No-one knows whether or not a neutral-tasting nutrient-sludge diet leads to enormous weight loss
February 15, 2023
I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt.
I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy. But what’s really been absorbing me recently is a series of twenty long, detailed posts under the banner “A Chemical Hunger“, in which the author contests that the principle cause of the modern obesity epidemic is chemically-induced changes to the “lipostat” that tells our bodies what level of mass to maintain.
I highly recommend that you read the first post in this series, “Mysteries“, and see what you think. If you want to read on after that, fine; but even if you stop there, you’ll still have read something fascinating, counter-intuitive, well referenced and (I think) pretty convincing.
Anyway. The post that fascinates me right now is one of the digressions: “Interlude B: The Nutrient Sludge Diet“. In this post, the author tells us about “a 1965 study in which volunteers received all their food from a ‘feeding machine’ that pumped a ‘liquid formula diet’ through a ‘dispensing syringe-type pump which delivers a predetermined volume of formula through the mouthpiece'”, but they were at liberty to choose how many hits of this neutral-tasting sludge they took.
This study had an absolutely sensational outcome: among the participants with healthy body-weight, the amount of nutrient sludge that they chose to feed themselves was almost exactly equal in caloric content to their diets before the experiment. But the grossly obese participants (weighing about 400 lb = 180 kg), chose to feed themselves a tiny proportion of their usual intake — about one tenth — and lost an astonishing amount of weight. All without feeling hunger.
Please do read the Slime Mold Time Mold write-up for the details. But I will let you in right now on the study’s very very significant flaw. The sample-size was two. That is, two obese participants, plus a control-group of two healthy-weight individuals. And clearly whatever conclusion we can draw from a study of that size is merely anecdotal, having no statistical power worth mentioning.
And now we come to the truly astonishing part of this. It seems no-one has tried to replicate this study with a decent-sized sample. The blog says:
If this works, why hasn’t someone replicated it by now? It would be pretty easy to run a RCT where you fed more than five obese people nutrient sludge ad libitum for a couple weeks, so this means either it doesn’t work as described, or it does work and for some reason no one has tried it. Given how huge the rewards for this finding would be, we’re going to go with the “it doesn’t work” explanation.
In a comment, I asked:
OK, I’ll bite. Why hasn’t anyone tried to replicate the astounding and potentially valuable findings of these studies? It beggars belief that it’s not been tried, and multiple times. Do you think it has been tried, but the results weren’t published because they were unimpressive? That would be an appalling waste.
The blog author replied:
Our guess is that it simple hasn’t been tried! Academia likes to pretend that research is one-and-done, and rarely checks things once they’re in the literature. We agree, someone should try to replicate!
I’m sort of at a loss for words here. How can it possibly be that, 58 years after a pilot study that potentially offers a silver bullet to the problem of obesity, no-one has bothered to check whether it works? I mean, the initial study is so old that Revolver hadn’t been released. Yet it seems to have just lain there, unloved, as the Beatles moved on through Sergeant Pepper, the White Album, Abbey Road et al., broke up, pursued their various solo projects, died (50% of the sample) and watched popular music devolve into whatever the heck it is now.
Why aren’t obesity researchers all over this?
Dino dig birthday cake
June 5, 2022
One of the benefits of being me is that my friends often make me cool dino-themed stuff for my birthday (f’rinstance). This year, it was this dinosaur dig cake from my friend Jenny Adams. Yes, it’s a vulgar, overstudied theropod,* but I take the requisite amount of joy from how thoroughly blown apart its skeleton is. Plus, the skull and cervicals are pneumatic (in vivo, if not in choco), so it’s a least plausibly interesting (i.e., not an ornithopod), and it looks cool (i.e., not Camarasaurus).
*I’m morally obligated to thank Paul Barrett for this wonderful phrase, which I use pretty much every chance I get.
