TWO THOUSAND years have passed since the Romans belched their way through
hundred-course banquets of peacock brains, flamingo tongues and elephant ears,
slipping discreetly into vomitoria to stick feathers down their throats when
their bellies grew too tight. Two whole millennia鈥攜et still the Romans
reign supreme as masters of gluttony. Is this what we call progress?
It is an especially shocking state of affairs when one considers that the
Romans had not a shred of scientific know-how, whereas we have put men on the
Moon and robots onto Mars. But never fear: appetite scientists with names like
Rolls, Grill, Cone and Butter have been picking away at the problem of eating
behaviour, stuffing journals to the gills with reports on chemicals and genes
that impel us to shovel meat, potatoes and pudding down our gullets.
Want to become the world鈥檚 greatest glutton? One of such calibre as to make a
Roman feaster gape? Modern medical science can help. 快猫短视频 has
consulted the experts to bring you 10 vital tips that will take you to
unheard-of heights of hoggishness.
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Tip 1: Watch what you eat, and with whom
To get as much food as possible inside you, don鈥檛 just shove any old thing
into your mouth. Careless choices will allow that 鈥渉ad-enough鈥� feeling to kick
in before it needs to. Pick food that is sweet, or slick with fat. And sprinkle
it with monosodium glutamate to add that 鈥渦mami鈥� savour鈥攖he fifth taste to
accompany the familiar quartet of sweet, salty, sour and bitter鈥攕ince
experiments show it to be inherently pleasing to the palate. Pack those calories
into as small a volume as possible鈥攊ce cream before milk shake, fried
chicken before soup鈥攁nd go for high fat foods over high protein ones. The
jury鈥檚 still out, but there鈥檚 evidence that protein makes you full faster.
Whatever you do, don鈥檛 eat alone or with strangers. You鈥檒l get down 50 per
cent more food at a sitting if you dine with your pals: the more enjoyable a
meal is socially, the more courses you鈥檙e likely to consume. A little alcohol
also does wonders for relaxing that 鈥渘o dessert, thanks鈥� restraint. Bona fide
lab studies show it.
Make sure, too, that there鈥檚 a good spread on the table. Barbara Rolls,
nutrition researcher at Pennsylvania State University, has shown that people
given four different kinds of food stuffed down 60 per cent more at a meal than
those presented with just one item, even if it was their favourite. People
dining on pasta alone will eat 15 per cent more if they have three different
shapes to select from. This lust for variety makes good evolutionary sense,
since it encourages a nutritionally balanced diet. It also means that those
weight-loss schemes that allow you to eat as much as you like of just one
food鈥攖he apple diet, the whipped-cream diet, the anything-you-care-to-name
diet鈥攕hould really work, if you could only stick to them. Soon, even
thinking about that food would turn you green.
Stumbling on any appetite researcher called Rolls is gratifying, never mind
finding two (especially two who have worked with a third named Charles Butter).
Edmund Rolls, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, has been examining
what happens to nerve cells in the brains of monkeys as they tire of the same
old food. Down in the brain鈥檚 orbitofrontal cortex, neurons fire when the animal
gets a novel titbit to eat鈥攁 banana, say. As the creature keeps eating
bananas, the neurons stop responding until a different food鈥攃heese,
perhaps鈥攁ppears. Then the nerves fire vigorously again. So pig out at that
buffet, and keep your orbitofrontal neurons crackling!
Tip 2: Watch your fluids
No glutton can truly concentrate on their craft if they鈥檙e dying for a drink.
Parched rats will more or less stop eating: this makes good survival sense,
since digesting food uses up a lot of water. Give those rats water, and they
drink nonstop for a spell鈥攖hen turn to their chow and chomp down as much
in half an hour as they ate in the previous 12 hours.
Neuroscientist Alan Watts of the University of Southern California explains
it this way. 快猫短视频s know that a region of the brain called the hypothalamus
is crucial for control of thirst, appetite and other basic urges. When hunger
strikes, levels of a key chemical called neuropeptide Y rise in the
hypothalamus, nudging the animal to eat. With thirst, levels of a different
peptide, corticotrophin releasing hormone, rise instead, inhibiting feeding.
And with hunger and thirst together? Both chemicals accumulate, but the
corticotrophin signal seems to stomp all over the neuropeptide Y signal until
the animal deals with its thirst.
Whatever the biochemistry, there are two lessons here for the serious
glutton. If your goal is steady, reliable overeating, take good care to avoid
dehydration. But if you鈥檙e really serious about stuffing yourself, try this
flashier strategy. First, gently dehydrate yourself by drinking saltwater for a
few days in the privacy of your home. Next, just before company arrives for
dinner, swallow plenty of normal water to regain your appetite. Then astound all
your friends by eating until your shirt buttons burst.
