@Mitch Chocolate's what's in my pantry! The only time I've been able to drink any of it was when I had COVID and couldn't taste it. I don't know why it tastes so bad when milkshakes taste great and are also high calorie

I've always been very skinny so it would have been good if I liked Ensure but alas no

@Laurel Oh... hm... I suppose Ensure is one of those 'prescribable' thins that can be put on insurance.

So maybe chocolate milkshakes would be sufficient swappables?

I recommend Frosties from Wendy's.

And dipping your french fries in it.

I do have frosty tags. I love just buying fries and getting two small frosties for free

weight gain and loss are weight dependent

The three main food groups: sugar, fried potatoes, and extra sugar

@Laurel If it don't taste good then it ain't gonna do what it's supposed to be for.

I'm addicted to hot chocolate, the kind which you make by heating milk, then adding some cocoa powder, then heating it all again, and finally sprinkling some cinnamon on top.

which is I presume weight maintenance (for say people who can't chew because of jaw surgery, or older people who can't tolerate solids)

I feel myself bad after bingeing on hot chocolate. Tiredness increases.

> a biotech company says implants of lab-made neurons introduced into the brains of 12 people with Parkinson’s disease appear to be safe and may have reduced symptoms for some of them. technologyreview.com/2023/08/31/1078728/…

There's also the similar Pedialyte for people with problems at the other end... it's supposed to maintain electrolytes when you have too much diarrhea.

but it always seems to have the very slightest of off-tastes that could easily put off someone who absolutely needs it (like maybe dysentery or cholera)

Cocoa powder has zero sugar.

ANd it's prescribable.

But you can get just as good with Gatorade.

or any kind of sports drink.

@CowperKettle That's awesome. Probably the result of stem cells?

then it must be the milk

I've finally made some progress with gaining weight actually. But it seems to be entirely because I'm exercising. No change to my diet has had any effect (and everyone hates me as a result :p)

@Mitch Yes, amazing. I hope it's not just hype.

@CowperKettle So you make yours with no sugar? just milk and cocoa powder?

@Laurel Gaining weight is easy. Pastry.

@Mitch Yes, and some cinnamon.

@CowperKettle Most things are very thin incremental slices.

or even if they are revolutionary, making it repeatable at scale can be a difficult engineering task that takes a long time to develop.

If some system could be devised to supply neural growth factors into brains of people with schizophrenia, that will be a revolution.

Is that the main difficulty with schizophrenia, neural... uh... what's the opposite of growth?

@Mitch Deficiency of neural contacts, at least in some forms of it.

I thought that was alcoholism or ... nope not alzheimer's, that's plaque of some kind

@CowperKettle But that's different than the neuron size, I'd think.

@Mitch Yes; some patients with SZ have reduced numbers of the synaptic density marker SV2A

But it's all preliminary.

SZ is many diseases.

Synaptic density marker SV2A is reduced in schizophrenia patients and unaffected by antipsychotics in rats

Antipsychotics don't solve the negative symptoms, because they don't help with neural plasticity, most likely they only make it worse.

@CowperKettle ok...looking at the press release: 1) yes, stem cells, 2) dopamine creating cells specifically for Parkinsons 3) it's just -extra- cells connecting to existing ones, not helping grow ones in place or increase existing ones size.

Does schizophrenia respond to dopamine?

@Mitch Yes, with increased hallucinations and delusions :)

@CowperKettle Oh. so maybe too much of a good thing

Sudden social exclusion, if I recall correctly, increases dopamine in the brain. Probably one of the triggers of psychosis.

relatedly, if there's ever a paywall for a website you want to look at, prepend the URL with 'https://12ft.io/' and it should give you the whole article to read.

It worked for MIT Tech Review

Some sites have put in measures to stop things like '12 foot wall' (that site), but most have not.

In schizophrenia, the protein reelin, which promotes neural plasticity, is decreased, but these are postmortem findings, hard to disentangle from drug action. However, making rats/mice "depressed" by constantly stressing them out or injecting with corticoids -> and then suddenly adding some reelin into their brains - makes their depression suddenly vanish, as fast as it vanished upon ketamine injection. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37550058

@CowperKettle Oh like solitary confinement in prison?

@Mitch Oh, probably yes

It's 04:25 am, I'll go to sleep some more. CYA!

later!

@CowperKettle I already eat whatever I want but it doesn't make me gain weight

@Laurel There have actually been so-called "overfeeding" experiments where they try to give normal-weight people tons of extra calories to make them gain weight. It turns out that this is incredibly difficult; rapid weight gain (through overfeeding) is just as difficult as rapid weight loss (through dieting).

@Laurel Look up The Vermont Prison Experiment

@Cerberus oh, all sorts. Going crazy on meat is one of the oldest ones, for example. People used to and still think many green and non-green things are some miracle cures for anything from skin rashes to cancer, so you encounter people that have been including, I dunno, beets in their meals for the past 20 years because that one time they had a flu before having beets and no flu after

Something interesting: long-term use of Benadryl (diphenhydramine) is known to cause weight gain. I wonder if you could intentionally use it to help gain weight. Probably the effect size is too small.

You have people that swear by table salt and that it has surely prevented them from getting cancer or HIV or whatever

@alphabet well if you wanna be half-asleep all the time and gain weight try mirtazapine instead

@Laurel You get it with mixed sushi plates. Variety, you know.

I gained at least two pounds when I was on vacation and that was just 5–6 days (depending on whether being stuck in Miami overnight counts as vacation)

@Robusto I wish I could afford to eat sushi every day lol. I love sushi. I was getting it frozen but that was also kinda expensive compared with the other stuff I eat

@M.A.R. I thought that was what quetiapine was for.

@Mitch Nice suit.

@M.A.R. Hmm doesn't sound too harmful?

@Laurel It is definitely expensive, especially for the genuine stuff made by Japanese chefs. My son took me to lunch in LA last month and the bill came to $235 (not including tip). That's almost as much as we spend on groceries for the week, normally.

With sushi, each piece is a separate little event.

@Cerberus oh just the usual problems. Too much red meat is gonna disrupt the lipid balances, induce hyperuricemia or even gout, things like that. People who can't have a meal without a salt shaker at arm's reach develop high blood pressures way more often.

@M.A.R. Ah, interesting.

@M.A.R. Even worse, it could turn you into Jordan Peterson

Rural people that swear by milk are likely to consume unpasteurized milk, and are way more likely to come down with brucellosis

@M.A.R. How dare you question the health benefits of a high-milk diet

@alphabet oh yeah I was always ambivalent about the guy until I heard about that meat diet BS.