March 6, 2012 • 35 mins
Gluttony: When does appetite transform into disorder? What are we to make of competitive eating? Join Robert and Julie as they continue their science-guided tour of hell, chatting with gluttons in the Inferno's third circle and considering modern forms of gluttony. Painting by Jacques de Backer (Luciano Pedicini/© Alinari Archives/CORBIS)
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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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we continue our journey through the seven Deadly Sins. This
week we're looking at a little something called gluttony. I
(00:26):
feel like you have to do that every time we
talk about one of these sins. Yeah. Well, well, of course,
I don't know if the true glutton would be able
to like it would be more of a muffled food
joked laugh right, food falling down the face, kind of
a you know, wine spilling all over the one's body
kind of a thing. Wine spilling. Wow, Yeah, I guess
it does have sort of like a boccus like yeah
(00:48):
evocation there. Yeah, it makes me think of on Futurama,
they have a there's a robot called hedonism Bot, and
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 as a very Roman air
to him. But yeah, so so gluttony is is the
sin that's typically associated with massive consumptions of food being
(01:08):
really into food, enormous feasts, 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, and Inferno the pit of the eternal suffering.
At the center of the planet, we see a circle.
This is the third circle, guarded by Cerebus, the three
(01:29):
headed dog. You know, the dog is a good symbol
of gluttony, so and a dog with three mouths is
let's like triple gluttony, right, 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 glutton's uh. All right,
So you have rain hale and snow falling just like
(01:51):
crazy rain hale and snow, all right, 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.
They're they're wallowing like pigs in this mud. That's kind
of they may or may not be excrement. There's um
that they're described in very doglike terms. And so this
is where the gluttons are punished now in purgatory, whereas
(02:13):
we discussed before, this is the mountain that connects Earth
to heaven, and souls that aren't quite bad enough for
hell when they need a little polishing before they can
get up into heaven, they have to climb this mountain
terrace by terraces. In each terrace they remove a sort
of a layer of grimy sin from themselves, so they're
transcending their sins. Right on the sixth terraces of Purgatory,
(02:33):
you will find these emaciated spirits with sunken eyes, you know,
all the way back in the and the sockets and
their their faces are said to resemble the letter M.
That's how swollen and sunk. Not swollen, but that's how
sunk in their faces are. And so they're just suffering
excruciating hunger and thirsts. So in life they had all
their fill. So if they're going to work off this
(02:54):
layer of gluttony, they're gonna have to get used to
the idea of going hungary. I like how Dante just
dove into the gird task wasn't scared of it. Um
And but that is part of the human condition, right
and um as uh Orson 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
(03:16):
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
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
(03:37):
really enjoy our hardwired yea, 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 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
(03:57):
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,
could that's that's someone who could afford to be gluttonous, right,
had a bunch of resources, master glutton, I wouldn't. I
would imagine it's fair to say that. I always think
(04:17):
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. You can at least be a glutton
on you can as far as bad food goes, you can,
(04:37):
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,
and then there's this level I'm eating because I really
enjoy these tastes and I enjoy the sensation of eating,
(04:58):
and I'm I'm enjoying the the sun a purely sense 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
about here says that he got into it because he
really likes chicken, and if he really likes the like
(05:19):
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 degree um. And I think most
people are familiar with Chakaro Kobayashi. He is the usually
(05:41):
a person that you think of when you think about
stuffing like three 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 goes by
a wing a door and you just refer to him.
He his specialty are his chicken chicken wings. And there's
(06:04):
a documentary film by Errol Morris called Elwing a Door
and like a seven minute deal. Yeah, it's not very long,
it's actually pretty it's worth checking out. We'll link to
it on the blogs are on the Facebook, but it
focuses on this five time champion of the Philadelphia wingboll
Bill Simmons, and how he prepares for these competitions. It's
(06:24):
just insane. Yeah. I would be tempted to classify him
as a power glutton. Yeah, yeah, a power if you
think about a power lifter, he guess 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
degree that it's just purely unholy, unholy. And they talk
about this actually in the documentary, to to the extent
(06:47):
that he says that he has almost accidentally eaten one
of his digits his fingers. Yeah, like he said, he
claims that his his hands are covered with scars because
he'll just will get so into the I guess he's
you know, he's achieving flow. He's a transcendent experience for him.
But it's to the point where he's biting his hands
and leaving scars because he's eating chicken wings in this
(07:10):
state of mind focused. Let's talk about how he trains.
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, that's the point of that. And ten
pounds of tutsie rolls a week. Yeah, this was especially
growth test because he's not just eating one and then
swallowing it. Now, he's he's throwing him in his mouth
(07:33):
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 there's some 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 two in
these tutsie rolls up in there, his baseball size mass
(07:54):
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 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 different story.
