2018-07-22 at 7:42 PM UTC
[…]But as he and his team reviewed the anonymous data of more than 1,000 volunteers (a cohort that included the psychiatric care patients and a control group of people recruited from nearby health care centers and colleges with no diagnosis of mental illness), a strange pattern began popping up among people diagnosed with mania, a state of hyper excitement, arousal, and delusion frequently followed by periods of severe depression in people who have bipolar disorder. Compared to the control group, people with a manic episode reported eating more cured meat. Overall, they found that people with a recent history of eating cured meat were three times more likely to be hospitalized for mania, even after adjusting for factors like age or socioeconomic status. The same pattern couldn’t be seen with any other type of food eaten.
“This is not what we were looking for,” Yolken told Gizmodo. “It came as something of an unexpected finding.”
Hoping to confirm that it was the jerky at fault, Yolken reached out to other researchers and started experimenting with rats. Because jerky and similar products are cured using nitrate salts, they theorized that nitrates might be the key driver of a mania effect.
They first fed rats 14 grams of store-bought jerky every other day (the rat equivalent of one snack a day in humans) and compared them to a control group. The jerky-fed rats began showing symptoms of hyperactivity and poor sleep within two weeks, while the control group didn’t. Next, they fed specially made dried meat without nitrates to another group of rats, finding these rats didn’t develop any symptoms. And lastly, they gave rats a typical rat feed loaded with nitrates, and found the same pattern.
https://gizmodo.com/study-eating-beef-jerky-might-be-linked-to-manic-episo-1827689271
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this
post didn't die in a fire!
