MAY 22, 2017

TO BEGIN WITH the obvious question: Does the world need a more or less 800-page book on food phobias? Beats me. But the answer is in any case moot because, despite his subtitle, Alexander Theroux has written something rather different, more interesting and grander than that.

A phobia is generally considered (Im quoting Merriam-Webster here) an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation, and certainly Theroux writes about those who suffer from (and lets face it, sometimes celebrate) this condition, though he also tries to explain the inexplicable. Moreover he demonstrates that the distinctions between phobia, dislike, simple preference, aversion, obsession, and mere squeamishness are inevitably blurred. Hes concerned with food fetishes, fixations, fashions, food snobbery, and inverted snobbery, with food as a marker of class, status, and self-definition. He presents a parade of faddists, would-be revolutionaries, nutritional autocrats, cranks, and a few well-meaning folk with dubious ideas.

Inevitably the book contains a good deal of what we might call food trivia, although Im sure the author would rightly insist that these matters are anything but trivial. This is a serious book. But that doesnt mean we cant have some fun along the way, starting with the title: it derives from the fact that Einstein famously hated beets, though its a limited fame as far as this reader was concerned. Einstein was not alone: Michelle and Barack Obama hate them too, as does the food writer and occasional novelist Gael Greene. In fact, the book demonstrates that youre extremely unlikely to be alone in your phobia, however singular it may seem: Alfred Hitchcock wouldnt eat eggs but neither would President Taft, nor will Whoopi Goldberg. Naomi Watts and Jennifer Aniston cant abide caviar. Colson Whitehead cant face ice cream having worked an ice cream stand where the perk of the job was all he could eat.

William Cobbett eschewed tea because it was a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age. Mussolini didnt eat mashed potatoes because they gave him a headache. Idi Amin doesnt seem like hed have been a fussy eater, but he had his limits, I tried human flesh, and it is too salty for my taste. Of course the reader cant be sure if this flesh was raw or cooked: if the latter, then surely the saltiness was the fault of the cook. There is also some speculation about whether Amin was actually speaking the truth or just buffing up his image as terrifying despot.

Prince (the purple one) didnt like to eat much of anything, but he particularly disliked mushrooms, feta cheese, and onions, although when he let Heavy Table look in his fridge there were 18 jars of mustard in there, and he explained, I dont collect it, but LOL yeah theres a lot in there. Incidentally, Thomas Love Peacock, the 19th-century novelist and official of the East India Company, judged an inn by its mustard pot: if he didnt like the look of the mustard hed leave the place.

These unlikely connections across history and culture, surprising, entertaining, sometimes free associative but not exactly random, are what give Einsteins Beets its special flavor and appeal. Therouxs scholarship is wide ranging and digressive, drawing on a quirky, specialized knowledge of history, literature, the higher gossip, as well as pop culture. Theres even an unexpected compare and contrast between food attitudes in Star Wars versus Star Trek.

The book also contains much that is genuinely informative and educational. Who knew that T-bone steak became the vogue in South Africa after Archbishop Desmond Tutu pointed out that its shape resembled that of the continent? Who knew that celery, parsnips, figs, and parsley contain high levels of fucoumarins potent light-activated carcinogens? How many of us are familiar with the philosophical poem by John Heywood (14971580) Of Books and Cheese? Well, I am now: its a good read.

Actually, cheese does seem to have the particular power to cloud mens and womens minds. Which is why Mitt Romney, when on the road running for president in 2011, though he ate a lot of pizza, always took the cheese off. T. S. Eliot declared never commit yourself to a cheese without first examining it. And Courtney Love, who hates cheese, calls it sour milk LARD. Like thats a bad thing?

From time to time I was reminded of Robert Burtons The Anatomy of Melancholy, similar in its baggy, overstuffed, eccentric, encyclopedic qualities, with the author by no means restricted to his alleged subject. Therouxs book has something of the magnificent folly about it. He tells us Brief Lives, John Aubreys gorgeously chaotic collection of biographies, is one of his favorite books: no big surprise there.

The index of Einsteins Beets is in itself a thing of wonder (if not of absolute accuracy): Angelina Jolie is there next to James Joyce, Jennifer Lopez next to Lord Byron, Homer next to J. Edgar Hoover next to Bob Hope next to Gerard Manley Hopkins. (Full disclosure, I should say that I too appear there, lodged somewhere between Isaac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche.)

