope,
who wrote The Fat Trap, started to think about this too.
In her the context of her own life, and she
(16:55):
started to look at all these different factors um that
could be responsible for the never ability of weight gain.
All right, Hey, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back more glutton. All Right, we're back
talking about the post diet syndrome. The body has has
(17:20):
realized that something is a miss, and it's trying to
replenish the stores and it breaks down in some interesting way.
It's the research has found that there's a gastric hormone
called grilling, often dubbed the hunger hormone, and it's about higher.
There's another hormone associated with suppressing hunger called peptide double y,
and it also ends up leveling out pretty low. Levels
(17:42):
of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism,
also remain lower than expected. And then you have a
whole host of other hormones that are associated with hunger
metabolism and they're all significantly changed compared to pre dieting levels. Yeah,
it's sort of cocktail that your cocktails of hormones um
that get messed with in this post diet state, right,
(18:02):
so that that graylon is higher, that hormone that tells
you that you're hungry, so you're more activated in terms
of like, hey, I'm feeling kind of hungry in your
post diet scenario. And again the left in and the
peptide why why are both decreased, and those are the
things that helps suppress your appetite. Another odd finding is
(18:24):
that in some post diet subjects, muscle fibers were acting
like slow twitch muscles, and slow twitch muscles are are
actually responsible for less burned calories, So you're seeing this
other weirdness happening in the post diet scenario. And then
there's again going back to the brains with post dieters
um They were studied by researchers Rudolph Libel and Michael
(18:46):
Rosenbaum at Columbia University, and f m r I was
used to track the brain patterns of people before and
after weight loss while they looked at objects like grapes,
gummy bears, chocolate, broccoli, cell phones, and you yos to
put in a couple of non food items right and
after weight loss. When the dieter looked at food, the
scan showed a bigger response in the parts of the
(19:07):
brain associated with reward and a lower response in the
areas associated with control. Again, that's the same thing that
we were talking about before, and the implication is that
the body induces cravings by making the person feel more
excited about food and giving him her less willpower to
resist high calorie treat the body wants to reset at
the higher weight. So I mean, how this actually susses
(19:29):
out is that it really gives someone who's in a
post diet scenario caloric disadvantage. And what I mean by
that is that you could be subject a for instance,
who is two hundred and thirty pounds and you're eating
three thousand pounds or three thousand pounds. That's a lot,
that's even more than l winger door um three thousand
calories a day. But then you drop down to one
(19:51):
and in order to maintain a weight of a hundred
and ninety pounds, you eat twenty three hundred calories a day.
You're counterpart who has not been in a dieting scenario
who is weighs a d nine pounds, actually could have
two hundred and fifty to four hundred calories more per
day than you to just maintain their weight. So that's
(20:13):
what this is. This is how this is all sort
of shuffling out, is that you know, when you're in
this post diet state, which by the way, it could
last up to six years. Um, your body really is
not going to burn as many calories and automatically wants
you to reset as opposed to your your your counterpoint
who isn't dieting at that same weight, So you have
(20:34):
to burn more and more calories. And this, I think
is the sticking point of why people continue to creep
up on the scales throughout their lives or yo yo
diet because your your body is sort of working against you. Yeah,
and it really it really becomes an issue of like
sort of me versus body and which is which is
kind of a false idea because we are our bodies
(20:55):
and as we discussed before, what our guts doing affects
what our brain is doing to a level the you
can't just cut one off from the other. But it's
also not the situation of, um, I am you know
this is all about me, I am going to lose
this weight. It becomes this this knee and what I
want versus the needs of my body and the the
sort of the ideas of my body and it's not
(21:15):
our body just trying to be terrible to us. I
mean how we evolved, right, Like we have these you know,
big thick brains that require a lot of energy. It's
sort of like the Firefox of browsers, right, takes up
a lot of energy. But it makes sense that we
have gluttony hardwired into us because at some level we
need it. Our brain evolved for us to eat an
(21:36):
excess in order to survive. Yeah, I mean we we
live in a an environment now that is rather far
removed from from what we originally evolved into where we
can go and we can in most most of our
listeners anyway, you're in a position where you could go
out today and you could probably eat just as much
as you possibly wanted to. There's there's there's nothing that
(21:57):
would stop you, and our bodies aren't really a volved
to deal with that, righties, we didn't know that buckets
of chicken were just available for you know, the drive through.
