The magpie, the pregnant, vampires and the buffet restaurant

Through this blog I contacted a little over a year with a guy who is dedicated to the restoration business for many years. In particular his specialty, if you can call it in this way, was to open buffet restaurants.

Of all the possible restoration business, the one based on the buffet has always seemed to me the most risky. The ambition of the client is usually larger than its stomach and much of the food they put on their plate is never going to go through their mouth. It's like cooking directly for the trash can.  I explained him  my doubts about this kind of restaurant and to my surprise he was very surprised in turn at my misgivings. 

He had opened a total of seven free buffets during last  thirty years and they all worked in relative prosperity. It was true that a percentage of the food was wasted but not so much as it seems. Then I commented that it seemed to me extremely difficult to arrange the purchase and choose the recipes without knowing exactly how much food would be choosen by the clientes. Once again he surprised me. He said that the free buffets regular customer, in the long run, use to tend to eat a balanced diet. Maybe in the first visits they abused of meat and fat,  but gradually client consumes many more vegetables, salads and fruits. Never mind that the buffet would serve truckers or students of a school, cause in decreasing order, the products most consumed were carbohydrates, legumes, vegetables, dairy, fruits and meats. Indeed it was relatively easy to organize supplies and recipes. There was no need to make any educational effort to convince anyone. Healthy meals were more common than we use to think. My friend had a surprising theory about it: our body knows what foods to eat to get the necessary nutrients. Expressed in a more blunt: the body needs a certain nutrient and our brain "orders" that we get a particular food because it knows that contains that nutrient. To assert such a strange theory the man asked me if I had not felt at some point in my life the urgent need to consume a food that might not be regular in my diet. It was true. Such a thing had happened. Sometimes I need red meat or nuts - both I do not like -  which, according to this man, would respond to a very specific need in my body. Probably if I had done an analysis of "before" and "after" would have found the lack of a nutrient and how it was corrected by eating an specific food.

The truth is that I did not think about this theory  for a long time, probably because it seemed too strong to say that our body is able to determine that lacks zinc, selenium, vitamin, b6, whatever and then transmit the alarm to the brain that result in us the desire to eat a particular food.

Until one day, watching "Rosemary's Baby" by Roman Polanski, I was struck by a scene in which Mia Farrow, pregnant with the Prince of Darkness, assaulted the fridge to devour raw meat. The intent of the scene was to highlight the monstruous character of the fruit of her womb that was necessary to give raw meat to relieve anxiety. Well, a "craving" as is manifested by the character is perfectly possible in pregnant women. The real reason lies behind the so-called pregnant cravings are still unclear. For most gynecologists is to increase the amount of calories and thus "respond" to the needs of the mother and fetus. This does not explain why pregnant women often want little calorie meals. And do not explain neither why pregnants need particular foods, often undesirable or even unusual in their diet, which once again are hated once the body seems satisfied. In certain cases some doctors admit the possibility that the intake concerned to alleviate vitamin deficiencies or minerals in the body of the pregnant woman and fetus. If a pregnant woman expresses a clear desire to eat red meat or sausages made with blood  is likely to have iron deficiency. If instead they want some fruit or vegetables is almost certainly to solve a problem about vitamin or mineral. All this taken carefully because as I said many experts see no clear cause and effect.

Of course things get complicated when the pregnant wants to eat dirt, suck chalk or swallow. Things are not really edible.

The magpie is a bird of black and white feather, very common in Europe, Asia and West North America. Its Latin name is Pica pica, which refers to its interest in stones, golden and silver things and indeed in swallowing inedible objects used in situations of courtship and mating. Well, if a person swallows inedible substances this is a syndrome of Pica. It can occur to anyone but is most common among pregnant women and young children. The variety of non-foods you can eat is long. I will omit most of them not to hurt sensibilities. The ingestion of soil, for example, can occur when the individual has a zinc deficiency. In fact some have been fixed Pica syndrom  providing doses of zinc or other minerals. Other cases, like individuals who swallow coins or washing machine detergent, are harder to understand. It's hard to know why the brain sends the order to compulsive eating nonfood substances, even knowing that you can not extract from them the nutrient that the body lacks. This behavior is not unique to the human species: many animals do in the same way, although it is true that no one goes to the extremes of the human being, capable of filling the stomach with hair pins until cause death.

The need to take seemingly strange substances is also related to certain diseases. Vampires are believed to represent the myth of patients with porphyria. Sufferers of porphyria have some characteristics that we associate with vampires (pallor, sensitivity to light). It seems that some porphyria patients resorted to drink the blood of other animals or humans to try in vain to cure their disease. This is particularly interesting when one considers that the treatment today is through venous infusions.

Although there is a potential field of research on the brain's ability to control what we eat wisely, the truth is that I find little literature on it. Find the next article about Pica in Wikipedia:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_disorder

but little or nothing about a comprehensive study done on the selection of buffet food restaurants (although I think there is a study in England which unfortunately I could find). If this were true it would open new possibilities for the potential of our brain to diagnose the needs of our body and why not, on the diseases that plague us.

Indeed, I say disease because it is not the first time that a dream - a product of our brains - have been alerted about an individual suffering from a disease without knowing it.

David Janssen was a popular actor of television, especially for interpreting Dr. Kimble in the series "The Fugitive". While filming a movie he had a strange dream. He dreamt he was in a coffin and around it developed its own funeral. He could hear the conversation between two of those present. One of them explained to someone that he had died of a heart attack. When waking up Janssen suspected that the dream was a warning sent by his mind about a heart problem that so far had not been revealed. He went to the hospital and did a check.  Doctors did not detect anything. Twenty-four hours later the actor died of a heart attack.
So if your "body" asks you meat with cream and strawberries, pay it attention ...