Eat
Shit, Lose Weight.
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| Believe me, I am not shitting you |
The
internet serves a wholesome purpose in sharing a lot of vital and hard to get
information to us in real time. Careful use of the net helps us to gain a lot
of knowledge. But there are some real bloopers floating around the net in the
name of science and it is actually hard to identify what’s real and what’s just
plain old bull shit.
Talking
of shit, reminds me of a rat shit thing I read just yesterday- a breaking news scientific
paper on Science magazine which was being amped all over the internet-
about how good bacteria from a thin persons stomach would cure obesity if given
to a fat person. Intrigued, I went beyond the title and read the full article
(as befitting my training as a BS deductor) only to see that it was a rat study
and not a human study like the headlines subtly implied. The researchers had
taken the fecal droppings (in plain words- rat shit) of a thin rat and fed it
to a fat rat, an obese rat as they call it in the paper. This wholesome diet
seems to have disagreed with the fat rat for on eating it he seems to have
dropped a whole lot of weight which result the researchers immediately
attributed to the beneficial effects of the shit, errr the bacteria in the shit
from the thin rats stomach which must have shown the fat rats stomach bacteria
how to digest the, errrr fat.
Anyway
that’s what the researchers say inside the main body of the article unlike in
the headlines where they scream in a bold font "New cure found for
obesity". But personally I feel that though the result of the study is borderline
believable, the reason for the weight loss might be something else entirely
when you think about it. The fat rat that was being fed the fecal droppings of
the thin rat must have developed an aversion to food and starved like our size
zero models who just sniff at food when hungry. If you are a foodie of any
sort, you can’t help but sympathize with that fat rat cant you? I mean, made to eat something like that daily,
is it any wonder he lost weight? And now as a follow up to the study, the
researchers are planning to do human trials too. Oh yeah, Eat shit (someone else's) and lose
weight must be a very popular slogan to recruit people for the study. I can’t
imagine a whole lot of people lining up to take that cure. Not even our desperate
size zero models. They would rather starve wouldn’t they?
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| Its a whole lot of crap, ain't it? |
Anyway the point of this post is to stress the
point that medical news on the Internet is often highly hyped but factually
incorrect. But a lot of people who see those screaming headlines go onto
believe that the damn thing actually works. Very few take the time to read
through the whole article to find out what it really says. Even if they do,
they can’t understand the scientific jargon and the statistical magic tricks to
make sense of the truth beyond the headlines. Besides most medical journals are
pay-per-view only and never allow you to read the full thing- they just show
you the sensational headlines and leave you to make your own interpretations.
Often there is a very vast difference between what the title of an article says
and what the real conclusion hidden inside the article says. And even doctors find it difficult to interpret
the real truth from the raw data included in the tables section like an
afterthought- which is the only way to check whether a thing really works or
the authors are just Bull S'ing you.
So
even if the shit for food theory actually works, I don’t see much of a future
for any shit-cure pills. What about you dear reader? Care to share your views?
That is if you are still reading this post after all those shitty idioms I used
above.
