Taste for Chaste: Sexless trend in Japan spurs demographic tragedy
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Love at first bite? Watch these kids react as they take their first bites of some “challenging” food flavors in this slow-motion video.
For most of us, bitter foods aren’t love at first bite. (Not convinced? Just watch the little girl in the video above taste an olive for the first time.)
But after a few espressos or IPAs, most of us warm up to bitter flavors and eventually throw our arms in the air, like the little girl in the video, declaring, “Yes, I love bitter foods!”
Of course, people didn’t evolve an ability to taste bitterness just so we could appreciate hoppy beer or macchiatos. So then, what are our bitter receptors good for?
More than a million years ago, our ancestor Homo erectus probably gained the ability to detect bitter flavors. So would he have enjoyed an espresso macchiato?
About a million years ago, one tiny change in DNA gave our ancestors the ability to perceive a bitter compound common in olives, nuts and seeds, scientists reported recently in the journal Molecular Biology Evolution.
That means the bitter-tasting mutation was present long before modern humans existed. And it stuck around as we evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
But here’s the twist: The mutation probably didn’t arise — and persist — for the reason that most of think.
“People in the past have thought that bitter taste perception may have evolved for avoiding toxic substances,” says biologist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. “If you’re a hunter-gatherer, you don’t want to eat a poisonous plant. A bitter taste tells [you to] immediately to avoid it.”
But that’s not what she and her postdoc Michael Campbell found when they analyzed taste genes across indigenous populations in Africa.
Campbell and her team tracked down 74 ethnic groups that still practice ancient methods of subsistence, such as hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders.
The team measured how easily people in each group could taste two bitter compounds, including the chemical in aspirin. They also sequenced two genes involved in detecting bitter flavors on the tongue.
“We had to haul huge numbers of bottles and chemicals to remote areas all across Africa,” Tishkoff tells The Salt. “This was a ton of work.”
She thought that hunter-gatherers would be more likely to carry the mutation that boosts their sensitivity to the aspirin compound because they and their ancestors foraged for food.
“We thought we’d see a difference in the bitter genes between the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists because of their diet,” Tishkoff says. “But there was no correlation all.”
In fact, while the ability to perceive bitter flavors is ubiquitous in people outside of Africa, that was not the case inside the continent, she says. In Africa, she found that people’s ability to detect bitter tastes varied by geography — but it had nothing to do with what they ate or how they got their food.
So if bitter sensing didn’t help our ancestors avoid poisonous plants, why have the genes stuck around for so long?
No one is really sure yet, Tishkoff says.
“These genes could be detecting a compound we don’t know anything about,” she says. Or they could be performing a task that’s completely unrelated to taste all together.
In the past few years, scientists have started to realize that bitter taste receptors are all over the body, Tishkoff says. These receptors have turned up in cells in the gut, lungs and even the testes.
“So the receptors are not only altering how we perceive food,” she says, “but probably also our physiology, in ways we have no idea about.”
Love at first bite? Watch these kids react as they take their first bites of some “challenging” food flavors in this slow-motion video.
For most of us, bitter foods aren’t love at first bite. (Not convinced? Just watch the little girl in the video above taste an olive for the first time.)
But after a few espressos or IPAs, most of us warm up to bitter flavors and eventually throw our arms in the air, like the little girl in the video, declaring, “Yes, I love bitter foods!”
Of course, people didn’t evolve an ability to taste bitterness just so we could appreciate hoppy beer or macchiatos. So then, what are our bitter receptors good for?
More than a million years ago, our ancestor Homo erectus probably gained the ability to detect bitter flavors. So would he have enjoyed an espresso macchiato?
About a million years ago, one tiny change in DNA gave our ancestors the ability to perceive a bitter compound common in olives, nuts and seeds, scientists reported recently in the journal Molecular Biology Evolution.
That means the bitter-tasting mutation was present long before modern humans existed. And it stuck around as we evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
But here’s the twist: The mutation probably didn’t arise — and persist — for the reason that most of think.
