obesity

so when i study intensively, i spend all day just hanging out with my brain, and inevitably, it says interesting things to me:

i was reading about forms of sugar we can't process (e.g. L-glucose, cellulose.. ) and how they were used in artificial sweeteners -- they activate your taste receptors, but can't be metabolized, so they don't count as calories to your body. sounds simple, no?

after my last quarter in endocrinology though, i wonder: the body is amazing at regulating both how we process food and even our very instinct to feel hungry and eat in order to maintain our weight. if it wasn't, we would all become amazingly fat (half a twizzler a day in excess of what you need = 10 pounds in a year). in a sense then, it is this balancing system that matters, not how many calories you consume (of course, if you guzzle massively, you will gain though... but i'm thinking at the margins here).

this brings us back to artificial sweeteners. by binding taste receptors, they trick the body into thinking it is consuming calories, when it actually isn't. this sets of signalling cascades that affect digestion and metabolism (how much energy we consume per unit time), but as the food doesn't match the signals, the system begins to break down. the body asks wtf? and eventually says "screw this".

this is when we become fat.
even when we watch what we eat.
(this would explain the worsening obesity epidemic in america over the last half century)

so obviously this is a rough thought. just typing an outline here -- will follow up next week, after my mcats. P.S. a quick google search shows that some scientists have also begun thinking about this recently (articles i saw were 2008+)...

blood boiling

so, i was reading about vapor pressure, and boiling points falling with altitude... and i wondered if your blood spontaneously boils when you hit 16,000m and the boiling point of water drops to about 37 degrees C.

but apparently, it doesn't.
good old skin -- what would we do without it.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html

ok. procrastination over.
back to work.

resonance

"How can a doctor be afraid to say 'I don't know'? ", she said to me, amongst many other things, and with every word I felt myself drawn closer and closer into that world. You know that feeling when someone says something, and you hear yourself in their voice? Those half-magical moments when you meet an idea or thought in someone else and it resonates with the very core of your being?

She told me stories from her life. Simple stories about crazy doctors, about all-nighters and breastfeeding... and as I listened, I realized she was describing a life that I just knew I wanted to lead (well, maybe without the breastfeeding). Not because it was perfect, or glamorous, or even particularly comfortable... but simply because it fit.

We talked for an hour, not watching the time, until her next appointment knocked and asked to come in.

I've decided to do an MD-PhD. There are many things that must happen between here and that, but I have a path now, and I will walk it bravely.


---
Something from The Beatles:




in honor of good conversations, the coming spring, and songs that live forever.

that which remains.

"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known;"

- Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I wanted to start a blog about something cool like travel, or science, or prostitution (example, because I know you're wondering). But, the problem of not having sufficiently titillating experiences myself aside, it occurred to me that perhaps all these things are really different forms of conversations -- dialogues with places, people, bodies, ideas... and the fabric of life as we know it.

I have lots of conversations.

This blog will be a commitment to having more, as well as an attempt to remember the ones I've had. Not anything exhaustive or complete by any means -- simply an occasional snapshot of the bits that stick. Like the dirt that gathers on the soles of our feet as we walk, and in so doing, change the way we feel the earth beneath us.