Daily diced parrot could help you slim

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 September

Anything in common with 'Four cups a day can leave women less depressed, says study' (from AOL's sign-in page)?

Maybe just that claims can be made without someone knowing or giving the basis for the assertion, and sometimes that is the experimenter(s): some people will know of the biology paper, written by the editor of the journal in which it was published, that went through the mathematics / physics of flight in relation to the bumblebee.

I read the paper at the time, and its (albeit unhappy) conclusion was that it seemed to have proved that the bumblebee could not fly.

Of course, though, it can (in a fashion) - the biologist had to revisit his calculations, and, having found that a factor, effect, coefficient or variable had been overlooked. I did not see what was written then, but the bumblebee - a great relief to it, I'm sure - was authorized to fly again.


Turning to these 50,000 nurses, of whom, presumably, 25,000 did not drink coffee at all, unless there was a whole range of amounts of coffee drunk on average by the coffee-drinking nurses, plus the ones who stuck to tea (or smoothies).

What sort of coffee?

* Filter coffee?

* Instant?

* A skinny decaffeinated cappuccino bought in from a nearby Starbucks®**?

* Turkish coffee (with two sugars)?

* A double espresso from a filling-station with a self-service machine?


If the reports that I have seen mean anything, it must have been coffee with caffeine, because someone is suggesting (although there is actually caffeine in tea) that it might be what makes those nurses experience (or report) depression less: that person may only have skimmed through the report, and I have just seen and heard the headline, when I need to get to read the report...


In the meantime, isn't there something special about nurses and their life-style? - and I don't mean the Carry on Nurse or pornographic stereotype. It's not unusual for them to work double-shifts (e.g. morning and afternoon, night and morning), and could do two of those with very little time in-between, such as arriving for a shift at 7.00 a.m., not finishing till 10.00 p.m., and having to do the same the following day.

Not a typical working-life, unless that has been adjusted for that factor, so, unless something was done to compensate, not the best sample, even though the size is a good one. What would the effect on influences (social, emotional, economic, personality, predisposition, prior experience of depression, etc.) be of such a lifestyle? - of the working life of a nurse anyway, with all that they are exposed to socially, economically, etc., in their actual work?

And coffee? People who do not drink coffee drink something else for al sorts of reason, and those who do drink it, drink it for all sorts of reason, but often to give themselves a kick or a boost. Could wanting a kick or a boost say more about those who drink coffee than anything else? And what about nurses who smoke? Nurses who smoke and who drink coffee, nurses who don't smoke, but drink coffee, nurses who don't drink coffee, but who smoke?


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here


** Which Garrison Keillor, in his novel Love Me, described that the narrator's partner and he did when they were 'slumming it' - and I tend to agree with that analysis.