domenica 15 marzo 2009

experiments about honey crystallization

I just found out that fructose when heated up becomes the stable form, glucose.. now honey contains: 20% water, 40% glucose and 40% fructose (of course these values depend of the honey type). It turns out that fructose is more soluble than glucose so we expect the crystals on the bottom of the honey glass to be glucose.

Then I propose two experiments to prove that:
1) Take honeys which contain more glucose than others: do they crystallize sooner and faster?
2) It is known that glucose is more stable than fructose: therefore if you take honey, heat it (according to this, the temperature of a hot coffee, say 60 Celsius degrees, should suffice.. ) and let it cool down, probably the molecules of fructose will become glucose, so we expect much higher crystallization rate after heating!

sugar and rabbits

"we should all eat less sugars, and prefer fructose to glucose" ..is this true or false?
http://www.medbio.info/
Trying to figure it out I found out this nice website, full of many scientific explanations about the sugar in our alimentation (since obesity comes mainly from sugar excess in the diet, and on the other hand, the brain needs a lot of energy, available easily through sugar, one may be interested to find some equilibrium between mental lucidity and fatness..)

Ok enough introductions.. I will comment here the first article that I read from that website.

SUMMARY:

It deals about what the body does, when no sugar is available. In this case there are only two main energy sources: fat and proteins. The article makes a very interesting observation, which leads to fat as the best substitute:
-proteins are tranbsformable in energy only through the liver
-the reactions needed for that require oxygen
-the liver does recieve most of its oxygen through the portal vein, which has a low concentration of oxygen

based on the above considerations, one can make a quantitative prediction of the energy producable by the liver through protein burning: about 1600 kcal.

What about fat? this can be transformed in energy directly in the cells, no need of the liver for that. Therefore there is no limitation on the energy producable through that process. Easy, isn't it?

Then why did I speak about rabbits in the title? ..that's because of a nice example given there, about this population eating only rabbits.. animals with little fat and a lot of proteins in their meat!! People were eating a lot of rabbits, but still they were hungry! Of course they did not starve (does that confirm the 1600 Kcal estimate?), but that phenomenon was called "rabbit starving".
On the other side, there are other populations eating a lot of fat ("saturated" fat is more energetic, it seems..[this will be discussed elsewhere])..and they had no problems. QED

nazis, runes and Che Guevara

I discovered an interesting fact today.. I was looking up the wikipedia page about runes.. near the end of that loong article, there was a section about the use of a runic alphabet in nazist Germany ..of course everybody knows that the Swastika is a symbol used by northern people to represent the sun; but I didn't know that the symbol of SS is also composed of 2 runes.. actually that runes are the SIG RUNES, similar to our current "S" and called the "sig" rune. This rune had also (like all runes) a magical meaning: it was the rune of Victory.

And here comes the point of this post. "Sieg heil" is the well-known nazi greeting, used by the propaganda of the time as one of its slogans.. and that actually means "hail victory"-- The same as "hasta la victoria"!!! very strange, huh?