“People in the past have thought that bitter taste perception may have evolved for avoiding toxic substances,” says biologist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. “If you’re a hunter-gatherer, you don’t want to eat a poisonous plant. A bitter taste tells [you to] immediately to avoid it.”
But that’s not what she and her postdoc Michael Campbell found when they analyzed taste genes across indigenous populations in Africa.
Campbell and her team tracked down 74 ethnic groups that still practice ancient methods of subsistence, such as hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders.
The team measured how easily people in each group could taste two bitter compounds, including the chemical in aspirin. They also sequenced two genes involved in detecting bitter flavors on the tongue.
“We had to haul huge numbers of bottles and chemicals to remote areas all across Africa,” Tishkoff tells The Salt. “This was a ton of work.”
She thought that hunter-gatherers would be more likely to carry the mutation that boosts their sensitivity to the aspirin compound because they and their ancestors foraged for food.
“We thought we’d see a difference in the bitter genes between the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists because of their diet,” Tishkoff says. “But there was no correlation all.”
In fact, while the ability to perceive bitter flavors is ubiquitous in people outside of Africa, that was not the case inside the continent, she says. In Africa, she found that people’s ability to detect bitter tastes varied by geography — but it had nothing to do with what they ate or how they got their food.
So if bitter sensing didn’t help our ancestors avoid poisonous plants, why have the genes stuck around for so long?
No one is really sure yet, Tishkoff says.
“These genes could be detecting a compound we don’t know anything about,” she says. Or they could be performing a task that’s completely unrelated to taste all together.
In the past few years, scientists have started to realize that bitter taste receptors are all over the body, Tishkoff says. These receptors have turned up in cells in the gut, lungs and even the testes.
“So the receptors are not only altering how we perceive food,” she says, “but probably also our physiology, in ways we have no idea about.”
PHOTO: Obama and wife forced to downgrade next $ 100 million vacation
Regarding all of those who are living well – off the fat of the land…
The U.S. government began a formal shutdown early Tuesday after Washington failed to reach any real agreement on their federal spending plan – with Obamacare being the single biggest bone of contention.
Thousands of government sites will be closed, as “America’s number one employer”, boasted by President Obama – the US Federal Government, has been forced to tell a few million federal workers that they are now being “furloughed’ (told to stay at home without pay), although Congress did manage last night to approve an agreement to keep the US military’s paychecks coming.
Regarded as Washington’s most bloated and corrupt financial sink hole – the Pentagon has been living high on the hog for a while now. This latest crisis has left a confused Chuck Hagel to scramble with the Earth’s largest-ever game of musical chairs. Reportsclaim that up to 400,000 of the defense department’s 800,000 civilian workers are being furloughed.
Here’s what’s happening to the rest of the US Federal Bureaucratic Army of Paper Pushers and Badge Wearers…
“In a memo issued by the White House shortly before midnight, the Office of Management and Budget instructed that federal agencies “should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations.” National parks, monuments and museums, as well as most federal offices, will close. Tens of thousands of air-traffic controllers, prison guards and Border Patrol agents will be required to serve without pay.”
Is this a staged, bipartisan distraction, designed to conceal what Washington is really cooking up behind the scenes? Time will tell, and soon.
What about all the trillions of Federal dollars tied up in gravy train Federal government contracts? Are those being paid first? Houston, we have a structural problem – with this overtlyfascist system of government.
If they could furlough Congress and Senate – and the bottomless, black hole budgets like the White House’s monthly golf, holiday, shopping and beauty regimes, the DHS, NSA and the CIA – and maybe, just maybe then, Americans might have a chance to make some real progress…
WASHINGTON DC: A place were the marginally talented and mediocre alike, can hang out and get paid well to get fat, get drunk, snort cocaine, and use your tax money to hand out Federal contracts to their ‘friends’.
April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year.
