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Fuck it, I’m having a donut

By on June 26, 2009 in Odd Science

Professor QuippyNews out of the journal Obesity (I buy it for the photos), shows that being moderately overweight actually improves your odds of not dying early.

Compared with people in the “normal” range of the BMI — the misused and misguided body mass index, which charts your height and weight and determines if you are “normal”, overweight or underweight — people who were moderately overweight were 17 percent less likely to die than people in the normal range.

This is really more of a condemnation of the BMI than it is anything else. One of the study’s primary authors and a researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Oregon, David Feeny, said: “I think this is part of an accumulation of evidence that indicates that organizations like Health Canada… should rethink the evidence on their classification of BMI categories.”

According to the Globe and Mail:

Feeny speculates that overweight people might survive longer because their extra heft gives them more resilience when they become old or ill. Since people lose fat faster than muscle, having that bit of extra weight might help in preventing frailty.

No word yet on how much beer you have to drink to live longer. But… fingers crossed!

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are both a bit beyond the norm too. More on this story at the Globe and Mail.

Ask General Kang: As a world-conquering potentate, what is your policy regarding instant gratification?

By on May 16, 2008 in Ask General Kang

Ask General KangWell, I’m totally against it.

From what I can see there is too much instant gratification happening here on Terra; and this is at least some part of the reason why I am conquering this world soon.

I’m a fan of a system of gratification we call The Rectitude on my home world.

The Rectitude started out as philosophical movement of neo-utopian bonobos, but it eventually caught on within the simian population at large, and I hope that someday it will catch on amongst the primates of this world too.

What is The Rectitude?

It sounds kind of proctologist-y, but essentially, to have some kind of physical gratification, the idea is that first you have to earn it. (Yes, just go ahead, say it just like John Houseman.)

The best kind of Rectitude to earn is through intense physical effort. For example, if you climb a mountain, that earns you lots of Rectitude — at least a week of all kinds of debauchery. Walk to the store instead of driving, and that probably earns you enough Rectitude to eat the Cheese Doodles you were going to get in the first place.

Once Earth is fully under my control, every sentient being on the planet can look forward to a lifetime of earning and expending Rectitude.

Stop groaning! It will be good for you humans to learn a little self-discipline!

Next time: How do you handle unwanted sexual advances, particularly from another species?

You know who has rectitude? Hard working humor writers.

Professor Quippy: Scoring Pizza & Bad Stomach Chemicals

By on May 8, 2008 in Odd Science

Professor QuippyResearchers have discovered that you can blame your pudgy middle on bad chemicals.

According to researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, a hormone secreted by the stomach can cause junkie-like behavior when you see food.

Pizza? Score! Chicken wings? Groovy! Chocolate cake? Drop that man!

The guilty culprit is not your lack of willpower, it’s the hormone ghrelin, which is made in your stomach. As you get hungry, ghrelin levels rise and when you’ve eaten, they wane. In the study, volunteers were given a shot of ghrelin and then shown pictures of scrumptious, irresistible food. Their brains lit up just like a junkie’s.

Alain Dagher, a neurologist at McGill, says this is probably an evolutionary mechanism that encouraged our distant ancestors to bulk up on tasty calories whenever they had a chance (which probably wasn’t very often.) Fast forward a few thousand years, to the Era of Addictive Chicken, and this spells an obesity epidemic.

According to the New Scientist: “Several pharmaceutical companies already have their sights set on ghrelin, as drugs that block the hormone may quell hunger and fight obesity.”

The problem? If you turn off the hormone, it may affect other parts of your brain. Like, the segment of your cerebellum that makes you happy. The part that prevents you from falling into a deep, sponge-cake-like depression. And then killing yourself.

So, a danger of suicide, but at least you wouldn’t be fat anymore.

Humor-blogs.com is hopped up on laughter. Alltop too.