The Diet Zone: A Dangerous Place

    Diet Coke, diet Pepsi, diet pills, no-fat diet, vegetable diet… We are surrounded by the word “diet” everywhere we look and listen. We have so easily been attracted by the promise and potential of diet products that we have stopped thinking about what diet products are doing to us. We are paying for products that harm us psychologically and physically.

    Diet products significantly weaken us psychologically. On one level, we are not allowing our brain to admit that our weight problems lie not in actually losing the weight, but in controlling the consumption of fatty, high-calorie, unhealthy foods. Diet products allow us to jump over the thinking stage and go straight for the scale(秤)instead. All we have to do is to swallow or recognize the word “diet” in food labels.

    On another level, diet products have greater psychological effects. Every time we have a zero-calorie drink, we are telling ourselves without our awareness that we don't have to work to get results. Diet products make people believe that gain comes without pain, and that life can be without resistance and struggle.

    The danger of diet products lies not only in the psychological effects they have on us, but also in the physical harm that they cause. Diet foods can indirectly harm our bodies because consuming them instead of healthy foods means we are preventing our bodies from having basic nutrients. Diet foods and diet pills contain zero calorie only because the diet industry has created chemicals to produce these wonder products. Diet products may not be nutritional, and the chemicals that go into diet products are potentially dangerous.

    Now that we are aware of the effects that diet products have on us, it is time to seriously think about buying them. Losing weight lies in the power of minds, not in the power of chemicals. Once we realize this, we will be much better able to resist diet products, and therefore prevent the psychological and physical harm that comes from using them.

    Roald Dahl is a beloved British writer. He is the writer of some of the world's best-known children's novels, including James and Giant Peach, Matilda, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

    More than 250 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. His works have been translated into 58 languages. Tuesday was Roald Dahl Day. People around the world celebrated what would have been Dahl's 100^th birthday. He was born in 1916 in Wales. He died in 1990.

    Roald Dahl Day was worldwide on social media(媒体). Many people thanked Dahl for making them truly enjoy reading. One Twitter user wrote, “My childhood was made magical because of the wonderful Roald Dahl. A great storyteller!” Another wrote, “You made me fall in love with reading—a love that has lasted me a lifetime.” Special events and celebrations were held in Britain and other countries in honor of Dahl.

    The Oxford English Dictionary marked Dahl's 100^th birthday by officially adding six Dahl-created words to its latest edition. They included words such as “Oompah- Loompah” and “scrumdiddlyumptious.”

    Oompah Loompahs are the factory workers in the book—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They had orange skin and green hair. They danced and played music. Oompah Loompahs became more famous after the 1971 film of the book, which starred Gene Wilder as candy maker Willy Wonka.

     “Scrumdiddlyumptious” is a word that appeared in Dahl's book- The BFG—short for The Big Friendly Giant. It generally means “delicious”. A film of The BFG, directed by Steven Spielberg, was released(发行)this year

    Earlier this year, Ocford released an entire Roald Dahl dictionary. It included more than 8,000 real and invented words used by the master storyteller.

    I start every summer with the best of intentions: to attack one big book from the past, a classic that I was supposed to have read when young and ambitious. Often the pairings of books and settings have been purely accidental: "Moby Dick" on a three-day cross-country train trip: "The Magic Mountain" in a New England beachside cottage with no locks on the doors, no telephones or televisions in the rooms, and little to do beyond row on the salt pond. Attempting "The Man Without Qualities" on a return to Hawaii, my native state, however, was less fruitful: I made it through one and a quarter volumes (册), then decided that I'd got the point and went swimming instead.

    But this summer I find myself at a loss. I'm not quite interested in Balzac, say, or "Tristram Shandy." There's always War and Peace, which I've covered some distance several times, only to get bogged down in the "War" part, set it aside for a while, and realize that I have to start over from the beginning again, having forgotten everyone's name and social rank. How appealing to simply fall back on a favorite-once more into "The Waves" or "Justine," which feels almost like cheating, too exciting and too much fun to properly belong in serious literature.

    And then there's Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," which happens to be the name of my favorite cocktail (鸡尾酒) of the summer, created by Michael Cecconi at Savoy and BackForty. It is easy to drink, and knocking back three or four seems like such a delightful idea. Cecconi's theory: "I take whatever's fresh at the green market and turn it into liquid." The result is a pure shot of afternoon in the park, making one feel cheerful and peaceful all at once, lying on uncut grass with eyes shut, sun beating through the lids...