Should you want to replicate this glycemic index Chicxulub, here’s the stratigraphic breakdown, starting from the bedrock (bedchoc?):
- base layer is a regular chocolate cake,
- but with added chocolate chips,
- topped with vanilla frosting, to hold down:
- a whole package of Oreos crumbled into faux dirt
- surrounding the vanilla-flavored white chocolate dinosaur bones
Jenny made the dino bones using a set of (new, clean) plastic sand molds, like these:
You can find a zillion like ’em online by searching for ‘dinosaur sand toys’ or ‘dinosaur sand mold’.
Anyway, I can report that the excavation has been most enjoyable, but with about half the ‘quarry’ left to explore, the number of fossils recovered intact continues to hover near zero — we’ve been grinding them up to use as dietary supplements. Good thing it’s just a theropod!
I floated this idea on Fist Full of Podcasts, and Andrew Stuck gave it a shout-out in the comments, so I’m promoting it to a post.
The idea, briefly, is that sauropods grew fast and had enormous energy demands and even though horsetails and pine needles are surprisingly nutritious (Hummel et al. 2008), they probably suck to eat all the time. Extant herbivores are notoriously carnivorous when no-one is looking, and it’s silly to assume that extinct ones were any different. It seems likely that a big, hungry sauropod, gifted by natural selection with more selfish opportunism than compassion, would probably have viewed a turtle as a quick shot of protein and calcium, and a welcome hors d’oeuvre before stripping yet another conifer or tree fern. Furthermore, said sauropod would have been well-equipped to render the unfortunate chelonian into bite-size chunks, as shown above. The first time might even have been accidental. (Yeah, sure, Shunosaurus, I believe you. [rolls eyes])
Given that sauropods and turtles coexisted over most of the globe for most of the Mesozoic, I’ll bet this happened all the time. I don’t know how to falsify that,* but how could it not have? You’d have to assume that sauropods didn’t run into turtles, or that their mercy outweighed their curiosity and hunger. That’s even more bonkers than turtle nachos.** As Sherlock Holmes almost said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains – no matter how stupid/awesome – was probably done by sauropods.”
* “Oh, you found a boatload of turtle shell pieces at your fossil site? How tantalizingly unprecedented – please tell me more!” said no-one ever. Seriously, everyone who works on stuff younger than the Early Jurassic seems to bitch about all of the turtle frags they find, whether they’re looking for Apatosaurus or Australopithecus.
** Not to be all navel-gazey, but that is conservatively the greatest sentence I have ever written.
In conclusion, sauropods stomped on turtles and ate them, because duh. Fight me.
Further Reading
For more sauropods stomping, see:
- Genesis of an instant palaeo-art classic
- Sauropods stomping theropods: a much neglected theme in palaeo-art
- Sauropods stomping theropods, redux
- Greatest. Palaeoart. Ever.
- Brian Engh: Stomp time!
- Sauropods stomping theropods: Bryan Riolo’s Chaos Gigantes
- Greatest. Video. Ever. Starring sauropod-on-theropod violence!
And for sauropods not eating, but gettin’ et:
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten, part 2: Bakker’s snoozing brontosaur
Reference
Mind you, it’s not all dead badgers in my kitchen
March 28, 2016
There’s also this:
As Orson Welles is supposed to have said: My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
Sauropods were toblerones, not smarties tubes
September 9, 2015
As we’ve previously noted more than once here at SV-POW!, apatosaurine cervicals really are the craziest things. For one thing, they are the only dinosaur bones to have inspired the design of a Star Wars spaceship.
One result of this very distinctive cervical shape, with the ribs hanging down far below the centra, was that the necks of apatosaurines would have been triangular in cross-section, rather than tubular as often depicted. (The Apatosaurus maquette that Matt reviewed gets this right.)
Here’s how I conveyed this in two slides of my SVPCA talk:
Although apatosaurs take this to the extreme, the same was essentially true of all sauropod necks. The ventrolateral position of the cervical ribs would have lent the necks a rounded triangular shape, or diamond-shaped in the case of less extreme sauropods whose neck soft-tissue hung below the cervical ribs.
(Previously: Sauropods were tacos, not corn dogs; and Sauropods were corn-on-the-cob, not shish kebabs.)
Vertebrates and invertebrates of Nova Scotia
June 16, 2015
Last week I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the twice-yearly meet-up with my Index Data colleagues. On the last day, four of us took a day-trip out to Peggy’s Cove to eat lunch at Ryer Lobsters.