Tip 3: Consider brain surgery
Some lily-livered would-be gluttons may balk at the prospect of surgery and
wish to pass right on to tip 4. Bear in mind, though, that cutting or otherwise
damaging the hypothalamus will have quite spectacular results. This has been
amply illustrated by animal experiments, and by people with brain lesions from
accidents and tumours. We鈥檙e not talking a few more bow-tie pastas or an extra
spoonful of dessert: this strategy will have you eating like there鈥檚 no
tomorrow.
Ask your surgeon for a cut or a sharp jolt of electricity in the ventromedial
hypothalamus (tell him that鈥檚 in the middle of the structure, near the bottom).
This should make you eat voraciously. Not only that, it will help you bulk up by
slowing your body鈥檚 metabolism. It might also make your stomach churn faster and
get its juices flowing more freely, both of which will aid in the grinding of
food. Injections of monosodium glutamate into the same bit of the brain should
also do the trick鈥攊t does for rats, that鈥檚 for sure.
Is there a downside? Well, yes. Cutting the wrong part of the
hypothalamus鈥攖he 鈥渓ateral鈥� region鈥攕timulates fasting, not gluttony,
and there may be inconvenient side effects such as interference with normal
sexual urges. This latter effect might prove useful, though, since the pursuit
of greatness does require focus and single-mindedness.
Tip 4: Get wired
So you鈥檙e eating right and you鈥檙e drinking right and you鈥檝e lesioned your
hypothalamus. Now what? Well, if you aren鈥檛 averse to carrying around your own
electric power pack, the answer could be to have that accommodating surgeon go
into your brain again and stick an electrode into the lateral
hypothalamus鈥攔emember, that鈥檚 the part you didn鈥檛 want damaged in your
first round of surgery. Apply electricity, but not too much this time: only
enough to stimulate the neurons, not kill them. As long as the power is on,
you鈥檒l eat.
Downside? There is no downside. Not only will you eat, the electrical
stimulation is deeply pleasurable. Indeed, rats implanted with such devices like
the effects so much they learn to press bars to turn on the current. Mmmmm.
Tip 5: Stay in shape
Preparing to become a world-class glutton is like training to be a
world-class athlete: you have to keep fit. Don鈥檛 worry, that doesn鈥檛 mean
getting up at the crack to lift weights, though one can鈥檛 deny that vigorous
exercise stimulates the appetite. No, what we鈥檙e interested in is your stomach,
and how to give it a good old work-out.
Gone are the days when eating scientists bowed down before the stomach as the
be-all and end-all of appetite control, explains Harvey Grill, stomach expert at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. But the organ does play its
part. Eventually, as pork pie after French fry slithers into it, the stomach鈥檚
walls distend, and stretch receptors relay that 鈥渇ull up鈥� message to the brain,
which terminates eating.
But there鈥檚 scope for improvement here鈥攆or the dedicated. Stomachs can
be pushed to increase their capacity.
Some of the evidence is anecdotal. A few years back, Britain鈥檚 speed-eating
champion Peter Dowdeswell (whose many world records include 1300 baby eels in
13.7 seconds and 17 bananas in 1 minute 47 seconds) described the type of meal
it took to satisfy him: three pounds of sausages, five pounds of mashed potato,
half a head of cabbage, peas, gravy and trifle for dessert. What normal,
unstretched stomach could manage that little load?
But there are lab data, too. Allan Geliebter, an obesity researcher at St
Luke鈥檚-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, inserted balloons into the stomachs of
bulimics and normal eaters, then filled them with water until the pressure and
discomfort made it prudent for him to desist.
At capacity, bulimic stomachs held 1200 millilitres, whereas normal stomachs
expanded no further than a paltry 800 millilitres. The lesson here for hopeful
gluttons? Eat huge meals regularly, and you should see results.
Tip 6: Cheat
You may find this suggestion unsporting, but look at it this way. Life would
be simple for the aspiring human glutton if we were like flies. If you cut a
little nerve between fly gut and fly brain, the creature will eat till it
explodes, as physiologist Vincent Dethier (author of that classic 1976 volume
The Hungry Fly) discovered to his astonishment.
We are not flies, though, and the regulation of our feeding is decided on a
biochemical battleground of hormones and neural circuits, all of which are
fighting to keep our food intake and energy expenditure balanced.
You can force more food into the stomach. You can even clear the stomach
faster by taking a drug to make it churn more heartily. But what good is that,
if the minute the food hits the small intestine it smothers your appetite by
binding to nutrient receptors and sending 鈥淚鈥檓 full鈥� signals to the brain?