However, all that free-wheeling research aside, there is a personal, autobiographical element to the book. Fittingly enough the author tells us about his own phobias and dislikes. A by-no-means-complete list includes peppermint, margarine, marshmallows, kidneys, fruit-flavored teas, haggis, Scotch eggs, pork pies, all white bread, sweetbreads, overcooked pastas, salty chips, dried coconut flakes that taste like candle wax, fat-free yoghurt, three bean salad, pretty much all casseroles, head cheese, Waldorf salad, menudo, white chocolate, whole-wheat pasta, egg salad in any form, deviled eggs, any canned or jellied ham, yellow waxed beans, smoked salmon and cream cheese pinwheels, tossed salads with apples, mince pies of any stripe, store-bought candied fruits, harsh anchovies, tuna or sardines packed in water or even for that matter cheap mushy tuna in oil. Heres an author who knows his subject.

Theroux emerges as quite a character, perhaps his own literary creation; irascible, opinionated, easily distracted, with a lot on his mind. He doesnt do political correctness, hardly a shock to readers of his earlier works, and that may be an objection for some, though it would be a very sour individual indeed who could keep an entirely straight face at some parts of his chapter titled Liberaces Sticky Buns, or How Gay is Your Food? which reaches an apotheosis in a description by Neil Patrick Harris of his visit to an Asian restaurant in Montreal where he ate acupunctured snapper. Theroux quotes Harris as saying, Its snapper that has been caught and then killed in a way that is very calm the fishermen insert needles so that the trauma of death is avoided and the cut is really tender. Id have thought this must be satire, but apparently not. The information comes from an interview in Bon Apptit, a magazine not much known for its zesty sense of irony and subversion.

Theroux meanwhile does a very nice line in casual, personal abuse. Bill Cosby is the moronic, face-pulling jester/rapist. Andrew Zimmern he of Bizarre Foods fame is [s]calp-bald, beaky and voracious, he has the head of a California Condor, except that the body is that of a manatee. Diana Vreeland whom he despises for her snobbery (she once said, I loathe native food) is [t]all, loud, brash opinionated, and as homely as an empty glass of buttermilk. Both Ogden Nash and Elaine Dundy are dismissed as poetasters. Mahatma Gandhi was a peevish foodie, P. J. ORourke a would-be humorist, Dick Cheney a sour ball and satanic creep. He isnt always politically incorrect.

Joan Didion the cadaverous novelist and a frail, querulous near-dwarf comes in for special treatment. The dislike here (and it does seem downright phobic) surely has more to do with her writing than her eating habits, though Theroux takes time to pour scorn on her personal cookbook a bunch of astonishingly unoriginal recipes. And he finds a surprising ally in Angela Carter Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, she writes, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didions female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a special squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest. Ouch, in all sorts of ways.

Being an equal-opportunity abuser, Theroux also directs some venom at his own brother, Dear Paul who is also compulsively and self-admiringly forever the steadfast, brave, and unwavering hero of his own books, both fiction and non-fiction. He also casts doubt on Pauls claims to have eaten owls, sparrows, and beaver, among other rarities.

As for his high seriousness, theres a polemical section about the Israeli governments policy to restrict the amount of food going into Gaza, and he quotes Dov Weisglass, senior advisor to (now-disgraced) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as saying they were putting the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger. Theres also a pretty sharp analysis of Hillary Clintons political disingenuousness, in her refusal to express any food preference whatsoever, declaring that all food is good, presumably for fear of offending anyone. Trump is simply dismissed (the book was evidently written before the election), not least because Trumps a man who will eat a whole bucket of chicken with a knife and fork.

But above all the book is an attempt to understand the various meanings that attach to eating and food, not only, or at least not narrowly, in terms of phobias and aversions. It may be a clich to say that we are what we eat, but its true enough. And perhaps were even more defined but what we dont eat, or what we refuse to eat. Theroux writes: A negative chic attaches to refusing something outright. The act of spurning acquires a kind of power. It gives advantage, dominance.

Well yes, most of us carnivores have ceded power to the vegetarian at our table, havent we? And most of us, however omnivorous, have probably turned up our nose at moms cooking in order to assert our independence. Theroux has a chapter titled We Inhabit the Universe of Mom.

Not that its only about mom. In a different chapter, titled Hearst, Hebrews, and Hydrophones, he offers a convincing analysis of Kafkas The Hunger Artist. Kafka may or may not have been suffering from anorexia nervosa, but he was certainly suffering from a troubled relationship with his father. Theroux sees the repudiation of food in this short story as an example of self-cancellation. The Hunger Artist controls the one thing that he can, and later he adds, I have often thought that in extreme cases the food a person selects to dislike might very well be an objective correlative of his or her guilt, the projection of an inner demon. The hunger artist selects to dislike everything.