We had to forge for this stuff. Now did we
mention this? The Elingador, the Errol Morris originally shot the
videos an extra because he was he was shooting a
promotional video for KFC Kentucky Fried chicken. We didn't talk
(22:20):
about that. That's fascinating. So he was like, this is
the dude, because I mean, I guess this was I
forget the exact time from, but I guess this was
in that era of the double down where KFC is
like unhealthy food for the win, let's let's market it
this way. So so Morris is like, this is this
is the dude, This is the patron saint of double Bounce.
(22:42):
So he shoots this video with him and so he's like,
this dude is so interesting. This is such a fascinating
glimpse into really the heart of gluttony. My words, not his. Uh,
he had to shoot this tim and it extra where
he's just talking to wing a door about about it
and I love that. And as you had mentioned earlier
when we were talking about this, but um, you have
to see him in action with the wings getting his
(23:03):
glutton chops on Clinton chops. Yeah, which is I guess
what you call the smears of orange hot wing sauce
that are on the side of your face when you're
fully engorging yourself on chicken wings. Yeah, as a vegetarian,
because I've never had glutton chops, I might have had
soy glutton chops. Are there soy based or do you
think they're vegetarian or vegan eating competitions? No, but you
(23:28):
know again, if someone's out there and they want to
explore that, there you go, there's an idea. Yeah, I
think it's just sort of antithetical to the whole vegetarian
vegan thing. Yeah. I could be wrong, though, I think
it tends to be. Well, so let's talk about the
future of gluttony, because there's always a future for Yeah.
I mean, you know what, I guess that we've reached
(23:48):
the space age of gluttony with the eating competitions, But
I think humans could be grosser. I think we have
it in ourselves to to do more. Well. I think
that you know, there's there's the stability that we could
actually create the vomitorium. Right. We used to think that
in room in times that there was something called vomitorium
that we we'd eat and maybe there was a vomitorium,
but it was it was not a place where you
(24:09):
throw up your food so you can eat more. It
was just an architectural flourish, I believe. Yeah. Yeah, the
people mistook for like this big communal place where you
just threw up after you yea, which is a factlessness
idea that doesn't exactly exist. But in the future we
might actually be able to manage food in a way
that we could overeat and in a way get rid
(24:30):
of all of this access and that is through lefton. Again,
we talked about left in as being something that could
uh that is very helpful and appetite suppression, and scientists
at Columbia University have conducted several small studies looking at
whether injecting people with lepton can override the body's resistance
to weight loss and help maintain a lower weight. And
(24:50):
this is in a few small studies, left injections seemed
to trick the body into thinking it's still fat and
after left in replacement, and this is really interesting. Study
subjects burned more calories during activity and in brain scan studies,
left in jecton's appeared to change how the brain responds
to food, making it seem less enticely. So you would
like stick a syringe of lefton in one end and
(25:12):
a meatball sub in the other, and they would they
would balance each other right, right, They just can'cel each
other up. But of course this is a sort of
a new treatment and not something that's been widely studied,
and it is probably years away for use. Right. Tooking
for cheese steak, why did I go from meatball? Cheese
steak as much grosser? Do you think that's more glenn
Is than meatball? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it basically the same.
(25:33):
Both are lots of meat and some cheese on giant
pieces of bread. But there's something about the cheese steak
that's a little vialer. I guess maybe because it's protein
on protein, I guess. Yeah. It seems like there's a
show I was watching and it was like they were
profiling these different chefs and their favorite foods in different cities,
and like every city has its own cheese steak. I
(25:54):
feel like I've been this rant before, but I have
a thing against cheese steaks. All right. I think we're
gonna have to have a Science of TI Sticks podcast
coming up. Um. Here's another thing that is that on
the cusp of our understanding and perhaps harnessing this information,
something called brown fat. There are fat cells that consume
calories and release heat. Yeah, and if you're not driving
(26:16):
or riding a bicycle or anything like that, you can
you can probably reach up around your neck and you
can sort of feel yourself a little a little brown fat, right,
because that's where the human body tends to store it
doing it right now? Yeah, Yeah, you have a nice
little padding there. Um. It is important because researchers actually
think that, um, this could help turn white fat into
(26:39):
brown fat and you could actually burn more calories. And
you could possibly do this by exercising. They have seen
in subjects that exercise can create brown fat out of
white fat. Yeah. And this brown fat is remarkable because
rather than storing excess energy, the fat actually burns through
it right. Yeah. And and previously we kind of only
thought it was like a rodent or human new born thing.
