Pulse Beat

Prof Dr BM Hegde 21 November 2016

Skipping Dinner Is Healthy, Helps Reduce Weight

Jains in India do not eat after sundown. Animal studies did show that time-restricted feeding did help reduce body weight and make the animal healthier. Now, for the first time, human studies performed carefully did show that eating the last meal very early (in the study, they finished the last meal at 2pm) will reduce weight in the obese without any reduction in total calorie intake!

I followed this principle of the Jains some years ago and have found that my weight does not go up even if I overeat, as long as I give a longish gap after the last meal of the day and the following day’s breakfast.

Although I do not know how this works, I think, one of the possible hypotheses is that you do intermittent fasting daily! Fasting is good for health; but periodic fasting, which had been studied for its health benefits, I feel, ranks lower than daily fasting by giving a big gap after the day’s last meal.

We can learn a lot from our ancient habits but we need to research, to check their authenticity. Modernity is not getting information from the West and calling it the best, as most of us in India are but RNIs (resident non-Indians)! Modernity in every culture should come from its antiquity.

Sexual Orgasm and Its Science

Adam Safron, PhD, of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston ( IL, USA), notes that the majority of research relating to the orgasm has focused on its evolutionary functions.

“The idea that sexual experiences can be like trance states is, in some ways, ancient. Turns out this idea is supported by modern understandings of science. In theory, this could change the way people view their sexuality. Sex is a source of pleasurable sensations and emotional connection, but beyond that, it’s actually an altered state of consciousness,” feels Adam.

In addition, his research found that the way the brain reacts to rhythmic sexual stimulation is comparable to the way it responds to rhythmic music and dance. He wasn’t expecting to find that sexual activity was so similar to music and dance, not just in the nature of the experiences, but also in that evolutionarily, rhythm-keeping ability may serve as a test of fitness for potential mates.

Rhythmic sexual stimulation—if intense enough and if it lasts long enough—can boost neural oscillations at correlating frequencies, a process called “neural entrainment-sexual trance.”

Rock Music and Human Health

I had a bitter experience once in Delhi. I was to talk on the present state of education in India and, in that context, I had mentioned Allan Bloom’s book Closing of the American Mind. The chair of the meeting was Dr Karan Singh who got up to condemn me in no uncertain terms as he said that “he enjoys rock music and thus it cannot be bad!” A good example of a really closed mind!

This book is a classic, written by a professor of social philosophy at the University of Chicago. He refers in that book to his research which showed that rock music of the 1960s was the cause of a wave of suicides and divorce in the USA of the 1990s onwards. Rock is an African word that signifies sexual intercourse, the rhythm of both being one and the same. He gives graphic details of how that destroyed the emotional bondage in marriage, which should be the bedrock of a happy marriage, and might even have led to suicide in later life! In retrospect, that makes good sense with the new findings of the science of sexual orgasm.

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