Science, Museums, and Adornment

[browngirl]

Heredity and metabolism: drglam told me about studies that indicate that if one's parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents underwent a famine, one can be at increased risk for metabolic disorders like obesity and diabetes (the mechanism involves dna methylation, apparently). I immediately thought of the higher rates of obesity and diabetes amonng African-Americans and the malnutrition endemic among slaves and sharecroppers. Man, if I were twenty I would immediately set out to write a disseration on this.

Museums: like this writer, I was commuting (on a shuttlebus) when I glanced up and saw on a building's side, "MGH museum of medical innovation". I need to go see that, and so many other museums around Boston, so this is my note to myself.

While I sat on that bus I had my hair up in a bun with a white scarf tied around it; today I have a pink one. The new variant on my hairstyle has gotten me several compliments, and it's just... a lot of fun, feeling a scarf fluttering behind me like a flag as I walk outside. I'm rather indulging my frivolous side, but I don't think it'll rot my soul. :D

Comments

[gosling.livejournal.com]

I'd say dieting and eating disorders were contributing quite a bit. Famine, whether self-inflicted or imposed externally, does all sorts of subtle and less than pleasant things to hormones (and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it impacted one in utero more than any other time, though I imagine childhood and especially adolescence are probably pretty critical times as well).

Also, I do not actually believe obesity to be a disorder in of itself. (Some day, in an alternative universe where I have time to do so, I could write a great many paragraphs on this.)