Featured image: Subtle suggestions, like pictures in the bottom of cafeteria food trays, can influence people to make different choices for their lunch. (Courtesy MPR News)
Today, Kelsey Ockert from the Princeton Public Library brings us Secrets from the Eating Lab by Traci Mann, PhD. It’s a book full of science about nutrition, hunger, and dieting that often flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” (on a topic where opinions abound!). Traci advocates for an easing up on the stress around dieting: it doesn’t usually work for humans to clamp down into strict routines, since our willpower is limited. Listen for a message of body-positivity, appetite and social pressures as backed up by laboratory data!
In other news:
- Scientists are laying the groundwork for measuring certain hard-to-find exoplanets with gravitational waves, at least once the satellite-based detectors are deployed!
- Children’s ears may not be fit to be around bathroom hand dryers, as published by an affected young scientist.
- A new gamma ray detector in Tibet has measured the highest energy light ever, giving us new info on stellar explosions in space.
- Crop failures are devastating to regions, but get much worse when food can’t be imported either. What happens in a future when many crop failures are synchronous?
The playlist can be found online at WPRB.com or below.
These Vibes Are Too Cosmic 
Traci Mann must not have studied the ketogenic diet. When in ketosis, hunger decreases and cravings tend to go away. Not much willpower is required other than starting the diet. Transitioning into ketosis, after a lifetime of a high-carb diet, doesn’t come naturally, though.
The body has to be retrained into ketosis, even though it is the state babies are born and the state in which most humans existed in for most of human evolution. It can take weeks or longer for some people to become fully fat-adapted and metabolically flexible.
But once that is achieved, it is the simplest ‘diet’ in the world because it doesn’t feel like a diet.
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