(08:17):
Like chewing is for chumps. Yeah, chewing is for chumps,
And and and only that he's such a pro that
when he masters this, he moves on to dog bones, Yeah,
masticating them normal when and I'm equating a baseball made
air tutsi rolls its normal human food here. But but
but this becomes just too mundane for him, so he
(08:39):
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 that
he never gets full and that he feels that he
has an eating disorder. Yeah, because five pound bags of
raw high bones like these are the if you've ever
been around a dog chewing one of these things, these
are those things that the dog too and it makes
(09:01):
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
eating and they'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
(09:22):
so much that they send a message to the brain,
which interprets the signal to mean, hey, you've got a
full belly. Um that our brain stops is from eating anymore.
That's what normally happens. But they say a 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
(09:42):
according to Douglas Seidner, m d. Program director for Clinical
Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic. So it's kind of mind
over matter. Yeah, yeah, it's mind over manning, mind over
mind over anything. That you eat yourself into a numbness
and you deaden your urge to up eating, which is
just incredible, incredible. It is one way way to put it.
(10:06):
L Wing a door. He's he's pretty amazing and he
has some or or when he is his I'm not
sure if he's active at the moment, but when he
is active sometimes he is accompanied to the eating platform,
the gluttony ring, 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
(10:28):
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, don't they
sort of? From from what I remember, they actually are
counting the amount of food items that he's stepping down
his gullet, helping to corroborate his win. Yeah, because you're
gonna need somebody to keep track of that. I mean,
(10:49):
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 sin citations have done. It's like I need
somebody else. Does tell me now we're at number five
because I'm gonna get wrong. So you need some lamb ats? Yeah,
I need some. 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
(11:11):
and um, how our body actually responds to eating. It's
really pretty fascinating. Physician Jane jack Wang of Brookhaven National
Laboratory and his colleague Nora Volcal 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
(11:33):
people are usually less sensitive to dopamine's rewarding effects. So,
as we all remember, dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It delivers
the high that we feel um our brain perceives when
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
(11:56):
have to chase after a stronger dose of food or
drugs in order to get a decent bump of that dopamine. Yes,
that whole trait chasing the dragon type thing, when we've
all heard examples of it with like an extreme case
like like heroin, where you an individual individual have that
first taste of heroin and it'll be this amazing, just
overpowering experience, but they never get that same experience again,
(12:19):
like the rest of their lives then is assuming they
I mean and hopefully they're able to get away from it,
but 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
that's increased or excessive stimulation just creates more decent citation
(12:40):
with dopamine. And then yeah, again that vicious circle kicks
in and you've got increased desire and decreased payoff at
the same time. 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 bacon or Canadian bacon.
I'm not sharing like fig spread. It't was sounds like
(13:00):
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 it's like each time it's like a little
a little further removed from 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 I'm telling it
(13:21):
that the Napoleon I don't know, it's really At 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, and he just made it even more like yeah,
and then it became even more of a thing. The
server was like, what sandwich? That sandwich? Oh, the Napoleon,
the really short one. Stilts to make it feel better.
(13:44):
It would be cool if it were on stilts. But well, yeah,
My point is the sandwich was dope, and that it
actually I mean, yeah, nice, nicely done. So um Whang
looks into this problem of obesity and addiction and he
actually asked him of his while tears in a study
to come hungry. The torture experiment horrible. It's horrible. He
(14:06):
has them to describe their favorite meals while he heaps
up that meal in a nearby microwave so that the
waft of the 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
(14:26):
their brain goes nuts, okay, and then the orbital frontal cortex,
which is implicated in decision making, also lights up. And
then they find that the 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,
(14:49):
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
candy and about how darn experience sugar in a in
a kind of different sensory realm than adults do, and
then most adults do. And in this the experiment that
really highlights this this idea that that obase individuals or
(15:12):
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
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 eat just
one such the piez instead of four? You know, But
(15:33):
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 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 Times sort are called called the Fat Trap,
(15:54):
and what they found is that weight loss and weight
control depends. It still depends of us on the simple
equation of eat less and exercise more, right, but for
some people it's a lot more complicated. Right, So we
talked about the brain being changed in that instance. Um.
They were talking in this article of the Fat Trap
about something called post diet syndrome, and it's essentially a
(16:16):
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. There's a guy named Joseph Proyeto and
he's a physician at 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
(16:39):
were like super diligent. Um. The patients that he was
working with, they had food diaries. Um, 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 Herapote Parker Pope, who wrote
(17:01):
The Fat Trap, started to think about this too in
her the context of her own life, and she started
to look at all these different factors, um, that could
be responsible for the inevitability of weight gain. You know,
no matter if you're abuse or not. But it makes
it incredibly difficult for people who are obese to maintain
their weights throughout their whole lives. And we'll talk a
(17:23):
little bit about why that is when we come back.
All Right, we're back talking about the post diet syndrome.
The body has has realized that something is a miss,
and it's trying to replenish the stores and it breaks
down in an interesting way. It's the research has found
(17:45):
that there's a gastric hormone called grillan, 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 of lepton, a
hormone that suppresses hungered increases metabolism, also remain lower than expected.