We stopped off at the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse on the way, and spotted a vertebrate, which I am pleased to present:
It’s a whale skull, but I have no idea what kind. Can anyone help out?
So much for vertebrates — it was really all about the inverts. Here are six of them:
I have a 2lb lobster here; my colleague Jakub went for two 1lb lobsters, as did Jason and Wolfram (not pictured). That’s Wolfram’s lobster closest to the camera, giving a better impression of just what awesome beasts these were.
Peggy’s Cove: recommended. For vertebrates and inverts.
(Thanks to Wolfram Schneider for these photos.)
The mother of all holiday dinosaur posts
November 23, 2011
Here at SV-POW! we are ardently pro-turkey. As the largest extant saurischians that one can find at most butchers and grocery stores, turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) are an important source of delicious, succulent data. With Thanksgiving upon us and Christmas just around the corner, here’s an SV-POW!-centric roundup of turkey-based geekery.
The picture at the top of the post shows a couple of wild turkeys that frequented our campsite in Big Bend in the winter of 2007. Full story here.
If you’re wondering what to do with your turkey, the answer is GRILL IT. I use the recipe (available on Facebook) of my good friend and colleague, Brian Kraatz, who has fallen to the Dark Side and works on mammals–rabbit tooth homology, even (Kraatz et al. 2010)–but still grills a mean theropod. (In his defense, Kraatz has published on extinct saurischians–see Bibi et al. 2006.) My own adventures in turkey grilling are chronicled in this post, which will show you the steps to attaining enlightenment, or at least a larger circumference.
While you’re cooking and eating, you might as well learn something about muscles. This shot of the fanned-out longus colli dorsalis muscles in a turkey neck was the raison d’etre for this post, and turned up again with different muscles labeled in one of the recent Apatosaurus maquette review posts. Mike and I ate those muscles, by the way.
After the meal, you’ll have most of a turkey skeleton to play with. This diagram is from my other ‘holiday dinosaur’ page, which I put together for the Lawrence Hall of Science and UCMP back in 2005. That page has instructions on how to turn your pile of greasy leftovers into a nice set of clean white bones. Tom Holtz is widely acknowledged as King of the Dino-Geeks, and in kingly fashion he took the above diagram and turned the geek-o-meter up to 11. Steel yourself, gentle reader, before checking out the result here.
Speaking of bones, here’s a turkey cervical from Mike’s magisterial work in this area, which first appeared as a tack-on to a post about the holotype dorsal vertebra of the now-defunct genus Ultrasauros. The huge version of the composite photo has its own page on Mike’s website, where it is available in three different background colors. The lateral view also turned up in one of my rhea neck posts.
From the serving platter to publication: when I was young and dumb, I used a photo of a broken turkey vert to illustrate the small air spaces, or camellae, that are commonly found in the pneumatic bones of birds and some sauropods (Wedel and Cifelli 2005:fig. 11F).
I made a much better version by sanding the end off a cleaned-up vertebra, and used that in Wedel (2007), in this popular article on pneumaticity (which has instructions for making your own), and way back in Tutorial 3–only the 12th ever post on SV-POW!
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to point out that turkeys are not only readily accessible, tasty sources of anatomical information, they are also pretty interesting while they’re still alive. Don’t stare at the disgusting freak in the photo above or you might lose your will to eat. Instead, head over to Tetrapod Zoology v2 for Darren’s musings on caruncles, snoods, and other turkey parts that don’t even sound like words.
That does it for now. If you actually follow all of the links in this post, you might just have enough reading to keep you occupied during that post-holiday-meal interval when getting up and moving around is neither desirable nor physically possible. If you’re in the US, have a happy Thanksgiving; if you’re not, have a happy Thursday; and no matter where you are, take a moment to give thanks for turkeys.
References
- Bibi, F., Shabel, A.B., Kraatz, B.P., and Stidham, T.A. 2006. New fossil ratite (Aves: Palaeognathae) eggshell discoveries from the Late Miocene Baynunah Formation of the United Arab Emirates, Arabian Peninsula. Palaeontologia Electronica Vol. 9, Issue 1; 2A:13p.