Elsewhere in the book Theroux writes, resistance, outward and inward, is nothing less than a whispering answer to our need [] The struggle is for freedom, although of course it may well end up as a kind of enslavement. The last line of the book asks: Why cant food have its own devils? But by then, Theroux has proved that it can, it does, and probably it must.

So to return to that opening question, does the world need an 800-page book on food phobias, as well as dislikes, simple preferences, aversions, obsessions, squeamishness, food fetishes, fixations, fashions, snobbery, and inverted snobbery? Simple answer: Damn right it does and with Theroux at the helm, you cant help wondering why it wasnt a thousand, two thousand pages long. Some of us will be eagerly awaiting an expanded edition.

Geoff Nicholson is a novelist and nonfiction writer and a contributing editor atLARB.

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The Anatomy of Finickiness: On Alexander Theroux's Einstein's Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias - lareviewofbooks

By David Kohn, The Washington Post

Kari Alitalo had studied lymphatic vessels for more than two decades. So he knew that this network, which carries immune cells throughout the body and removes waste and toxins, didnt extend into the brain: This had been accepted wisdom for more than 300 years. Nobody questioned that it stopped at the brain, says Alitalo, a scientist at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Three years ago, Alitalo wanted to develop a more precise map of the lymphatic system. To do this, he used genetically modified mice whose lymphatic vessels glowed when illuminated by a particular wavelength of light. (The mice had been given a gene from a species of glowing jellyfish.)

When viewing the modified mice under the light, Aleksanteri Aspelund, a medical student in Alitalos laboratory, saw something unexpected: The heads of the mice glowed. At first, he suspected that there was something wrong with the animals, the lighting or the measuring equipment. But when Alitalo and Aspelund repeated the experiment, they got the same result. It seemed that the lymphatic vessels extended to the brain after all.

This was surprising, to say the least: In the 21st century, major findings involving basic human anatomy are rare. These days, you dont make discoveries like this, Alitalo says. But every once in a while in science, you stumble on something really unexpected. You open a new door, to a whole new world.

Alitalo is one of several scientists exploring this new world. Working independently, several other researchers, including Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester and Jonathan Kipnis of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, have also shown that lymphatic vessels extend into the brain.

The discovery is much more than a historical footnote. It has major implications for a wide variety of brain diseases, including Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, stroke and traumatic brain injury.

Researchers have identified two networks: the vessels that lead into and surround the brain, and those within the brain itself. The first is known as the lymphatic system for the brain, while the latter is called the glymphatic system. The g added to lymphatic refers to glia, the kind of neuron that makes up the lymphatic vessels in the brain. The glymphatic vessels carry cerebrospinal fluid and immune cells into the brain and remove cellular trash from it.

Alitalo, Nedergaard, Kipnis and others have found evidence that when the systems malfunction, the brain can become clogged with toxins and suffused with inflammatory immune cells. Over decades, this process may play a key role in Alzheimers disease, Huntingtons disease, Parkinsons disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses, research suggests. This is a revolutionary finding, Nedergaard says. This system plays a huge role in the health of the brain.

Nedergaard describes the glymphatic system as like a dishwasher for the brain. The brain is very active, she says, and so it produces a lot of junk that needs to be cleaned out.

In hindsight, she says, the system should have been noticed long ago. When the skull and head are dissected, the vessels are visible to the naked eye. But no one bothered to really look: Usually the brain is seen only as a bunch of nerve cells. We have come to think of the brain as a computer. And its not. Its a living organ.

Nedergaard and Helene Benveniste, a scientist at Yale University, have found evidence linking problems in the lymphatic and glymphatic systems to Alzheimers. In a study on mice, they showed that glymphatic dysfunction contributes to the buildup in the brain of amyloid beta, a protein that plays a key role in the disease.

Last year, Jeff Iliff, a neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, and several colleagues examined postmortem tissue from 79 human brains. They focused on aquaporin-4, a key protein in glymphatic vessels. In the brains of people with Alzheimers, this protein was jumbled; in those without the disease, the protein was well organized. This suggests that glymphatic breakdowns may play a role in the disease, Iliff says.

The vessels have also been implicated in autoimmune disease. Researchers knew that the immune system has limited access to the brain. But at the same time, the immune system kept tabs on the brains status; no one knew exactly how. Some researchers theorize that the glymphatic system could be the conduit and that in diseases such as multiple sclerosis where the bodys immune system attacks certain brain cells the communication may go awry.