And then you have a whole host of other hormones
(18:06):
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 that get messed with
in this post diet state, right, so that that grayllin
is higher, that hormone that tells you that you're hungry,
so you're more activated in terms of like, hey, I'm
(18:28):
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 that in some post
diet subject, muscle fibers were acting like slow twitch muscles.
A slow twitch muscles are actually responsible for less burned calories.
(18:51):
So you're seeing this other weirdness happening in the post
diet scenario. And then there's again going back to the
brains of post dieters, um they were studied by researchers
Rudolph Libel and Michael 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,
(19:15):
and yos, just 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 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
(19:38):
her less willpower to resist high calorie treat a body
wants to reset at the higher weight. So I mean,
how this actually susses 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 three
(20:01):
thousand pounds. That's a lot that's even more than l
winger um three thousand calories a day. But then you
drop down to one and in order to maintain a
weight of a hundred and ninety pounds, you eat twenty
three hundred calories a day. Your counterpart who has not
been in a dieting scenario, who is weighs a hundred
ninety pounds, actually could have two hundred and fifty to
(20:24):
four hundred calories more per day than you to just
maintain their weight. So that's 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
(20:46):
your your your counterpoint who isn't dieting at that same weight,
so you have to burn more and more calories. And this,
I think is 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 really becomes
an issue of like sort of knee versus body, and
(21:07):
which is which is kind of a false idea because
we are our bodies and as we discussed before, what
our guts doing affects what our brain is doing to
a level that you can't just cut one off from
the other. But it's also not this 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
(21:29):
body and the sort of the ideas of my body.
And it's not 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
(21:50):
level we need it. Our brain evolved for us to
eat an 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
(22:13):
nothing that that would stop you, and our bodies aren't
really evolved to deal with that. Right. We didn't know
that buckets of chicken were just available for you know,
the drive through. We thought we had to forge for
this stuff. Now did we mention this? That El wingadore
the that Errol Morris originally shot the videos an extra
because he was he was shooting a promotional video for
(22:34):
KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken we didn't talk about and that's fascinating.
And so he was like, this is the dude, because
I mean, I guess this was I forget the exact
time frame that I guess. This was in that era
of the double down where KFC is like unhealthy food
for the wind, let's let's market it this way. So
so Morris is like, this is this is the dude,
(22:56):
This is the patron saint of double downs. So he
shoots this video with and he's like, this dude is
so interesting. This is such a fascinating glimpse into really
the heart of gluttoning my words, not his. Uh, he
had to shoot this tim Inte 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 you have to see him
(23:17):
in action with the wings, getting his glutton chops on
Clinton chops, which is I guess what you call the
smears of orange hot wing sauce. They're on the side
of your face when you're fully engorging yourself on chicken wings. Yeah,
as a vegetarian, because I have never had glutton chops.
Are there? I might have had soy glutton chops? Are there?
Soy based or do you think they're vegetarian inter vegan
(23:40):
eating competitions? No, but you 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
empathetical 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
(24:01):
always a future for gli Yeah, I mean, you know what,
Like I said, we've reached the space age of gluttony
with the eating competitions, But I think humans could be grosser.
I think we have it in ourselves too to do
more well. I think that you know, there's there's the
possibility that we could actually create the vomitorium. Right. We
used to think that in room in times that there
was something called a vomitorium that we would eat And
(24:23):
maybe there was a vomitorium, but it was it was
not a place where you throw up your food so
you can eat more. It was just an architectural flourish,
I believe. Yeah, yeah, that people mistook for like this
big communal place where you just threw up after you yeah,
which is a factless gluttonous idea of 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
(24:45):
in a way get rid 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 in injecting people
with lepton can override the body's resistance to weight loss
and help maintain a lower weight. And this is in
(25:08):
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 injectons
appeared to change how the brain responds to food, making
it seem less enticing. So you would like stick a
syringe of lefton in one end and a meatball sub
(25:29):
in the other, and and they would they would balance
each other, right, right, they just cancel each other. But
of course this is a sort of a new treatment
and not something that's been widely studied and is probably
years away for use. Right, she took on for cheese steak.
Why did they go from meatball? Cheese steak as much grosser?
Do you think that's more glad as the meatball? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean it's basically the same. Both are lots of
(25:52):
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 feel like I've done
this rent before, but I have a thing against cheese sticks,
(26:16):
all right. I think we're gonna have to have a
Science of Cheese 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 are
fat cells that consume calories and release heat. Yeah. And
if you're not driving or riding a bicycle or anything
like that, you can you can probably reach up around
(26:37):
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,
we have a nice little padding there. Um. It is
important because researchers actually think that, um, this could help
turn white fat into brown fat, and you could actually
burn more calories and you could possibly do the spy
(27:00):
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 that it was like a
rodent or human newborn thing. Rats are babies, one of
the you know, they were the only ones who who
(27:20):
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 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, like there that they even
figured out that brown fat exists in adult humans. And
(27:42):
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 that is not true. Um.
They actually found found that younger women have more brown
(28:06):
fat than say, older men, Thinner people have more brown
fat than um than larger people. So they're still trying
to figure it out. And figure out how to actually
manipulate it for own use. And it's one of those things.