An obvious, kill-two-birds-with-one-stone strategy is to engineer matters so
that the stomach never fills and the food never reaches the small intestine.
This can be done鈥攊ndeed is done, by creating a porthole into the stomach
through which food can enter or leave. Clinically, such holes are used to slip
food into stomachs of people whose normal urge to eat has diminished to the
point where they risk starvation: cancer patients, perhaps, or anorexics. You,
as a glutton, could turn this life-saving technique on its head and 鈥渟ham feed鈥�,
as animals in experiments are sometimes made to do. Gorge nonstop for hours, if
you want鈥攃ollecting food oh-so-discreetly in a bag slipped under your
shirt. It鈥檚 the principle of the vomitorium brought up to date.
Is it fair? Is it ethical? This is a profoundly personal question, which
every glutton must wrestle with alone.
Tip 7: Partake of peppers
If your conscience won鈥檛 permit you to sham feed, don鈥檛 despair. Just look to
your spice rack. Pull out that jar of chilli pepper, loaded with a hot little
chemical called capsaicin. Studies on rats show that capsaicin injections,
either into the blood or directly into the small intestine, keep the creatures
eating for longer. What happens is that the chemical interferes with the ability
of nerves to send 鈥渇ullness鈥� messages to the brain when fats and carbohydrates
wash down from the stomach. So here goes, glutton-in-the-making: Load your food
with peppers鈥攐r get that capsaicin directly into your gut via another
鈥渟ham鈥� port-hole. And eat, eat, eat.
Tip 8: Change your genes
This may be a delicate point, which is why we鈥檝e left it till near the end.
But it is a fact of life that we are not born equal: some of us will be more
prone to gluttony than others. Almost daily, it seems, another gene associated
with appetite is unearthed: obesity, tubby and fatty
are just a few of those that have been found in mice, their names revealing what
they do when their proper function is impaired. Damage to one such gene, which
codes for an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin, produces voracious
eating and obesity in people, as well as a mouse which Roger Cone of the Oregon
Health Sciences University in Portland describes as 鈥渁 ball of fat on legs鈥�.
Such conditions are anything but fun for a person who does not aspire to
champion gluttony, but in these heady days of biotechnology it can only be a
matter of time before people who do have such goals will be able to alter their
genes. Bear this in mind: Cone has found that mice carrying two
mutations鈥攐ne in the leptin gene, another in a gene called agouti
鈥攁re even greedier than mice with just one of the two, so you may want to
damage several genes for maximal effect.
Cautious about messing with your genes? Then consider tinkering with Mother
Nature in a slightly different way, and getting yourself cloned. You鈥檇 be
creating a champion glutton who is in many senses 鈥測ou鈥� without exposing
yourself to that risky engineered DNA. This could be one for the future: wait
and see if Dolly turns out to be the sheep she鈥檚 cracked up to be before you get
on the phone to Richard Seed.
Tip 9: Take drugs
Leptin, melanocortin, neuropeptide Y, galanin, cholecystokinin鈥攖he list
of chemicals involved in regulating our appetite grows longer by the day. For
the glutton who doesn鈥檛 mind going pharmacological, taking drugs that either
mimic or interfere with these substances is a sure-fire way to push up food
intake. Your strategy is simple. If the hormone dampens appetite, as leptin
does, what you need is a substance that will block its action. If the hormone is
an appetite stimulant, you鈥檒l want something that does the same job, preferably
better.
Such drugs haven鈥檛 yet reached pharmacists鈥� shelves. But you could try
calling up the likes of GlaxoWellcome, Roche or Amgen to see if they鈥檝e got
something bubbling away in their appetite research labs. If you find for some
perplexing reason that these companies are more focused on finding drugs that
curtail eating, don鈥檛 despair. There are many other substances that can help to
get you gorging, though admittedly not as spectacularly. Steroid hormones and
opiates are pretty effective. And don鈥檛 forget that reliable old standby,
marijuana.
Tip 10: Go on a diet
It鈥檚 simple, it鈥檚 legal and millions of people do it. Dieting is just
wonderful for would-be gluttons. It might cut down your calorie intake for a
while, but studies show that once you break free from your diet you鈥檒l leave
nondieting peers in the dust with your binges on high-fat, sugary foods. The
more extreme the better: in a classic 1940s experiment in Minnesota, men were
semi-starved for six months so scientists could study the consequences of
prisoner-of-war camp diets. During the diet, the men thought and talked of
little but food. Several made plans to become chefs. After the diet, they ate
insatiably, bingeing sometimes for days on end. Deprivation like this sets you
up for the long haul: other studies show that some people binge-eat even decades
after they鈥檝e been semi-starved. So go ahead. Live off cabbage soup for a
half-year or so. And bon app茅tit forever thereafter.