We're talking of course about tryptophan, the most silent of killers. Standing in line at Bank of America, where they've recently set up flat screen televisions to counterbalance the long lines of people waiting to hear about their housing loans being eaten by giant sandworms, i overheard the first of what will surely be an endless slew of threat embellishments. As a news segment ended, we saw the stereotypical anchorwoman making banter with her weatherlady, wishing her good luck on Thanksgiving in coping with the scariest sounding amino acid on the planet. Though i don't recall it word for word, it went something along the lines of
"be careful getting behind the wheel on thursday night after all that tryptophan..."
Tryptophan. It's an amino acid, and an essential protein builder in the human diet. There are high levels of it in chocolate, bananas, milk, yogurt, eggs, fish, poultry, red meat, spirulina, and peanuts. So for the jury still out on whether or not it's the turkey that's going to make you fall asleep on the drive home from aunt mildred's and plunge your car full of children off an overpass and NOT the ten corona's you drink watching the Detroit Lions get pummeled like a demented tether ball, you've got a few things mixed up. In fact, it's overstatements on small scientific findings like this that make me think we're better off as a christian fundamentalist society. Science is way more scary than useful to the general public, and so are all the amino acids, for that matter. Allow me to be the first to suggest we place all amino acids on the FDA-prohibited list, and protect American families from this atrocity this Thanksgiving. Drive safe everyone, and avoid the benadryl green beans.
2 comments:
I have benadryl green beans most every night.
"Science is way more scary than useful to the general public, and so are all the amino acids, for that matter."
see, for example, social darwinism, eugenics, and this asshole: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy
Post a Comment