Could be problematic though, because the people who have the
most active brown fat are generally individuals with cancer or hyperthyroidism.
So right, and again hypothrotoism in cancer, assuming that you
(28:30):
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. 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
(28:55):
point where they can they can release random drug like
chemicals into their body just thinking about them. Uh, they
have these you know, the benevolent robots that look after them.
But they can also bypass food or beverage. So like,
if an individual wants to have another cocktail that doesn't
want to feel the effects of that cocktail, they can
bypass it straight through. Well not straight through, well, that
(29:16):
would it 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 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,
(29:38):
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 two different digestive systems in a way.
The one digestive system doesn't really work. I'm just trying
to think how we can fit this into our own
little uh worldview in the future. Possibility of having two
(29:59):
different digestives systems, Yeah, I mean, of course there are
other possibilities too 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, you you know, I wonder if that
would chick in again with the reward center and openmine,
if that would be released situation. Maybe maybe it's it's
such a far future possibility, like you would have to
(30:20):
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
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
(30:43):
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
couple of weeks later, but that we were recording this
on ash Wednesday before 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
(31:05):
of a thing. So, but that's kind of that's that's
kind of perfect. Yeah, yeah, talking about sins and lent
and gluttony. Shall we bring the robot over? Yes, bring
the robot over with his fat sack of mail. All right,
and this this is rather fitting as well. We heard
from a listener by the name of Aaron. Aaron all
(31:27):
right sin and says hello, Robert and Julie. I just
finished listening to your Absolute Disgust podcast in which you
mentioned the Kloaka bot, which you have just to specify,
because I guess we do mention that creation a lot.
Last week, I was lucky enough to take a trip
to Tasmania for my twenty fifth birthday, Happy Birthday, and
whilst I was there, I visited the Mona Art Gallery. Um.
(31:47):
It was here I got to experience the Kloaka Bot
for myself, close up and somewhat personal. Upon arrival of
the gallery, I wasn't too familiar with Wim Delvo's work,
so when I walked into the room that contained the bot,
I was a bit caught off guard. There was a
quote in some of the information that was given to
me about the bot that pretty much sums up the
artwork for me, and it was a bit tedious to
(32:08):
watch and stinks. Um. I was captivated by the contraption
as it looked like something could have come out of
the original wallet Willy Wonka film, and once I realized
what the piece was, I was intrigued to find out more,
but I also was soon impulse to get out of
the room quickly. I can only describe the smell as unsettling.
(32:30):
It wasn't a smack in the face stinch, but more
of an unearthy, grumbling deal in the back of your
throat kind of smell. Um that, as much as I
wanted to explore the machine more, I couldn't stay in
the room. Uh. There were a few other smaller versions
of the cloak a bot. My favorite was kloak A
number five that we're in a separate room that I
mustered up lung capacity to do a quick trip round
(32:51):
to peak at all the inner works of these machineries.
It was a smell a yet intriguing experience. And then
she goes on to point out that her perhaps her
only major disgust these mangoes. You know what, I actually
understood that what's really because they're slimy um, and they
don't for me. They don't pack the punch of like
a peach or you know, some other fruit in the
(33:12):
same category. Uh well, I mean I love mangoes, that
they are a bit temperamental. They're one of those fruits
when you buy them that and you will never really
know what you're gonna get. Like a banana, banana is
pretty consistent. I mean assume that you can tell on
the outside what a banana is probably doing on the inside,
and and you know what you're in for. But like
a mangoes, kind of like a cantaloupe, the candleop is
(33:35):
one of those where sometimes sometimes the candlop is amazing
butt al, though sometimes it's just kind of yeah, just
to payoff is not so great. I get this, we
shouldn't see anything about sliminess, but I understand it from
that perspective. But apparently in Australia that makes for a
bit of a un Australian, very UnAustralian odd personal fruit,
the golden fruit. Right, she's been shunned for an unliking him.
(33:57):
We'll presumably I would say, well, may me your man
goes then, but that would be disgusting because by the
time I got here, would they would just be grotest
package full of insects and slide. Anyway, She closed by
saying love listening to your podcast, along with lots of
other podcasts from you folks at hs W, thanks for
blowing my mind on a weekly basis. So yeah, but
that was an excellent to you know, definitely hear about
(34:20):
and more about like firsthand knowledge of the clay butt.
I love that people are out there meeting it for us. Well,
it's on my bucket list now. I've heard so much
about it and I've read so much about it. I
just I've got to see it in the flesh. Yeah,
poor choice affords. All right, Well, there you go. Gluttony.
We would love as always to hear your input on
(34:40):
this topic. What is your perception of gluttony? What is
your experience with gluttony? What do you think about professionally
eating contest? Have you ever participated in one? And uh
and what do you think about a nice friendly vegan
eating competition? Is that against everything that you can stand for?
Or would it be kind of interesting? I don't know.