- Kraatz, B.P., Meng, J., Weksler, M., and Li, C. 2010. Evolutionary patterns in the dentition of Duplicidentata (Mammalia) and a novel trend in the molarization of premolars. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12838. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012838
- Wedel, M.J. 2007. Aligerando a los gigantes (Lightening the giants). ¡Fundamental! 12:1-84. [in Spanish, with English translation]
- Wedel, M.J., and Cifelli, R.L. 2005. Sauroposeidon: Oklahoma’s Native Giant. Oklahoma Geology Notes 65 (2):40-57.
Things to dissect and see: longus colli dorsalis
September 15, 2011
Okay, special dissection post, coming to you live from the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic coast of England, well past my bedtime. First, check out this comment from Neil and see the linked image of some neck muscles in the anhinga. Here’s a small version I’m swiping. There are a couple of short, single-segment muscles shown, but the big long ones in this image are longus colli ventralis (on the ‘front’ or ‘bottom’ of the neck) and longus colli dorsalis (on the ‘back’ or ‘top’).
Now, grok these photos of the same dorsal muscle. Or muscle group, if you prefer. Note that in all cases shown here and in the link–anhinga, rhea, and turkey–the muscle inserts on the anterior cervical vertebrae, and not on the skull.
In Rhea:
In Meleagris (turkey):
The rhea was dissected by Vanessa back at Western a couple of weeks ago, the turkey by me on Mike’s dining room table on Monday. Full story to follow…at some point.
In the meantime, go buy your own turkey and cut up its neck. It’s cheap and you’ll learn a ton.
The Archbishop in cake form
April 20, 2011
A few months ago, prosauropod supremo Adam Yates blogged about the Aardonyx cake that the BPI honours class baked in his honour. In the comments, I mentioned that my wife Fiona once made me a BMNH R5937:D9 cake (i.e. a cake in the form of the more posterior of the pair of nicely preserved dorsal vertebrae of The Archbishop, in right lateral view). At the time, I couldn’t find the photo that I knew had been taken, and Adam asked me to post it when it turned up.
Voila!
And here, once more, is the real thing for comparison:
(Note that the topology of the lateral lamination is spot on, with a single infradiapophyseal lamina which forks into anterior and posterior branches only some way ventral to the diapophysis. That’s what you look for in a cake.)
Update (21 April)
Silly me, of course what I should have shown is the cake and the vertebra side by side. Here they are — together at last!
Grilling your Thanksgiving dinosaur: live-blogging the bird
November 26, 2009
Trying two new things this morning: grilling a turkey, and live-blogging on SV-POW!
I like to grill. Steak, chicken, kebabs, yams, pineapple, bananas–as long as it’s an edible solid, I’m up for it. But I’ve never grilled a turkey before. Neighbor, colleague, fellow paleontologist and grillmeister Brian Kraatz sent me his recipe, which is also posted on Facebook for the edification of the masses. See Brian’s excellent writeup for the whole process, I’m just going to hit the photogenic parts here. Oh, and usually I tweak any photos I post within an inch of their lives, but I don’t have time for that this morning, so you’re getting as close to a live, unedited feed as I can manage. Stay tuned for updates.
Enough of that. Let’s rock!
The process starts more than a day in advance, with the brine. Salt water, fruit, onions, garlic, spices, and some apple juice.
The turkey needs to be entirely immersed in the brine for at least 24 hours. Doing this in a solid container would require an extra big container and too much liquid to cover the bird. I follow Brian’s method of brining in a triple-layer of trash bags. You can see a turkey roaster peeking out underneath the trash bags. Helps with the carrying.
Put the turkey in the trash bags first, then pour in the brine. Unless you like huge messes.
The genius of the trash bag method on display. You can squeeze out all the air so that the volume of the bag is equal to just the turkey and the brine.
Into the fridge for a day.
First thing this morning: out come the giblets, and save the goodies from the brine. We’ll get back to the neck later.
The bird awaits.
