Jim Turner.
Brain Fuel
The comedian Jim Turner has played dozens of roles in films and television series, like the football-star-turned-sports-agent on HBO’s Arliss series, but his most dramatic performance was reserved for his wife. It occurred the night he had a dream in which he was responsible for righting all the world’s wrongs. It was an exhausting duty, even in a dream, but then he discovered teleportation. To travel anywhere, all he had to do was think of the place, and he’d magically appear there. He went back to his old home in Iowa, to New York, to Greece, even to the moon. When he woke up, he was convinced he still possessed this power. He generously tried to teach it to his wife by shouting over and over, “You think it, you go there and you be there!”
His wife had a better plan. Knowing he was diabetic, she tried to get him to drink some fruit juice. He was still so crazed that he poured some of it over his face, got up, and then demonstrated his power by doing a somersault in the air and landing back on the bed. Finally, much to her relief, the juice kicked in, and he calmed down—or at least that was how it looked to his wife, as if the manic frenzy had subsided. But in fact he hadn’t been sedated. Quite the reverse: The juice’s sugar had given him extra energy.
More precisely, the energy in the juice was converted to glucose, the simple sugar manufactured in the body from all kinds of foods, not just sweet ones. The glucose produced by digestion goes into the bloodstream and is pumped throughout the body. The muscles, not surprisingly, use plenty of glucose, as do the heart and liver. The immune system uses large quantities, but only sporadically. When you’re relatively healthy, your immune system may use only a relatively small amount of glucose. But when your body is fighting off a cold, it may consume gobs of it. That’s why sick people sleep so much: The body uses all the energy it can to fight the disease, and it can’t spare much for exercising, making love, or arguing. It can’t even do much thinking, a process that requires plentiful glucose in the bloodstream. The glucose itself doesn’t enter the brain, but it’s converted into neurotransmitters, which are the chemicals that your brain cells use to send signals. If you ran out of neurotransmitters, you’d stop thinking.
The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked. Overall, they tended to be more anxious and less happy than average. Hypoglycemia was also reported to be unusually prevalent among criminals and other violent persons, and some creative defense attorneys brought the low-blood-sugar research into court.
The issue became notorious during the 1979 trial of Dan White for the assassination of two city officials in San Francisco, Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, a member of the board of supervisors and the most prominent openly gay politician in America. When a psychiatrist testifying for the defense cited White’s consumption of Twinkies and other junk food in the days before the murders, journalists mocked White for trying to excuse himself with a “Twinkie defense.” In fact, White’s chief defense wasn’t based on the argument that the Twinkies turned him murderous by causing his blood-sugar levels to quickly spike and then crash. His attorneys argued that he deserved mercy because he suffered from “diminished capacity” due to severe depression, and they presented his junk-food consumption (along with other changes in habits) as evidence of his depression, not as the cause of it. But when White received a relatively light sentence, the popular wisdom became that the Twinkie defense had worked, and the public was understandably outraged.
Other defense
Brain Fuel
The comedian Jim Turner has played dozens of roles in films and television series, like the football-star-turned-sports-agent on HBO’s Arliss series, but his most dramatic performance was reserved for his wife. It occurred the night he had a dream in which he was responsible for righting all the world’s wrongs. It was an exhausting duty, even in a dream, but then he discovered teleportation. To travel anywhere, all he had to do was think of the place, and he’d magically appear there. He went back to his old home in Iowa, to New York, to Greece, even to the moon. When he woke up, he was convinced he still possessed this power. He generously tried to teach it to his wife by shouting over and over, “You think it, you go there and you be there!”
His wife had a better plan. Knowing he was diabetic, she tried to get him to drink some fruit juice. He was still so crazed that he poured some of it over his face, got up, and then demonstrated his power by doing a somersault in the air and landing back on the bed. Finally, much to her relief, the juice kicked in, and he calmed down—or at least that was how it looked to his wife, as if the manic frenzy had subsided. But in fact he hadn’t been sedated. Quite the reverse: The juice’s sugar had given him extra energy.
More precisely, the energy in the juice was converted to glucose, the simple sugar manufactured in the body from all kinds of foods, not just sweet ones. The glucose produced by digestion goes into the bloodstream and is pumped throughout the body. The muscles, not surprisingly, use plenty of glucose, as do the heart and liver. The immune system uses large quantities, but only sporadically. When you’re relatively healthy, your immune system may use only a relatively small amount of glucose. But when your body is fighting off a cold, it may consume gobs of it. That’s why sick people sleep so much: The body uses all the energy it can to fight the disease, and it can’t spare much for exercising, making love, or arguing. It can’t even do much thinking, a process that requires plentiful glucose in the bloodstream. The glucose itself doesn’t enter the brain, but it’s converted into neurotransmitters, which are the chemicals that your brain cells use to send signals. If you ran out of neurotransmitters, you’d stop thinking.
The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked. Overall, they tended to be more anxious and less happy than average. Hypoglycemia was also reported to be unusually prevalent among criminals and other violent persons, and some creative defense attorneys brought the low-blood-sugar research into court.
The issue became notorious during the 1979 trial of Dan White for the assassination of two city officials in San Francisco, Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, a member of the board of supervisors and the most prominent openly gay politician in America. When a psychiatrist testifying for the defense cited White’s consumption of Twinkies and other junk food in the days before the murders, journalists mocked White for trying to excuse himself with a “Twinkie defense.” In fact, White’s chief defense wasn’t based on the argument that the Twinkies turned him murderous by causing his blood-sugar levels to quickly spike and then crash. His attorneys argued that he deserved mercy because he suffered from “diminished capacity” due to severe depression, and they presented his junk-food consumption (along with other changes in habits) as evidence of his depression, not as the cause of it. But when White received a relatively light sentence, the popular wisdom became that the Twinkie defense had worked, and the public was understandably outraged.
Other defense
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