You can find us on faceboo. Look it is stuff
to blow your mind and uh oh, we're also on Twitter.
(35:03):
You can reach out to us there at Blow the
Mind and you can always send us an email to
Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast Stuff from the future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
we continue our journey through the seven Deadly Sins. This
week we're looking at a little something called gluttony. I
(00:26):
feel like you have to do that every time we
talk about one of these sins. Yeah. Well, well, of course,
I don't know if the true glutton would be able
to like it would be more of a muffled food
joked laugh right, food falling down the face, kind of
a you know, wine spilling all over the one's body
kind of a thing. Wine spilling. Wow, Yeah, I guess
it does have sort of like a boccus like yeah
(00:48):
evocation there. Yeah, it makes me think of on Futurama,
they have a there's a robot called hedonism Bot, and
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 as a very Roman air
to him. But yeah, so so gluttony is is the
sin that's typically associated with massive consumptions of food being
(01:08):
really into food, enormous feasts, 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, and Inferno the pit of the eternal suffering.
At the center of the planet, we see a circle.
This is the third circle, guarded by Cerebus, the three
(01:29):
headed dog. You know, the dog is a good symbol
of gluttony, so and a dog with three mouths is
let's like triple gluttony, right, 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 glutton's uh. All right,
So you have rain hale and snow falling just like
(01:51):
crazy rain hale and snow, all right, 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.
They're they're wallowing like pigs in this mud. That's kind
of they may or may not be excrement. There's um
that they're described in very doglike terms. And so this
is where the gluttons are punished now in purgatory, whereas
(02:13):
we discussed before, this is the mountain that connects Earth
to heaven, and souls that aren't quite bad enough for
hell when they need a little polishing before they can
get up into heaven, they have to climb this mountain
terrace by terraces. In each terrace they remove a sort
of a layer of grimy sin from themselves, so they're
transcending their sins. Right on the sixth terraces of Purgatory,
(02:33):
you will find these emaciated spirits with sunken eyes, you know,
all the way back in the and the sockets and
their their faces are said to resemble the letter M.
That's how swollen and sunk. Not swollen, but that's how
sunk in their faces are. And so they're just suffering
excruciating hunger and thirsts. So in life they had all
their fill. So if they're going to work off this
(02:54):
layer of gluttony, they're gonna have to get used to
the idea of going hungary. I like how Dante just
dove into the gird task wasn't scared of it. Um
And but that is part of the human condition, right
and um as uh Orson 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
(03:16):
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
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
(03:37):
really enjoy our hardwired yea, 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 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
(03:57):
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,
could that's that's someone who could afford to be gluttonous, right,
had a bunch of resources, master glutton, I wouldn't. I
would imagine it's fair to say that. I always think
(04:17):
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. You can at least be a glutton
on you can as far as bad food goes, you can,
(04:37):
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,
and then there's this level I'm eating because I really
enjoy these tastes and I enjoy the sensation of eating,
(04:58):
and I'm I'm enjoying the the sun a purely sense 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
about here says that he got into it because he
really likes chicken, and if he really likes the like
(05:19):
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 degree um. And I think most
people are familiar with Chakaro Kobayashi. He is the usually
(05:41):
a person that you think of when you think about
stuffing like three 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 goes by
a wing a door and you just refer to him.
He his specialty are his chicken chicken wings. And there's
(06:04):
a documentary film by Errol Morris called Elwing a Door
and like a seven minute deal. Yeah, it's not very long,
it's actually pretty it's worth checking out. We'll link to
it on the blogs are on the Facebook, but it
focuses on this five time champion of the Philadelphia wingboll
Bill Simmons, and how he prepares for these competitions. It's
(06:24):
just insane. Yeah. I would be tempted to classify him
as a power glutton. Yeah, yeah, a power if you
think about a power lifter, he guess 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
degree that it's just purely unholy, unholy. And they talk
about this actually in the documentary, to to the extent
(06:47):
that he says that he has almost accidentally eaten one
of his digits his fingers. Yeah, like he said, he
claims that his his hands are covered with scars because
he'll just will get so into the I guess he's
you know, he's achieving flow. He's a transcendent experience for him.
But it's to the point where he's biting his hands
and leaving scars because he's eating chicken wings in this
(07:10):
state of mind focused. Let's talk about how he trains.
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, that's the point of that. And ten
pounds of tutsie rolls a week. Yeah, this was especially
growth test because he's not just eating one and then
swallowing it. Now, he's he's throwing him in his mouth
(07:33):
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 there's some 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 two in
these tutsie rolls up in there, his baseball size mass
(07:54):
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 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 different story.
(08:17):
Like chewing is for chumps. Yeah, chewing is for chumps,
And and and only that he's such a pro that
when he masters this, he moves on to dog bones, Yeah,
masticating them normal when and I'm equating a baseball made
air tutsi rolls its normal human food here. But but
but this becomes just too mundane for him, so he
(08:39):
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 that
he never gets full and that he feels that he
has an eating disorder. Yeah, because five pound bags of
raw high bones like these are the if you've ever
been around a dog chewing one of these things, these
are those things that the dog too and it makes
(09:01):
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
eating and they'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
(09:22):
so much that they send a message to the brain,
which interprets the signal to mean, hey, you've got a
full belly. Um that our brain stops is from eating anymore.
