Brave like cabbage
What effect would it have on young adults and young children if they saw a positive facial expression from strangers eating raw broccoli?
Katie Edwards from Aston University in the UK, together with her colleagues there and from the University of Birmingham in the UK, tried to find out.
The Journal appetite published a first-hand account of this adventure entitled “Exposure to the positive facial expressions of models eating a raw vegetable increases children’s acceptance and consumption of the modeled vegetable.”
They don’t have to mince their words when it comes to their results. In their own words: “Contrary to hypotheses, the facial expression of the models while eating broccoli had no significant influence on their initial willingness to try broccoli.”
Circles of Life
In the 1960s, young intellectuals in Western countries urged each other to adopt the philosophy and way of life of Zen (Zen Buddhism). In order to live a thoughtful, wise and good life, people were encouraged to “walk the way of Zen” and “be one with the universe.”
Six decades later, thoughts and conversations have evolved.
Although no replacement has emerged as a counterpart in the West in the 2020s, feedback points to Venn (Venn diagrams).
Like Zen, Venn aims at a simpler understanding of seemingly complex issues. Venn masters sometimes describe their practice like this: A Venn diagram uses overlapping circles or similar shapes to represent the logical relationships between different types of elements.
Adopt Venn’s philosophy and methods. Recognize and cultivate the overlaps in your life. Draw a Venn diagram of the characteristics of every person, place, and thing from your entire life, from birth to present. The overlaps in the Venn diagram reveal the commonalities. Accept them. Be one with the few.
Let’s go, Venn.
Talent for titration
Superpowers, trivial or not, have a reputation for being all or nothing. John Hancock tells Feedback of an exception – perhaps a partial exception – to that.
He says: “I seem to be able to pour almost exactly half of a 339 ml bottle of beer, so that two identical glasses separated by 1 or at most 2 mm have the same beer level. I can do it in one go without any aids – I just seem to know when to stop pouring!”
(Feedback indicates that Hancock’s name is familiar to citizens of the U.S. On January 4, 1776, an earlier John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, a document telling Britain to go to hell. Hancock wrote that declaration in such big and bold letters that his name became synonymous with “a person’s handwritten signature.” In the U.S., people still say to each other, “Sign your John Hancock.” That earlier John Hancock, unlike this modern John Hancock, despised half measures.)
Questionable discomfort
There is another new addition to the feedback collection called “The title tells you everything you need to know”.
“The potential pain of execution by various methods” may have surprised the magazine’s readers perception in 1993. Its author, Harold Hillman from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, also received the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
If you find an equally impressive example, please send it to Telltale Titles, c/o Feedback, with citation.
The Teflon Diet
Teflon, highly prized as a non-stick coating for frying pans and other cookware, could become a common food additive, especially in weight-control diets.
Readers of a 2022 study titled “Engineering Properties of Teflon derived Blends and Composites: A Review” get a brief hint of this in a single, slightly cryptic sentence: “By adding volume to Teflon, calories in foods were reduced and satisfactory, community-accepted results were observed.” This sentence refers to a 2016 article in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology.
The 2016 article has an intellectually delicious title: “Ingestion of polytetrafluoroethylene as a way to increase food volume and therefore satiety without increasing calorie content.” Authors Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway from the USA explain that polytetrafluoroethylene – also known as PTFE or Teflon – is a plastic. They explain its benefits: “Animal feeding experiments showed that rats fed a diet containing 25% PTFE for 90 days showed no signs of toxicity and that the rats lost weight.”
They further hypothesize that “increasing the volume of food by mixing food with PTFE powder in a ratio of 3 parts by volume of food to 1 part by volume of PTFE significantly increases the feeling of satiety and reduces people’s calorie intake.”
Polytetrafluoroethylene, they write, “does not add any flavor (as evidenced by its use in tongue piercings) and therefore does not affect the eating experience.” It is also “extremely inert…so does not react in the body.”
It is therefore “an ideal substance for use as a volume filler for unmetabolized foods” – in foods that are guaranteed not to stick to the ribs.
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