From ABC News:
Angelo Tremblay [a professor at Laval University] noticed something odd every time he worked up a grant application for his research program in a Quebec university. He had a craving for chocolate chip cookies.
Professor Tremblay wondered if this meant that thinking makes you fat — which is curious, because it implies that the rest of his job didn’t involve thinking. Or at least not much of it. Much more likely is that anxiety makes you crave pleasure-producing food (such as chocolate-chip cookies) to dull the pain; there is a term for it, emotional eating. Grant writing is anxiety-producing, of course: You worry about not getting the grant. It would be un-male to acknowledge such fears, of course, but Professor Tremblay goes surprisingly far in this lack of acknowledgment: He starts a research program to test the idea that thinking alone causes us to eat more. That the program produces results that he takes to support his idea makes me want to write a book: How to Lie With Experimental Design. Its predecessor, How to Lie with Statistics, was a big success.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
From ABC News:
Professor Tremblay wondered if this meant that thinking makes you fat — which is curious, because it implies that the rest of his job didn’t involve thinking. Or at least not much of it. Much more likely is that anxiety makes you crave pleasure-producing food (such as chocolate-chip cookies) to dull the pain; there is a term for it, emotional eating. Grant writing is anxiety-producing, of course: You worry about not getting the grant. It would be un-male to acknowledge such fears, of course, but Professor Tremblay goes surprisingly far in this lack of acknowledgment: He starts a research program to test the idea that thinking alone causes us to eat more. That the program produces results that he takes to support his idea makes me want to write a book: How to Lie With Experimental Design. Its predecessor, How to Lie with Statistics, was a big success.
Thanks to Dave Lull.