That's what normally happens. But they say a 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
(09:42):
according to Douglas Seidner, m d. Program director for Clinical
Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic. So it's kind of mind
over matter. Yeah, yeah, it's mind over manning, mind over
mind over anything. That you eat yourself into a numbness
and you deaden your urge to up eating, which is
just incredible, incredible. It is one way way to put it.
(10:06):
L Wing a door. He's he's pretty amazing and he
has some or or when he is his I'm not
sure if he's active at the moment, but when he
is active sometimes he is accompanied to the eating platform,
the gluttony ring, 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
(10:28):
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, don't they
sort of? From from what I remember, they actually are
counting the amount of food items that he's stepping down
his gullet, helping to corroborate his win. Yeah, because you're
gonna need somebody to keep track of that. I mean,
(10:49):
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 sin citations have done. It's like I need
somebody else. Does tell me now we're at number five
because I'm gonna get wrong. So you need some lamb ats? Yeah,
I need some. 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
(11:11):
and um, how our body actually responds to eating. It's
really pretty fascinating. Physician Jane jack Wang of Brookhaven National
Laboratory and his colleague Nora Volcal 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
(11:33):
people are usually less sensitive to dopamine's rewarding effects. So,
as we all remember, dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It delivers
the high that we feel um our brain perceives when
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
(11:56):
have to chase after a stronger dose of food or
drugs in order to get a decent bump of that dopamine. Yes,
that whole trait chasing the dragon type thing, when we've
all heard examples of it with like an extreme case
like like heroin, where you an individual individual have that
first taste of heroin and it'll be this amazing, just
overpowering experience, but they never get that same experience again,
(12:19):
like the rest of their lives then is assuming they
I mean and hopefully they're able to get away from it,
but 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
that's increased or excessive stimulation just creates more decent citation
(12:40):
with dopamine. And then yeah, again that vicious circle kicks
in and you've got increased desire and decreased payoff at
the same time. 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 bacon or Canadian bacon.
I'm not sharing like fig spread. It't was sounds like
(13:00):
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 it's like each time it's like a little
a little further removed from 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 I'm telling it
(13:21):
that the Napoleon I don't know, it's really At 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, and he just made it even more like yeah,
and then it became even more of a thing. The
server was like, what sandwich? That sandwich? Oh, the Napoleon,
the really short one. Stilts to make it feel better.
(13:44):
It would be cool if it were on stilts. But well, yeah,
My point is the sandwich was dope, and that it
actually I mean, yeah, nice, nicely done. So um Whang
looks into this problem of obesity and addiction and he
actually asked him of his while tears in a study
to come hungry. The torture experiment horrible. It's horrible. He
(14:06):
has them to describe their favorite meals while he heaps
up that meal in a nearby microwave so that the
waft of the 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
(14:26):
their brain goes nuts, okay, and then the orbital frontal cortex,
which is implicated in decision making, also lights up. And
then they find that the 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,
(14:49):
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
candy and about how darn experience sugar in a in
a kind of different sensory realm than adults do, and
then most adults do. And in this the experiment that
really highlights this this idea that that obase individuals or
(15:12):
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
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 eat just
one such the piez instead of four? You know, But
(15:33):
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 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 Times sort are called called the Fat Trap,
(15:54):
and what they found is that weight loss and weight
control depends. It still depends of us on the simple
equation of eat less and exercise more, right, but for
some people it's a lot more complicated. Right, So we
talked about the brain being changed in that instance. Um.
They were talking in this article of the Fat Trap
about something called post diet syndrome, and it's essentially a
(16:16):
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. There's a guy named Joseph Proyeto and
he's a physician at 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
(16:39):
were like super diligent. Um. The patients that he was
working with, they had food diaries. Um, 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 Herapote Parker Pope, who wrote
(17:01):
The Fat Trap, started to think about this too in
her the context of her own life, and she started
to look at all these different factors, um, that could
be responsible for the inevitability of weight gain. You know,
no matter if you're abuse or not. But it makes
it incredibly difficult for people who are obese to maintain
their weights throughout their whole lives. And we'll talk a
(17:23):
little bit about why that is when we come back.
All Right, we're back talking about the post diet syndrome.
The body has has realized that something is a miss,
and it's trying to replenish the stores and it breaks
down in an interesting way. It's the research has found
(17:45):
that there's a gastric hormone called grillan, 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 of lepton, a
hormone that suppresses hungered increases metabolism, also remain lower than expected.
And then you have a whole host of other hormones
(18:06):
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 that get messed with
in this post diet state, right, so that that grayllin
is higher, that hormone that tells you that you're hungry,
so you're more activated in terms of like, hey, I'm
(18:28):
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 that in some post
diet subject, muscle fibers were acting like slow twitch muscles.
