geekosystem

If you're hard-pressed for things to be thankful for today, may we offer a humble suggestion? Be glad you're not a Viking, because those folks had to eat a whole lot of tough, blubbery seal meat -- up to 80% of their regular calorie intake -- to survive. If anyone was planning on making their first million marketing The Viking Diet Plan...it might be time to let that dream die, because the Viking diet was apparently vile.

17-year-old Stacey Irvine of Castle Vale, Birmingham was living the dream until just recently; she'd been subsisting on a diet primarily composed of McDonald's chicken nuggets, sometimes -- but rarely -- straying from the staple for some KFC or a piece of toast. Just recently, however, it all caught up to her when she had trouble breathing and collapsed. She was taken to the hospital where doctors found swollen blood vessels in her tongue and the prescense of anaemia and promptly loaded her up with vitamins. Considering she has had neither fruit nor vegetable -- outside of ketchup, maybe -- in 15 years, it's a small miracle she didn't also have scurvy.

We've all heard the reasons why dieting can be unhealthy. Most nutritionists will tell you that eating the right food in the right quantity is far more beneficial for health than going on some fad diet, but researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have a new reason why you shouldn't diet. Dieting causes the brain to eat itself. Om, nom, nom.

Published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the researchers found that in mice, neurons in the hypothalamus start to eat their own organelles (interior parts of a cell) and proteins when the animals are deprived of food. Now, the body cannibalizing itself isn't something new, when the body is starving cells will start consuming pieces of themselves in a process known as autophagy, but until now, it was believed that the brain was resistant to this process.