Friday 10 June 2005

Pic of the day: "I want girls! I don't want guys!" Just take my word for it, even though I read women's magazines and the doctor squeezes my mammaries. (Actually this screenshot is from the anime Ghost Sweeper Mikami, about a highly competent female supernatural detective and the highly incompetent male assistant who does all the heavy work for free, foolishly imagining that he will some day gain her affection. That's more like it, yes.)

Female pizza fitness

Yesterday in the doctor's waiting room I spent most of the time devouring a fitness magazine for women, reasonably called "I form" (In shape). I don't think there is a corresponding fitness magazine for men. There is one called "Men's Health" (yes, it is called that in Norway too) but it was kinda repulsive back when I first saw it. More like, you know, men's magazines in general. Not entirely work- safe. Not so much about being healthy as looking impressive and getting female "attention", if you know what I mean. Luckily, Norwegian women also take the responsibility for keeping their men fit, if they want to keep them. Thus the front page on another Norwegian magazine for women which I saw while waiting at the supermarket. "His stomach – your responsibility? Real men don't slim!" (No, I don't spend a lot of time on women's magazines generally. Honest.)

Anyway, the magazine was interesting. I just skipped the more particular female stuff. There was still a lot left. Did you know that pizza is very good for your heart? The study they quoted also stood out in that it was in fact using control groups. You know this tends to be my pet peeve: People publish studies of human behavior and its effect on health, but it turns out to only be correlations: People who make love to many different people tend to be younger and prettier, so we will randomly conclude that it keeps you young and pretty rather than the obvious conclusion that they are in hot demand because they are young and pretty. But this study was different.

They took a bunch of people and put them on three different diets. One group got to eat no pizza. One group got to eat pizza twice a week, and one five times a week. Then after a while they measured some property of the blood correlated with cardiovascular health. It turned out that the more pizza you ate, the healthier your heart. Not eating pizza at all was the worst.

Of course, they still neglected to tell what the other people ate who didn't get pizza. Were they fasting? Did they eat broccoli? Almost certainly not. I don't think you should skip your vegan diet to eat as much pizza as your stomach can hold. But yeah, I have known for a while that pizza is much underrated. People think of it as fatty fast food, while it is actually pretty lean. The fat is just slightly more visible, because it is on the surface and makes the food gleam. Still, it is kinda impressive that you can actually pizza-up your health. I wonder what I will do with this knowledge. And a brand new space-age frying pan. Hmm.