Hypothesis + Experiment + Conclusion = Science

[cdave]

1) Hypothesis: You should chew your food thirty times before swallowing.
Experiment:
Split a bottle of sink de-clogger between 4 glasses, and cut a steak into bite sized chunks and split between 4 bags.
i) Empty 1 bag into a glass.
ii) Hit 1 bag with a tenderiser 10 times before emptying it into a glass.
iii) Hit 1 bag with a tenderiser 30 times before emptying it into a glass.
vi) Hit 1 bag with a tenderiser 50 times before emptying it into a glass.
After 4 hours sieve and weigh the remaining solids.
Expected Results:
i) Lots left.
ii) Some left.
iii) Little left.
iv) Not too different from iii)

2) Hypothesis: People can't divine for metal.
Experiment:
Stolen from Dawkins.
Experimenter 1 places a metal object under a small fraction of a number of buckets, records this, and leaves.
Experimenter 2, without meeting Experimenter 1 leads the diviner into the room, and lets them test each bucket with divining sticks, and records the result.
The experimenters results are compared.
Expected results:
The number of buckets whose contents are correctly identified is not significantly higher than would be expected if the selection was at random (this number to be determined before the experiment starts).

[Poll #1486717]

Comments

[andrewducker]

Your expected results for (2) don't line up with your hypothesis...

[cdave]

Thanks. I'd edited the hypothesis, and forgot to change the expected results.

(Aside, I was taught to divine for metal, but don't believe it's possible)

[andrewducker]

You fail because you do not believe.

(No, I don't mean that)

[cdave]

It was a long time ago, but I remember being quite good despite that.

I also won a raffle at the weekend when I bought a ticket with my lucky number on it.

I'm off to nail am upside down horseshoe to a black cat.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what is being tested in experiment 1 - is the idea that chewing 30 times allows the food to be digested faster, or that you are less likely to choke on it? And why is it beneficial that your food is digested faster?

If you're trying to simulate the digestive juices of the stomach I might be able to provide something a bit more like it than sink de-clogger.

[cdave]

I didn't make up the hypothesis. It's a well known clichéd bit of advice.

I thought food only stays in the stomach for a certain amount of time, after that it goes into the intestines for the goodness to start being sucked out of it. If anything is left solid at that stage it's missing out on time to provide anything useful. If anything is still left solid at the end of that stage you've been eating sweetcorn you get nothing from it.

And something more like real juices might be nice. Thanks! I may get back to you.

Solids in the stomach

[flinx.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who works on a gastric pathogen in a GI lab... yes and no.

The retention of a particular structure (the afore-deleted sweetcorn being a perfect example) after both mastication and gastric processing doesn't mean that it's not of any further nutritional benefit. Depending on what microflora you have in your lower GI tract, you may be extracting more nutrients as the bacteria take a whack at it, especially through the large intestine.

And re: a more digestive-juice-like mixture, can you purchase powdered meat tenderizer any more? That's usually a mixture of digestive enzymes (papain, calpain, collagenase) purified up from sundry sources (papaya, pineapple, some bacteria, some intestines, and so on).

Hrmm, there's an interesting idea for a public experiment. Take some of the more exotic fruits, juice them fresh, and test them for protease/collagenase abilities.

Re: Solids in the stomach

[cdave]

So. Many. Factors!

Cheers. That's actually quite interesting. I knew pineapple stopped jelly setting, but didn't realise it had other fun properties too.

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

The "thirty times" bit dates from a time when food was a lot less processed than today, and had a lot less fat in it.

[cdave]

Good point. I ought to try it with steak and against chicken nuggets too.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

What if the beneficial effect of chewing a lot is to get lots of saliva in contact with a large area of steak? Then the tenderizer mallet isn't a fair test, because it only simulates chewing with a very dry mouth. In the spirit of using household cleaning materials to simulate human digestion, you could spray enzymatic stain remover on 2cm, 1cm, and 0.5cm cubes of steak and test their subsequent attack by the acid. (if the effect of stain remover sprays is similar to the effect of saliva)

Aren't there marinade enzymes one can buy? You could use those and vinegar, and still have something edible after the experiment. The biologist Steven Vogel in, I think, Life's Devices ends a discussion of the mechanical properties of collagen with a complete recipe for beef heart vindaloo.

[cdave]

There's only one way to test that.

Make a grid of volume / type of liquid against number of simulated chews

HIT MORE THINGS WITH A HAMMER!

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

If you ever do the food experiment, just don't do it in front of me. I have a phobia about spit.

[cpt-buggernuts.livejournal.com]

Oh! Oh! I have the same thing. Does the idea of chewing gum make you want to vomit, too? Because if so I think we need to team up and, um... fight gob?

Yeah. So, there's actually no way in which this information benefits either of us but I got over-excited.

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I forget and take a piece of gum that is offered to me and then after half an hour realise I stuff in my mouth and NOWHERE TO GO WITH IT.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Where was the spit in the food experiment?

(er, perhaps that sentence would read better as, where in the food experiment was the spit?)

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

Just skim reading it made me gag. Writing this made me gag.

Phobia is not rational.