Food featured prominently at the annual Ig Nobel awards, which celebrate research that makes people laugh – and then makes them think – and which took place in the US last week.
The winners were handed their awards by bona fide Nobel laureates, and showered with paper planes at the ceremony at Boston University, reports The Guardian.
Scientists, doctors and public health officials have long battled to solve the obesity crisis, and among the event’s top 10 winners were researchers who had devised a radical new approach: slashing people’s calorie intake by feeding them Teflon.
The left-field proposal was inspired by zero calorie drinks and envisaged food manufacturers blending powdered polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) into their products in the hope it would sate people’s hunger before quietly sliding out.
Other researchers honoured on the night had discovered that alcohol, in small doses at least, boosted people’s foreign language skills; that cows disguised as zebras suffered fewer insect bites, and that people became more narcissistic after being told they were more intelligent than most, even when they weren’t.
“I feel honoured,” said Dr Rotem Naftalovich at Rutgers University in New Jersey, whose work on the Teflon diet landed the chemistry prize.
After discussing the idea for a zero calorie filler with his brother David, the pair hit on Teflon as their favoured substance.
Making their case in Obesity Technology, the researchers explained how PTFE could make up a quarter of our food by volume. But while Naftalovich made – and ate – chocolate bars containing Teflon, the US Food and Drug Administration was cool on the idea.
“I don’t think they wanted to review it because it was such a wonky idea,” Natfalovich said.
The peace prize went to a German, Dutch and British team who showed that a shot of vodka improved people’s foreign language skills. “A small sip seemed to boost confidence without making the words fall apart,” said Dr Fritz Renner, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg.
But the improvement wasn’t huge. “It’s not as if people were transformed into perfect Dutch speakers after a single drink,” added Professor Matt Field, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield who worked on the study.
If communication with foreigners improved with alcohol, flying did not. The aviation prize went to researchers who plied Egyptian fruit bats with ethanol. The bats became slow and their echolocation faltered, much as speech becomes slurred in the inebriated. Bats that binged on fermented fruit may be “at higher risk of colliding with obstacles”, the team concluded.
An exploration into the impact of diet on breast milk flavour won the paediatric prize for showing that babies suckled for longer after their mothers ate garlic. A largely Italian team won the physics prize for elucidating a phase transition in pasta dish cacio e pepe that leads to unpleasant clumping.
Another group discovered that, even when given a choice, rainbow lizards in Togo had an extreme preference for “four cheeses” pizzas, earning them the nutrition prize.
The psychology prize went to work that found people who were told they had above average intelligence believed it and were prone to bragging.
Dr Tomoki Kojima at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation in Japan won the biology prize. His team showed that cows suffered fewer fly bites when painted with black stripes. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought I was dreaming.”
The Ig Nobel prizes are not to be confused with the rather more prestigious, and lucrative, Nobel prizes that will be handed out in Scandinavia next month.
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