Crucial step: putting in a drip pan. Keeps the coals off to the side for indirect heat, and catches the grease so you don’t burn down the neighborhood.
Putting in the herb butter. I used three short sticks of butter mixed with sage, lemon pepper, and Mrs. Dash. Working the skin away from the meat and then filling the space with butter was extremely nasty. This must be what diverticula feel like.
A chimney is helpful to get the coals going.
To eat is human; to grill is divine.
Smoke bombs: mesquite chips soaked in water, wrapped up in balls of tinfoil, with holes poked on top to let the smoke out.
Fruit and spices into the body cavity.
At this point, I was fairly certain that today would be the greatest day of my life. The turkey is centered over the drip pan, stuffed with goodness, subcutaneously loaded with herb butter, draped with bacon. You can see one of the smoke bombs sitting right on top of the coals.
Know what you’re getting into. This 15 lb bird just barely cleared the lid of my grill.
A little over an hour in. I installed foil heat shields to keep the wings and thighs from cooking too fast. It’s all about the indirect heat. Some of the bacon comes off now, as a mid-morning treat.
Okay, the bird is about halfway done, and I have to whip up some sustainer coals and another batch of smoke bombs. Further updates as and when. Happy Thanksgiving!
UPDATE
I was hoping to get some more pictures posted before we ate, but you know how it is in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day (or, if you’re not an American, maybe you don’t know, so I’ll tell you: dogs and cats living together, we’re talking total chaos).
The turkey just before I pulled it off the grill. The heat shields turned out to be clutch, I would have completely destroyed the limbs without them. That’s going to be SOP from now on.
Ah yes, the bird, she turned out even more succulent than I hadda expected. Check out the pink shade of the meat just below the skin. I recognize that, from good barbeque, but I’ve never produced it before.
That’s it for the cooking part of today’s program. As for the ultimate fate of the bird…we ate a stupifying amount of it. I sent even more home with our guests. And the other half–yes, half–of this thunder beast is sitting in the fridge. Hello-o leftovers!
And hello-o science!
I was going to post some more pictures of the neck, but I didn’t get around to eating it, so…another time, perhaps. (UPDATE: it only took me 9 years and 1 month, go here and here.) In lieu, here’s Mike’s turkey vertebra in left lateral view (see the original in all its supersized glory here). Note the pneumatic foramen in the lateral wall of the centrum, just behind the cervical rib loop. This is actually kind of a lucky catch; a lot of times with chickens and turkeys, the pneumatic foramina are so far up in the cervical rib loop that they can’t be seen in lateral view.
It used to freak me out a little bit that birds often don’t have their pneumatic foramina in the middle of the lateral wall of the centrum, like sauropods. But a possible explanation occurred to me just this morning as I was planning this post. I think that birds have their pneumatic foramina right where you’d expect them, based on sauropods. I’ll explain why.
The first part of the explanation is that instead of wearing their pneumatic cavities on the outside, like this Giraffatitan cervical, bird vertebrae tend to be inflated from within, with just a few tiny foramina outside. The second part is that birds have HUGE cervical rib loops compared to sauropods. If the sauropod vert shown above had its rib on, the resulting loop would be fairly dainty, the osteological equivalent of a bracelet. The cervical rib loops of birds are more like tubes, they’re so antero-posteriorly elongated.
So take the brachiosaur cervical shown above and shrink all of the external pneumatic spaces by several inches. The cavities on the arch and spine would close up entirely, and the complex of fossae and foramina on the lateral side of the centrum would be reduced to a small hole right behind the cervical rib. Then stretch out the cervical rib loop in the fore-aft direction and voila, you’d have something like a turkey cervical, with a little tiny pneumatic foramen tucked up inside the cervical rib loop.
This doesn’t explain why bird verts are inflated from within instead of being eroded from without, or why sauropods had such dinky cervical rib loops (mechanical what, now?), or why pneumatic diverticula tend to make the biggest holes in the front half of the centrum, adjacent to the cervical ribs. I just think that maybe bird and sauropod pneumaticity are not as different as they appear at first glance. Your thoughts are welcome.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 