How NOT to lose weight
QUESTION In the 19th century, ladies would eat a tapeworm to keep trim. Was it an effective form of weight control?
In VICTORIAN times it was common for women to swallow tapeworm eggs in the hope of shedding a few pounds.
One advert from the era proclaimed: ‘Eat! Eat! Eat! & Always Stay Thin! Fat, the enemy that is shortening your life, banished! How? With sanitized tapeworms (jar packed). Friends for a fair form.’ And it promised: ‘no diet. no baths. no exercise no danger!’
Very little of this was true. Most of these pills contained tapeworm eggs — a waste of time (in terms of making you thin) as the eggs are not infectious to humans. To be in any way effective, tapeworms must be ingested in the form of a cyst containing live larvae. Species other than a beef tapeworm,
Taenia saginata, can be extremely dangerous to humans.
When a tapeworm attaches itself to the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, it begins to feed off your body’s nutrients and grows by reproducing from chain-like segments called proglottids.
Eventually, proglottids break off and exit through faeces, where they crawl about in search of a new host.
It is debatable whether a tapeworm will make you slim anyway.
Diet expert Dr Michael Mosley swallowed three tapeworm cysts as part of a weight-loss experiment. He also swallowed a tiny camera and reported they had ‘latched onto the walls of my small intestine, looking very much at home’. But he reported very little effect on weight loss.
In another study, a researcher who had infected himself as part of an experiment ‘had the unpleasant experience of feeling a segment crawling down his trouser leg’.
Taenia saginata infection can make you ill. A tapeworm could attach itself to organs or tissues outside your digestive tract and cause stomach pains and fever.
Taenia solium larvae from raw pork may invade the central nervous system result- ing in neurocysticercosis, which can cause seizures and brain damage.
Mary Warren, Lincoln.
QUESTION U.S. billionaire Bill Gross is said to have applied principles from the game blackjack to build his hedge fund Pimco. What are these?
RECUPERATING after a car accident in 1966, Bill Gross picked up Ed Thorp’s book Beat The Dealer, which proved mathematically that the house advantage in blackjack could be overcome by card-counting.
Gross practised the technique and, to his surprise, it worked. He went to Las Vegas and turned $200 into $10,000.
He used these skills in investing. ‘Many of the same principles I learned from blackjack apply equally to equities as to bonds,’ he said.
‘First, spread your risk. Cards run hot and cold, so be prepared. Second, as far as possible know your risks. Quantify them, predict the consequences and prepare how to react.
‘If you don’t bet too much and if you stay at the table long enough, the odds are high that you are going to go home with some extra money in your pocket.’
Gross says the problem with gamblers is they are emotional, undisciplined and often desperate. The key is to never bet more than 2 per cent of your stake, a principle he has used at Pimco by not over-investing in a single stock.
Jo Bowdler, Halifax.
QUESTION When I was a child, my father would bring home what we called Zunzl cakes from London’s East End. How are they made?
THEY were not ‘Zunzl’ cakes, but Kunzle cakes, named after Christian Kunzle, a talented Swiss chef who came to Britain in the 1920s to work in the House of Commons. He went on to open a number of restaurants in and around Birmingham and established a factory in Five Ways, supplying cakes and pastries to his restaurants and later to shops.
Post-war children still drool over the memory of a Kunzle cake known as the Showboat — a thick chocolate shell containing cake, topped with butter cream and a small chocolate in the centre.
The Kunzle factory expanded after the war under Christian’s son, Ernest, and grandson, George. It moved to Garret’s Green in 1960 and by 1970 employed 700 people. The firm ended up in the hands of Lyons in 1968.
Alan Beith, Sutton Coldfield, W. Mids.
QUESTION Has a circle always had 360 degrees?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, during the French Revolution, the metric system was used to quantify just about everything to base 10.
It was proposed a circle be subdivided into 400 units or grads rather than 360 degrees. They were subdivided, so 1/100th of a grad was known as a centigrad. But this clashed with the centigrade scale of temperature, subsequently renamed Celsius (after the scientist Anders Celsius).
My first experience of using the grad as a surveyor happened when using a borrowed theodolite (a precision intrument for measuring angles). not knowing it measured in grads, I was surprised to find I had measured an angle greater than 360 degrees.
As scientific calculators became more sophisticated, the better ones offered trigonometric calculations that were switchable between degrees and grads.
Sometimes I had not noticed I’d processed my results in grads and so obtained horrendous results.
The death-knell for the grad was the increasing sophistication and cost of modern surveying instruments, meaning it was no longer economically viable to produce expensive equipment utilising different measurement systems.