Ironick

The peanut butter diet.

I lost 30 lbs in five months eating three peanut butter sandwhiches a day. I was going to write a book and make millions. Now, someone has stolen my diet idea! Oh yeah, they published their book, The Peanut Butter Diet, at least two years ago. But still.

Comfort Foods Switch Off Stress.

The New York Times reports:

Until now, no one has known how chronic stress gets turned off. A year ago, researchers in Dr. Mary Dallman's laboratory at U.C. San Francisco removed the adrenal glands from rats and exposed them to chronic stress. When they added stress hormones to rats' brains, the animals remained stressed. But when they fed them sugar, the animals calmed down.

This is the first time it has been shown that the tendency to overeat in the face of chronic stress is biologically driven, said Dr. Norman Pecoraro, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco who helped carry out the research in rats. What is true for stressed-out rats, he said, is also true for humans.

Now I know why so many analysts (myself included) are overweight.