The system may also play a role in symptoms of traumatic brain injury. Nedergaard has shown that in mice, the injuries can produce lasting damage to the glymphatic vessels, which are quite fragile. Mice are a good model, she says, because their glymphatic systems are very similar to humans. She and Iliff found that even months after being injured, the animals brains were still not clearing waste efficiently, leading to a buildup of toxic compounds, including amyloid beta. Nedergaard returns to the dishwasher analogy. Its like if you only use a third of the water when you turn on the machine, she says. You wont get clean dishes.

Recent research has also found evidence that the glymphatic system may extend into the eye. For decades, scientists have noted that many people with Alzheimers disease also have glaucoma, in which damage to the optic nerve causes vision loss. But they struggled to find a common mechanism; the glymphatic system may be the link.

In January, Belgian and Swiss researchers identified a rich network of glymphatic vessels within the optic nerve. The scientists also found that when these vessels malfunction, they seem to leave behind deposits of amyloid beta as well as other neurotoxins that damage the optic nerve.

And in March, Harvard University researchers reported that glymphatic flow is significantly decreased in the period just before a migraine. The intense pain in these headaches is caused largely by inflamed nerves in the tissue that surrounds the brain. Neuroscientists Rami Burstein and Aaron Schain, the lead authors, theorize that faulty clearance of molecular waste from the brain could trigger inflammation in these pain fibers.

One key to glymphatic performance seems to be sleep. Nedergaard has shown that at least in mice, the system processes twice as much fluid during sleep as it does during wakefulness. She and her colleagues focused on amyloid beta; they found that the lymphatic system removed much more of the protein when the animals were asleep than when they were awake. She suggests that over time, sleep dysfunction may contribute to Alzheimers and perhaps other brain illnesses. You only clean your brain when youre sleeping, she says. This is probably an important reason that we sleep. You need time off from consciousness to do the housekeeping.

Nedergaard and Benveniste have also found that sleep position is crucial. In an upright position someone who is sitting or standing waste is removed much less efficiently. Sleeping on your stomach is also not very effective; sleeping on your back is somewhat better, while lying on your side appears to produce the best results. The reason for these differences remains unclear, but Nedergaard suspects that it is probably related to the mechanical engineering of the lymphatic vessels and valves; she suggests that the healthiest approach may be to move periodically while you sleep.

Sleep is probably not the only way to improve glymphatic flow. For instance, a paper published in January by Chinese researchers reported that in mice, omega-3 fatty acidsimproved glymphatic functioning.

Benveniste is examining dexmedetomidine, an anesthetic that may have the ability to improve glymphatic flow. And in a small human study, other scientists have found that deep breathing significantly increases the glymphatic transport of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain.

Alitalo is experimenting with growth factors, compounds that can foster regrowth of the vessels in and around the brain. He has used this method to repair lymphatic vessels in pigs and is now testing the approach in the brains of mice that have a version of Alzheimers.

Right now there are no clinical therapies in this area, he says. But give it a little time. This has only just been discovered.

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Major finding in human anatomy has implications for many brain ... - The Denver Post

Here we were, worried about Dr. Stephanie Edwards (Jerrika Hinton), when it was Japril that Shonda Rhimes tried to kill off in the "Grey's Anatomy" Season 13 finale.

There were plenty of surprises in the finale, including some actual good news to go along with the bittersweet. And then there were those record scratch scenes between April Kepner (Sarah Drew), Maggie Pierce (Kelly McCreary), and Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams), including April telling Maggie she can tell that Maggie likes Jackson (!) and she can also tell that Jackson likes Maggie too (!!) ending with the suggestion that Maggie tell Jackson how she feels (!!!).

Didn't Japril make up during #JaprilTheSequel? And didn't Maggie just have a huge crush on Nathan Riggs (Martin Henderson), like, five minutes ago?

Some fans have been anticipating/dreading a Maggie/Jackson pairing since Maggie's mom suggested she let loose and make a mistake, and that episode was followed by some borderline intimate moments with Jackson. But others thought, nah, they wouldn't do that, it's just step-family members supporting each other.

There are some fans out there who support a Maggie/Jackson pairing, in part because they don't like April and would like to see Jackson with someone else. But several more viewers, at least the ones who tweet, are solidly and vocally against the idea.

Here's a taste of the reactions to Japril + Maggie:

Clearly, this is what Shonda and company wanted -- to get fans talking and speculating in the summer before Season 14. It's possible Jackson will be conflicted, or know he wants to be with April (aka the mother of his child) and this will be another short love triangle for Maggie. It would be nice if she could have her own romance without third-party complications, but that's not "Grey's" style.

"Grey's Anatomy" Season 14 will premiere this fall on ABC.

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'Grey's Anatomy' Fans 'Rebuke' That Jackson, Maggie, April Twist ... - Moviefone