Want some acid? Bad trip on palmitic...

Well, it's Thursday night, only another 20 hours to go until my next doner kebab. Our Friday night habit has become something of a ritual and Glasgow is graced with the most enormous choice of doner shops, certainly compared to Newbury. But the quality is a little suspect on occasions. We have had two kebabs where the grease left in the bottom of the container HAS NOT SOLIDIFIED.

This is worrying and I certainly do not revisit those particluar shops. The Anniesland shop by the railway station has turned in to this category. A real doner kebab should leave solid white fat in its container and a coating of thick grease on your lips. This is mutton fat, predominantly stearic and palmitic acids. Real saturated fat is hard when cooled. Runny stuff makes me think it's adulterated with soy oil or sunflower oil... No thank you! Gimme the hard stuff.

Anyone with the sort of doner habit I have is well aware of the catastrophic effects of palmitic acid on appetite control. You know what it's like. You go in to a kebab pusher's den, I mean shop, for just "two small doners, no bread, no salad, no sauce", eliciting the ritual response: "What, just the meat?" in a heavy Glaswiegan accent. "Aye, that's right" you confirm, usually with a double thumbs up (I'm learning the lingo, does it show? I haven't dared add "laddie" to this intonation, yet. I value my teeth). Use the same shop twice and you become well known (infamous?). You've promised yourself that you're only going to eat one portion and your wife intends to share the other with your toddler son.

Anyhoo. Half a pound of doner meat down and you are now just ravenous. You fight the hunger off for another 10 minutes, but you know you are on to a looser. You blow another £3.20 on a second portion. Sitting in Mothercare's car park, finishing your second kebab, you promise yourself that now you will just drive home and stop eating, and you actually turn on the ignition before the palmitic acid driven hunger breaks your will like a matchstick and you go back for a third portion. This time you don't leave the shop and wolf down your fourth portion, an extra large one, which gets you up to well over the two pounds of meat mark, and you need more. After that it's a race within the family to spent the week's food budget on Friday night doner kebabs. With five or six pounds of meat eaten you hopefully run out of money and the palmitic acid pusher mercilessly and mercifully kicks you out on the street, half a sheep in your stomach and ravenous from the palmitic acid flooding your brain. That hunger is going to go on for days and you already are aware that there is no money until the next giro comes through...


WHAT? You don't recognise the scenario? Well that must just be your ignorance of this study and this newspaper article summarising it.

I have to say I quite like what I have seen of the study. It's really very weird, in that it actually gives you the exact diets used, in full. That's a bl**dy first in recent "fat bashing" studies. It is also published in a free access journal. This too is very good. It has pretty good control groups etc. I will actually read it in full some time but, at the moment, I just have to comment that it is utterly, totally and completely divorced from my experience of reality. Does anyone else develop driving hunger from a single exposure to lamb fat (or butter, as in the study)? That goes on for days?

Which planet do these rats and mice live on? Possibly the same one as the researchers, ie not the Earth!

Peter

EDIT: Thanks for the heads up Mark