(27:00):
Rats are babies one of the you know, they were
the only ones who who are really that into it.
And we would and generally if you would see a
lot of brown fat in the human, an adult human,
it meant that there was some sort of did generally
there was some of the kind of health ailment going
on that unbalanced things. Yeah, but they have a much
better understanding and this, I mean, this is only like
three years old information right now we're still figuring out. Yeah,
(27:21):
like the that they even figured out that brown fat
exists in adult humans, and again to go back to
the rodents. Um. At first, you know, they thought, okay, well,
rodents can't shiver and they use brown fat to keep warm,
and so do human infants, who also don't shiver very well.
And then they thought, well, once humans lose their brown
fat after infancy, the shivering response kicks in and we
no longer have a use for the brown fat. And
(27:43):
that is not true. Um. They actually found that younger
women have more brown fat than say, older men, Thinner
people have more brown fat than um than larger people.
Uh So they're still trying to figure it out and
figure out how to actually copulated for own use. That's
one of those things could be problematic though, because the
(28:04):
people who have the most active brown fat are generally
individuals with cancer or hyper thyroidism. So right, and again
hypothrotoism in cancer, assuming that you probably have whittled down
to a weight that's not that is no longer healthy. Right.
So yeah, it's got its limits, but that could be
an interesting future in terms of fighting off gluttony. Another possibility.
(28:27):
This would be far future, and I feel like I've
mentioned this example before, but an Ian m Banks culture series.
The denizens of the culture who you know, they've been
genetically advanced to the point where they can they can
release random drug like chemicals into their body just by
thinking about them. Uh, they have these you know, the
benevolent robots that look after them. But they can also
(28:48):
bypass food or beverage. So like if an individual wants
to have another cocktail but doesn't want to feel the
effects of that cocktail, they can bypass it straight through.
Well not straight through, well, that would have be the
effects of that cocktail later on, I mean, you still
want to hit the reward center, right, I think they
would just you would get the taste would be like
chewing a food and then spitting it out, or I
(29:09):
guess it would be a little they would get like
a little bit of the I got the impression it was.
It was like, I want to enjoy this food, but
I don't want to actually digest it and I don't
Or I want to enjoy this beverage, but I don't
want to actually take into the alcohol into my system.
So it's like they have a separate line just for
purely recreational food and beverage. I like that's just like
(29:31):
two different digestive systems in a way, but the one
digestive system doesn't really work. I'm just trying to think
how we can fit this center our own little uh
worldview in the future possibility of having few different digestive systems. Yeah,
I mean, of course, there are other possibilities to in
terms of the future of gluttony, like imagine being able
to plug yourself into a virtual environment where you just
eat all you want. Yeah, with that, with that, say,
(29:53):
you you know, I wonder if that would chick in
again with the reward center and openmine, if that would
be released. I don't know, situation. Maybe maybe it's it's
such a far future possibility, like you would have to
we're talking, we would be talking more than just like
strapping in some goggles and some haptic gloves and you know,
going through a city made out of cheeseburgers. It would
you would have to have a much more like neurologically
(30:14):
plugged in system for that to take place. And by
that point, who knows what else would have figured out? Well,
and then do you think in that realm that more
people would become competitive eaters? That's my question. Maybe, but
it would be a crazy like the competition would just
be off the charts. I mean, how would you even
clock that? I don't know, I don't know somehow someway
Interestingly enough, you know this will come out like a
(30:36):
couple of weeks later, but that we were recording this
on ash Wednesday, for a lot of people will go
into like some sort of Lenten fasting or saying I'm
not gonna eat fried foods except on feast days kind
of a thing. So that's kind of that's that's kind
of perfect. Yeah, talking about sins and lent and gluttony.
(31:00):
That you have it a little slice of stuff to
blow your mind past to have with those three slices
of pie that you had for Thanksgiving dinner and dessert.
We hope that the information helps you to understand the
gluttony that you part took off today, or help you
to understand the gluttony that you dodged, but inevitably someone
you know indulge again. Do you want to find us,
you want to talk to us about this topic and others,
(31:20):
you can head on over to stuff to Blow your
mind dot com. That's where you'll find all seven of
those uh seven Deadly's episodes there there for your listening pleasure,
including this one. If you want to listen to it
in its original format, hey, go for it. You can
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(31:41):
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