Iron Man IRL is not really desirable

Popeye the Sailor Man helped popularise the idea that large quantities of iron in your diet is a good thing.

While iron is important to make the red blood cells that carry oxygen and serve as catalyst for vital biochemical reactions in your cells, it is NOT of much help for developing biceps bigger than your head.

But the idea of its importance remain, and you can see most processed food are touted to be enriched in minerals (which is what iron is) and vitamins. Have we gone overboard with our enthusiasm for fortified food?

Have a look.



Judging from the video, I'm thinking that maybe a year's worth of breakfast cereal is sufficient to craft a single nail. That amount would kill ya.

Lucky for you, your liver does a fantastic job of getting rid of undesirable stuff in your body (sadly, not the extra 20 lbs obscuring your six pack) and you can do it all without supplements for detox. Yay for physiology evolution!

Iron toxicity is rare; it is usually seen in people who have to undergo high volume blood transfusion because of anaemia. As a deliberate poison of choice, it takes too long to kill the victim, so murderers should stick to something a little bit more fast acting.

However, there have been cases of children who died from iron toxicity courtesy of multivitamin overdose.

Yep, those cute, tasty, colourful, chewy tablets CAN CAUSE DEATH.

After all, children are small and their juvenile livers are incapable of removing excess iron effectively. Makes it easy to build high concentration of iron in their body enough to kill them. Children with their penchant for sweets and crunchy candy often like multivitamins enough to keep badgering you to give them the tablets.

*That* is why those kiddie multivitamin bottles have WARNING LABELS telling you to KEEP THIS BOTTLE OUT OF CHILDREN'S REACH.

You have been warned.

WTF moment of the day

Don't care. Got Johnny Depp.

Better living through chemistry

Yes/yes?

OMG! This is severely cool!

The nerd in me is amazed by the amount of work that had gone into this game. If you are interested in how addictive substance of abuse act on the brain or just want to torment some lab mice, go here!

Feel guilty no more!

If you have a tendency to reach for the chips packet and are fond of dousing your food with salt, you may sniff at the doomsayers who insists that you will die of hypertension (of which you might) and say ...

"It's in my genes."

Everyone knows if you have such genetic predispositions you are a victim and have no control over yourself.

So there.

*snerk*

Why can't we have it all?

The happy fog induced by marijuana is nothing but a fond memory if Sanofi-Aventis has their way. They are working on an endocannabinoid receptor blocker that has shown interesting result in reducing the blood sugar of diabetics who have poor sugar control. The numbers look really good; it also helps that the drug also improves the patient's lipid profile (better triglyceride, HDL, LDL levels) and most importantly: reduces the waistline.

Unfortunately, if you are depressed to begin with, you may feel suicidal.

So yeah, trimmer waistline may correspond with a greater need for Xanax.

Romance killers

Are your drugs turning you into a vampire?

According to this, they may. If you're into doxycycline, that is.

What a way to take out the romance of the supernatural creatures. Just when you thought that you've Turned into a creature of the night, languishing for the sun and all you have is an adverse drug reaction?

Sheesh.

Doping your way to higher grades/pay scale

When looking at a student's grade, do we ever think about the effort it takes to achieve it? Swotting, sure. Some all-nighter perhaps. So what if the kid knocks back a couple of Red Bull to keep his/her red rimmed eyes open to cram as much as possible for tomorrow's paper. No biggie. But taking and (most likely) abusing a controlled drug? Would that be considered extreme?

This commentary in Nature deserves some examination. According to some, as human beings, we owe it to ourselves to go further than ever with the aid of such enhancement. For others, it is "unnatural" and therefore abhorrent.

Whatever your take on this, you can betcha if I could line me some Ritalin, I would not hesitate to take it for my all-nighters, warranted or not.

Does that make me a bad person?

*ponders*