Starving Ourselves Into Stupidity
I discovered that not eating isn't very good for the brain
by George Jonas
National Post
December 23, 2009
This is the week of Christmas and dinner parties and people gorging themselves into oblivion. It's just the way it is. Even diet doctors are resigned to it. "You're only human," my doctor said to me, with a leniency remarkable for someone of her calling.
Her diagnosis may be too optimistic, but assume she's right. If I am a human being, is there anything I could do to resemble one more closely?
Well, yes. Starving myself into a stupor would be a beginning.
As a child in Europe, I took part in a nutritional experiment called the Second World War. It entailed, among other things, going without food for certain stretches of time. It was then that I discovered that dieting isn't very good for the brain.
My discovery has since been confirmed by an Australian study I wrote about some years ago. It found that dieting may be smart, but it makes you kind of stupid. Not eating your fill is likely to make you lose interest in mathematical matters, among other things. For people whose interest in mathematical matters isn't very keen to begin with -- me, for instance -- dieting just about puts them on the road to innumeracy.
Dr. Janet Bryan of Finders University's School of Psychology developed a meticulously designed experiment that had 40 middle-aged women in scenic Adelaide compete against each other adding up three-digit numbers. Half were on a diet, half were not. What was going to happen?
The excitement must have been palpable. You could probably hear a pin drop before the starter's gun went off.
Had Dr. Bryan called me, I could have told her the 20 who weren't on a diet would add up numbers more quickly and reliably than the 20 who were. If you're dieting, you're hungry, and if you're hungry, the last thing you want to think about is three-digit numbers. What you'll want to think about is your next meal. Hungry people and three-digit numbers don't mix.
When I was going without food as a child in wartime Europe, three-digit numbers were remarkably low on my list of priorities. If I had to add up some, my performance would have been disappointing.
The Australian researchers came to the conclusion that dieters performed more poorly on mental arithmetic or word pattern problems than non-dieters because they were preoccupied with dieting. In the researchers' own words, "dieters displayed significantly higher levels of preoccupying thoughts surrounding food, diet and body shape."
I don't know if Dr. Bryan and her crew shouted "Eureka!" when they made this discovery, but even if they were too modest for shouting, they had hit the nail on the head. I'd actually go further and say that if the dieters hadn't been preoccupied with their body shapes, they might never have gone on a diet. And once they went on a diet, it became just about inevitable for them to become preoccupied with food. Food, not digits.
Dr. Bryan's study, when it was published in the aptly-named journal Appetite, offered some further findings. It postulated that "thoughts about dieting, body shape and eating may place demands on limited cognitive resources, leaving fewer available for the performance of cognitive tasks." With this, the researchers laid to rest any suspicion that the dieters were slow in adding up three-digit numbers because, relative to non-dieters, their cognitive abilities were impaired to begin with. They demonstrated that one doesn't need to be stupid to go on a diet; just that going on a diet is stupefying.
Some might object that people on diets aren't stupefied with hunger, at least not necessarily. That's nonsense. Being stupefied with hunger is the whole point of a diet. If you're not stupefied with hunger, you're either cheating on your diet or the diet itself is a cheat. Hunger makes you slim: It's really as simple as that.
Last month I wrote about my grandmother's winning formula for losing weight. After her sage advice appeared in these pages -- "eat less, move more" -- eager correspondents wanted to know if she had anything else to say on the subject. Unfortunately, she didn't. For years I kept her momentous discovery to myself because I wanted to call it the Grandma Jonas Diet and make my fortune publishing it. Eventually I realized it's hard to write a best-selling book -- or even a slow-selling book -- if all you can put in it is: "Eat less, move more." Never mind that it's the only thing worth saying.
There's another drawback to my diet. When you eat less you get hungry, and when you're hungry, you want to lick your digits, not count them.
In fact, you may feel an urge to bite the digit that fails to feed you. Oh well -- no diet is perfect.