MMW: “One Tribe, Y’all”

On my second edition of Multimedia Wednesday (only three months after the first…), I have a few things to share with you.

Movies

I finally broke down and joined Netflix a couple of months ago.  I am SO glad that I did.  I freaking love it.  I feel like a kid in a candy store (or well, me in a candy store ) – especially that my queues now have over 500 movies in them and I’ve lost track of the number that I’ve actually watched.  Their best feature is the ability to stream quite a few of their movies online.  I bought one of their associated Roku boxes about a month ago (I think) and absolutely love it, too.  It lets me stream their movies over the internet through my TV.  This fall, I will also be able to stream them through my Wii box, so I will have access to it on two TVs in my house, plus my computer.  Then there are the movies they actually mail me.  There just isn’t enough time in the day to watch everything.  (Oh, and I’m not associated with Netflix in any way – this is just my own personal opinion.)

My most recent movie that I received through the mail was “Moon.”  I’ve had it in my queue for quite a while, but an old friend recently recommended it.  I moved it up in my queue and through perfect timing, I received it two days later.  You can click here to read about it on IMDB, but it is about a guy who is in his last two weeks of a three year contract of working on the moon….by himself.  He starts to hear and see strange things.  There are a couple of spooky moments towards the beginning, but you can see where the movie is obviously going at about the 30 minute mark.  Even with the predictability, it is still thoroughly enjoyable in my opinion.  There is one moment (when he makes a phone call) that tore at my heart.

I just went to YouTube to track down the trailer for you and after watching it (for the first time), have realized that you can pretty much figure out what’s going on just from it.  But I still like it. 

PS. I had a really hard time not picturing Zaphod from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” when seeing Sam Rockwell:

Tonight I have (500) Days of Summer to Watch.

Books

Diana recently recommended a book to me that I picked up over the weekend. And amazingly, even though it is nonfiction, I am actually reading it!   As a sidenote, I’m currently really reading three books at once.  Two of them are:  “A Rake’s Vow (Cynster Novels)” by Stephanie Laurens (loaned by a friend), and “Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950” by Cesare Pavese (this one is taking me a while).

The one Diana recommended is “The End of Overeating” by David A. Kessler, M.D.  I’m only on page 35, but it is really keeping my attention.  The part that I’m at right now is discussing how sugar, fat, and salt are reinforcing and rewarding and how that drives you to want to eat more of them regardless of how hungry you are.  As I’ve been going through, I’ve been flagging a few things that have caught my eye:

• At the beginning, when he is trying to figure out what has changed over time and why our overeating has dramatically changed, he asks the question: “But having food available doesn’t meant we have to eat it.  What’s been driving us to overeat?”  He then states that “It is not a want born of fear that food shortages lie ahead.  Once this had been so.  In the Bible, seven years of plenty were inevitably followed by seven years of famine, so we needed to build storehouses of fat in preparation.  But in America, where even northern supermarkets are filled with summer fruits much of the year, that logic doesn’t apply.”  I need to think about this more, but I don’t know if I particularly agree with this statement.  True, for the great majority of people, I doubt that this has anything to do with why they overeat.  But just because food is readily available now, doesn’t automatically make it that much more accessible – especially to people on very fixed incomes.  I know that as a child, it was often questioned as to whether we would have enough money to put food on our plates the following week.  Like I said, though, I need to finish the book and see what else he has to say.  I’ll agree that even if this is a factor for some, I’m sure in no case is it the only factor.
• The portion of the book that I’m currently reading is discussing various research studies that have been undertaken to see how various foods affect the hunger and food drive of rats and mice.  I find it fascinating, but I also have a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology (or as my friends called it “a note.”).  So I’m somewhat of a geek in that regard.  I had to run my own study in college and really enjoyed it.  Some of the studies were really interesting in that faced with sugar and fat-filled food products, rats were willing to run across an electrical floor to get at them even if they weren’t hungry!
• In another section, he discusses “settling points.”  If I’m understanding this correctly, a settling point is the point at which our appetite and expenditure sides fall into an equilibrium where our weight settles.  For example, if my weight settling point was around 200 – I could vary what I eat and how much I exercise somewhat, but would stay around that weight.  His conclusion, however, is this: “In the short term, we may be able to restrict our eating, lose weight, and reach a new settling point [as I did when I hit about 180 - 190 and stayed there for quite a while].  But if we return to earlier patterns and familiar environments, we will pursue reward with renewed vigor, gain weight, and return to the old settling point.  That’s why diets fail [and here's where I am now].”  I thought this was very interesting.
• Another part I want to share with you today that I found fascinating was another study that was done in which researchers discovered that animals are willing to work hard to get access to foods that contain sugar, salt, and fat.  Here’s the description of one study:  “Researchers look for the breaking point, the point beyond which the animal will not keep pressing the lever in search of a reward.  In the Canadian study, rats generally worked harder – that is they pressed the lever more – to get higher concentrations of sucrose.  On average, they pressed enough to earn five rewards of a solution without sucrose, about six rewards of a 10 percent sucrose solution, and about eight rewards of the 20 percent solution.”  For each additional reward, the rat had to push the lever many more times than it did for the previous reward.  “To get that eighth reward of 20 percent sucrose,, a rat had to press the lever forty-four times.”  And we wonder why we can’t turn down that cinnamon roll.  In another study, a scientist discovered that “[t]he breaking point at which the animals will no longer work for the reward,  . . . is slightly lower than the breaking point for cocaine.  Animals are willing to work almost as hard to get either one.”  As I said, fascinating!
• On page 32, he discusses how food can be rewarding: “Cues associated with the pleasure response demand our attention, motivate our behavior, and stimulate the urge we call ‘wanting.’  When those cues are present, we learn to pursue food with greater vigor to secure the expected reward.  . . . We pursue the food more frequently, and the resulting pleasure leads us to repeat the behavior.  A continuous cycle of cue-urge-reward is set in motion and eventually becomes a habit.”
• He then talks about how just being in a location in which you previously enjoyed food can become a trigger or cue.  “Pass the mall where you know you’ll find a Ruby Tuesday or the neighborhood where your town’s best pizza is available, and you’ll experience a desire that you didn’t have a moment before.”  Amen to that!  I’ll be fine until I think of something (like Haagen-Dazs ice cream – ACK!) and then I obsess about it until I HAVE TO HAVE IT!  Luckily, I think I’ve narrowly escaped this time.

So that’s where I’m at in this so far fascinating book.  A lot of it is stuff I’ve heard before, but is presented in a way that intrigues me – gets into the psychology-loving “what if” portion of my brain.  The next chapter up seems to be about how sugar, fat, and salt affect the neurons in our brains.  And all of this has made me realize just why chocolate covered pretzels are little bits of heaven on earth.

The best part about this book is that I think it’s pretty easy to follow. You don’t really have to be a science geek or an MD to follow it – as I’m certainly not even close to being either. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about the book, but in the meantime, if you want to check it out yourself, here is a link:

Music

This part of MMW is going to be a lot shorter.  I promise.  In fact, I’ll just share with you the song that has been stuck in my head for the past two days – thanks to a coworker.  For today, let’s “forget about all that evil, that evil that they feed ya.  We are one people.”  We’re “one tribe, y’all.”