    The cold and icy land that is the Eskimo's home is a dangerous one. The Eskimo once believed that to be safe from danger he had to obey taboos(禁忌). Taboos were rules that told him what he must do and must not do.

    The Eskimo had taboos connected with almost everything he did. He had to keep them in mind at all times. He believed that to break one would bring disaster. For the Eskimo, it was taboo to store reindeer(驯鹿) and seal (海豹) meat together. He could not even eat them on the same day. He believed the Goddess Sedna had separated the land animals from the sea animals. He thought bringing them together would cause the hunting to be bad.

    There were other taboos concerning animals. When a dead seal was brought into the house, the women had to stop working. They had to give its spirit a drink of water. If they did not, the spirit would be angered. It would keep other animals from being caught.

    When the Eskimo broken a taboo, he believed a black cloud formed around his head. He had to tell the others in the village what he had done. He thought that if he did not tell his neighbors, they would catch the black cloud. Then the whole village would have bad luck.

    Sweet potato plants don't have spines or poisons to defend themselves. But some have evolved a clever way to let hungry herbivores (食草动物) know they aren't an all-you-can-eat buffet, a new study finds. When one leaf injured, it produces a chemical that warms the rest of the plant and its neighbors to make themselves inedible (不宜食用的)to bugs. Sweet potato breeders could potentially engineer plants to produce the chemical as an all-natural pest defense.

    Plant ecologists led by Axel Mithofer of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, started to look into sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) defenses after they noticed something interesting about two varieties of the plant grown in Taiwan: The yellow-skinned, yellow-fleshed Tainong 57 is generally herbivore-resistant, but its darker orange cousin, Tainong 66, is plagued (造成麻烦) by insect pests.

    To find out why, the team offered up Tainong 57 and 66 plants to hungry African cotton leafworm caterpillars (毛虫).Both plants released at least 40 airborne compounds as the caterpillars snacked on their leaves. But Tainong 57 produced a lot more of a chemical called DMNT, which has a very distinct smell, the team details this month in Scientific Reports. ("The smell is not nice," Mithofer says. "You wouldn't want it as a perfume.")

    DMNT isn't a new compound; researchers have isolated (分离出) the smelly chemical from other plants such as corn and cabbage, and it is known to induce defense responses in some species.

    To determine whether this was happening in sweet potatoes, scientists set up two experiments. First, they put two plants next to each other and wounded one so it produced DMNT. Then, they exposed healthy Tainong 57 plants to DMNT they had synthesized (合成).In both cases, the DMNT caused the exposed plants to produce more of a protein called sporamin in their leaves. (Tainong 66 did not have the same reaction.) When the caterpillar's snack on sporamin, "they immediately stop eating because they don't feel well," Mithofer says.

    Sporamin is the main protein in sweet potato tubers (块茎),and is indigestible raw, which is why sweet potatoes must be cooked for humans to enjoy them. "If the caterpillars could cook it, they could eat it," Mithofer says. Theoretically, he says, sweet potato breeders could use genetic engineering to make different varieties of sweet potato produce as much DMNT as Tainong 57, and display the same defense responses.

    Still, the research isn't ready for prime time, cautions plant ecologist Martin Heil. DMNT might work in the lab, but in the field, airborne chemicals can be "blown away in seconds," says Heil, who studies plant-insect interactions at the National Polytechnic Institute in Irapuato, Mexico.

    Mithofer himself has no plans now to create genetically engineered sweet potato plants, because they would not be a viable (能活下去的) crop in Europe, where genetically modified crops are outlawed. So for now, Tainong 66 will have to put up with being a caterpillar salad bar.

    Science is finaly beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.

    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friend die.

    Pigs respond meaningful to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O's. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs walked only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not inconsiderable feat of reasoning.

    I've been guilty of prejudiced expectations, myself. At the start of my career almost four decades ago, I was firmly convinced that monkeys and apes out-think and out-feel other animals. They're other primates(灵长目动物), after all, animals from our own mammalian(哺乳动物的) class. Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, whales too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a viewpoint shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedure kin laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.

    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical (伦理的) revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will our ethics start to catch up with the development of our science?

    Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?