A slow twitch muscles are actually responsible for less burned calories.
(18:51):
So you're seeing this other weirdness happening in the post
diet scenario. And then there's again going back to the
brains of post dieters, um they were studied by researchers
Rudolph Libel and Michael 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,
(19:15):
and yos, just 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 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
(19:38):
her less willpower to resist high calorie treat a body
wants to reset at the higher weight. So I mean,
how this actually susses 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 three
(20:01):
thousand pounds. That's a lot that's even more than l
winger um three thousand calories a day. But then you
drop down to one and in order to maintain a
weight of a hundred and ninety pounds, you eat twenty
three hundred calories a day. Your counterpart who has not
been in a dieting scenario, who is weighs a hundred
ninety pounds, actually could have two hundred and fifty to
(20:24):
four hundred calories more per day than you to just
maintain their weight. So that's 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
(20:46):
your your your counterpoint who isn't dieting at that same weight,
so you have to burn more and more calories. And this,
I think is 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 really becomes
an issue of like sort of knee versus body, and
(21:07):
which is which is kind of a false idea because
we are our bodies and as we discussed before, what
our guts doing affects what our brain is doing to
a level that you can't just cut one off from
the other. But it's also not this 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
(21:29):
body and the sort of the ideas of my body.
And it's not 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
(21:50):
level we need it. Our brain evolved for us to
eat an 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
(22:13):
nothing that that would stop you, and our bodies aren't
really evolved to deal with that. Right. We didn't know
that buckets of chicken were just available for you know,
the drive through. We thought we had to forge for
this stuff. Now did we mention this? That El wingadore
the that Errol Morris originally shot the videos an extra
because he was he was shooting a promotional video for
(22:34):
KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken we didn't talk about and that's fascinating.
And so he was like, this is the dude, because
I mean, I guess this was I forget the exact
time frame that I guess. This was in that era
of the double down where KFC is like unhealthy food
for the wind, let's let's market it this way. So
so Morris is like, this is this is the dude,
(22:56):
This is the patron saint of double downs. So he
shoots this video with and he's like, this dude is
so interesting. This is such a fascinating glimpse into really
the heart of gluttoning my words, not his. Uh, he
had to shoot this tim Inte 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 you have to see him
(23:17):
in action with the wings, getting his glutton chops on
Clinton chops, which is I guess what you call the
smears of orange hot wing sauce. They're on the side
of your face when you're fully engorging yourself on chicken wings. Yeah,
as a vegetarian, because I have never had glutton chops.
Are there? I might have had soy glutton chops? Are there?
Soy based or do you think they're vegetarian inter vegan
(23:40):
eating competitions? No, but you 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
empathetical 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
(24:01):
always a future for gli Yeah, I mean, you know what,
Like I said, we've reached the space age of gluttony
with the eating competitions, But I think humans could be grosser.
I think we have it in ourselves too to do
more well. I think that you know, there's there's the
possibility that we could actually create the vomitorium. Right. We
used to think that in room in times that there
was something called a vomitorium that we would eat And
(24:23):
maybe there was a vomitorium, but it was it was
not a place where you throw up your food so
you can eat more. It was just an architectural flourish,
I believe. Yeah, yeah, that people mistook for like this
big communal place where you just threw up after you yeah,
which is a factless gluttonous idea of 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
(24:45):
in a way get rid 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 in injecting people
with lepton can override the body's resistance to weight loss
and help maintain a lower weight. And this is in
(25:08):
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 injectons
appeared to change how the brain responds to food, making
it seem less enticing. So you would like stick a
syringe of lefton in one end and a meatball sub
(25:29):
in the other, and and they would they would balance
each other, right, right, they just cancel each other. But
of course this is a sort of a new treatment
and not something that's been widely studied and is probably
years away for use. Right, she took on for cheese steak.
Why did they go from meatball? Cheese steak as much grosser?
Do you think that's more glad as the meatball? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean it's basically the same. Both are lots of
(25:52):
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 feel like I've done
this rent before, but I have a thing against cheese sticks,
(26:16):
all right. I think we're gonna have to have a
Science of Cheese 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 are
fat cells that consume calories and release heat. Yeah. And
if you're not driving or riding a bicycle or anything
like that, you can you can probably reach up around
(26:37):
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,
we have a nice little padding there. Um. It is
important because researchers actually think that, um, this could help
turn white fat into brown fat, and you could actually
burn more calories and you could possibly do the spy
(27:00):
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 that it was like a
rodent or human newborn thing. Rats are babies, one of
the you know, they were the only ones who who
(27:20):
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 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, like there that they even
figured out that brown fat exists in adult humans. And
(27:42):
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 that is not true. Um.
They actually found found that younger women have more brown
(28:06):
fat than say, older men, Thinner people have more brown
fat than um than larger people. So they're still trying
to figure it out. And figure out how to actually
manipulate it for own use. And it's one of those things.
Could be problematic though, because the people who have the
most active brown fat are generally individuals with cancer or hyperthyroidism.