There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was murdered right outside my office building.
It"s rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily – for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings.
On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified before a US Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target.
The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States – something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish.
His neighbors had admired the US, Al-Muslimi told the committee, but “Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant.”
Rack up another triumph for President Obama"s global assassination program, which creates hatred of the United States and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday.
The target of the Yemeni village assassination, which was carried out to induce maximum terror in the population, was well-known and could easily have been apprehended, Al-Muslimi said. This is another familiar feature of the global terror operations.
There was no direct way to prevent the Boston murders. There are some easy ways to prevent likely future ones: by not inciting them. That"s also true of another case of a suspect murdered, his body disposed of without autopsy, when he could easily have been apprehended and brought to trial: Osama bin Laden.
This murder too had consequences. To locate bin Laden, the CIA launched a fraudulent vaccination campaign in a poor neighborhood, then switched it, uncompleted, to a richer area where the suspect was thought to be.
The CIA operation violated fundamental principles as old as the Hippocratic oath. It also endangered health workers associated with a polio vaccination program in Pakistan, several of whom were abducted and killed, prompting the UN to withdraw its anti-polio team.
The CIA ruse also will lead to the deaths of unknown numbers of Pakistanis who have been deprived of protection from polio because they fear that foreign killers may still be exploiting vaccination programs.
Columbia University health scientist Leslie Roberts estimated that 100,000 cases of polio may follow this incident; he told Scientific American that “people would say this disease, this crippled child is because the US was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden.”
And they may choose to react, as aggrieved people sometimes do, in ways that will cause their tormentors consternation and outrage.
Even more severe consequences were narrowly averted. The US Navy SEALs were under orders to fight their way out if necessary. Pakistan has a well-trained army, committed to defending the state. Had the invaders been confronted, Washington would not have left them to their fate. Rather, the full force of the US killing machine might have been used to extricate them, quite possibly leading to nuclear war.
There is a long and highly instructive history showing the willingness of state authorities to risk the fate of their populations, sometimes severely, for the sake of their policy objectives, not least the most powerful state in the world. We ignore it at our peril.
There is no need to ignore it right now. A remedy is investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill"s just-published Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battleground.
In chilling detail, Scahill describes the effects on the ground of US military operations, terror strikes from the air (drones), and the exploits of the secret army of the executive branch, the Joint Special Operations Command, which rapidly expanded under President George W. Bush, then became a weapon of choice for President Obama.
We should bear in mind an astute observation by the author and activist Fred Branfman, who almost single-handedly exposed the true horrors of the US “secret wars” in Laos in the 1960s, and their extensions beyond.
Considering today"s JSOC-CIA-drones/killing machines, Branfman reminds us about the Senate testimony in 1969 of Monteagle Stearns, US deputy chief of mission in Laos from 1969 to 1972.
Asked why the US rapidly escalated its bombing after President Johnson had ordered a halt over North Vietnam in November 1968, Stearns said, “Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn"t just let them stay there with nothing to do.” So we can use them to drive poor peasants in remote villages of northern Laos into caves to survive, even penetrating within the caves with our advanced technology.
JSOC and the drones are a self-generating terror machine that will grow and expand, meanwhile creating new potential targets as they sweep much of the world. And the executive won"t want them just “sitting around.”
It wouldn"t hurt to contemplate another slice of history, at the dawn of the 20th century.
In his book “Policing America"s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State,” the historian Alfred McCoy explores in depth the US pacification of the Philippines after an invasion that killed hundreds of thousands through savagery and torture.
The conquerors established a sophisticated surveillance and control system, using the most advanced technology of the day to ensure obedience, with consequences for the Philippines that reach to the present.
And as McCoy demonstrates, it wasn"t long before the successes found their way home, where such methods were employed to control the domestic population – in softer ways to be sure, but not very attractive ones.
We can expect the same. The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right reaction is not passive acquiescence.
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Noam Chomsky"s new book is ""Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.""