So right, and again hypothrotoism in cancer, assuming that you
(28:30):
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. 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
(28:55):
point where they can they can release random drug like
chemicals into their body just thinking about them. Uh, they
have these you know, the benevolent robots that look after them.
But they can also bypass food or beverage. So like,
if an individual wants to have another cocktail that doesn't
want to feel the effects of that cocktail, they can
bypass it straight through. Well not straight through, well, that
(29:16):
would it 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 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,
(29:38):
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 two different digestive systems in a way.
The one digestive system doesn't really work. I'm just trying
to think how we can fit this into our own
little uh worldview in the future. Possibility of having two
(29:59):
different digestives systems, Yeah, I mean, of course there are
other possibilities too 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, you you know, I wonder if that
would chick in again with the reward center and openmine,
if that would be released situation. Maybe maybe it's it's
such a far future possibility, like you would have to
(30:20):
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
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
(30:43):
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
couple of weeks later, but that we were recording this
on ash Wednesday before 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
(31:05):
of a thing. So, but that's kind of that's that's
kind of perfect. Yeah, yeah, talking about sins and lent
and gluttony. Shall we bring the robot over? Yes, bring
the robot over with his fat sack of mail. All right,
and this this is rather fitting as well. We heard
from a listener by the name of Aaron. Aaron all
(31:27):
right sin and says hello, Robert and Julie. I just
finished listening to your Absolute Disgust podcast in which you
mentioned the Kloaka bot, which you have just to specify,
because I guess we do mention that creation a lot.
Last week, I was lucky enough to take a trip
to Tasmania for my twenty fifth birthday, Happy Birthday, and
whilst I was there, I visited the Mona Art Gallery. Um.
(31:47):
It was here I got to experience the Kloaka Bot
for myself, close up and somewhat personal. Upon arrival of
the gallery, I wasn't too familiar with Wim Delvo's work,
so when I walked into the room that contained the bot,
I was a bit caught off guard. There was a
quote in some of the information that was given to
me about the bot that pretty much sums up the
artwork for me, and it was a bit tedious to
(32:08):
watch and stinks. Um. I was captivated by the contraption
as it looked like something could have come out of
the original wallet Willy Wonka film, and once I realized
what the piece was, I was intrigued to find out more,
but I also was soon impulse to get out of
the room quickly. I can only describe the smell as unsettling.
(32:30):
It wasn't a smack in the face stinch, but more
of an unearthy, grumbling deal in the back of your
throat kind of smell. Um that, as much as I
wanted to explore the machine more, I couldn't stay in
the room. Uh. There were a few other smaller versions
of the cloak a bot. My favorite was kloak A
number five that we're in a separate room that I
mustered up lung capacity to do a quick trip round
(32:51):
to peak at all the inner works of these machineries.
It was a smell a yet intriguing experience. And then
she goes on to point out that her perhaps her
only major disgust these mangoes. You know what, I actually
understood that what's really because they're slimy um, and they
don't for me. They don't pack the punch of like
a peach or you know, some other fruit in the
(33:12):
same category. Uh well, I mean I love mangoes, that
they are a bit temperamental. They're one of those fruits
when you buy them that and you will never really
know what you're gonna get. Like a banana, banana is
pretty consistent. I mean assume that you can tell on
the outside what a banana is probably doing on the inside,
and and you know what you're in for. But like
a mangoes, kind of like a cantaloupe, the candleop is
(33:35):
one of those where sometimes sometimes the candlop is amazing
butt al, though sometimes it's just kind of yeah, just
to payoff is not so great. I get this, we
shouldn't see anything about sliminess, but I understand it from
that perspective. But apparently in Australia that makes for a
bit of a un Australian, very UnAustralian odd personal fruit,
the golden fruit. Right, she's been shunned for an unliking him.
(33:57):
We'll presumably I would say, well, may me your man
goes then, but that would be disgusting because by the
time I got here, would they would just be grotest
package full of insects and slide. Anyway, She closed by
saying love listening to your podcast, along with lots of
other podcasts from you folks at hs W, thanks for
blowing my mind on a weekly basis. So yeah, but
that was an excellent to you know, definitely hear about
(34:20):
and more about like firsthand knowledge of the clay butt.
I love that people are out there meeting it for us. Well,
it's on my bucket list now. I've heard so much
about it and I've read so much about it. I
just I've got to see it in the flesh. Yeah,
poor choice affords. All right, Well, there you go. Gluttony.
We would love as always to hear your input on
(34:40):
this topic. What is your perception of gluttony? What is
your experience with gluttony? What do you think about professionally
eating contest? Have you ever participated in one? And uh
and what do you think about a nice friendly vegan
eating competition? Is that against everything that you can stand for?
Or would it be kind of interesting? I don't know.
You can find us on faceboo. Look it is stuff
to blow your mind and uh oh, we're also on Twitter.
(35:03):
You can reach out to us there at Blow the
Mind and you can always send us an email to
Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast Stuff from the future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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