I don’t get this thread at all:
The guy takes a million years and conducts a bunch of contrived, unnecessary experiments to prove something that was never in dispute. We crave foods that have the nutrients our bodies need. Well, duh. Did anybody somehow manage not to notice?
Klara’s permanent teeth are coming in, so I’m boiling eggs for her all day. She needs calcium, so I’m boiling eggs, steaming broccoli and slicing cheese like a maniac because she keeps asking. I’d much rather make her some mashed potatoes because the stench of boiled eggs is getting to me but it’s a no-go. The phrase “are there any more eggs, mommy?” is giving me heart palpitations.
I’m low on vitamin C (and who isn’t after an endless winter like this one?), so I’m eating oranges by the sackful and fantasizing about orange juice which I normally have no interest in. I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s an overpowering craving.
And I’m sure that once I board the airplane on May 9, I’ll experience an uncontrollable desire for tomato juice that I never notice otherwise.
In kids, nutritional wisdom is really pronounced because they haven’t had a chance to mess up their healthy instincts. Klara once overate cake at a birthday party and then came home and ate nothing but raw cauliflower for two days.
So I’m not sure why all this is delivered as some sort of a revelation. Huge scientific breakthrough! If you close your eyes, it’s possible you might not see what’s in front of you! Here are 15 studies proving it!
Clarissa's Blog 
MODERATELY OFF-TOPIC, ABOUT ANOTHER QUIZ:
Here’s a quiz for your readers, Clarissa:
Several decades ago, a major psychological study was conducted to ask men of all ages, from legally adult teenagers to ancient men in their 90’s, what were the most vivid, never-fading memories of their lives — Were those memories about their struggle to manhood, or about their first loves, or their last, and their families, their precious wives and children, including the expected or untimely loss of loved ones? Or about their greatest personal or professional successes, or most humiliating personal/professional failures and loses in life?
For a large subset of American men, one growing smaller every year, the answer was always the same — and always surprising — to people who hadn’t shared their experience.
Can you guess what their most vivid memories were?
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I’m hoping sex but that would make them women. But these are men, so probably war.
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Nope, can’t guess but curious what these memories will likely be for my growing sons.
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“most vivid memories ”
I’m guessing something with the military or cars (both retreating experiences).
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I’m curious about the answer.
Things that younger men may not have experienced, but might be vividly remembered by the older set…
Going by what my Dad talks about…
1) Unsupervised play time. I feel like everything from bicycling to the grocery store to sandlot sports to making your own gunpowder and blowing stuff up in vacant lots used to be a lot more common than it is currently.
2) Hitchhiking. Dad certainly has lots of vivid hitchhiking stories. People don’t do that so much anymore. And if anything it was more dangerous in the 70s than it is now. But also far fewer people willing to give you a ride now.
3) Asking a girl out? I do feel like Tinder et al makes this a far less memorable experience than it used to be.
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The discussion ended up being a lot more interesting than the question. 🙂
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Clarissa’s suggestion of war is good, but from what I’ve been reading lately, people’s strongest memories are from early adolescence. Because it’s something fewer men are doing, my guess is the first time hunting with a gun.
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At first I was thinking it might be something we don’t culturally associate with masculinity since you seem to indicate the result surprised many people. So I was thinking something like wedding day or first time they saw their wives.
But upon rereading your post it seems like it’s something that no longer occurs? And the only powerful experience that happens to men that no longer occurs that I can think of is…..getting drafted? (It was certainly a powerful memory for my father.)
Other candidates: first day of school.or first day of work. Both still occur but cultural meanings have shifted.
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I’m convinced it’s WWII. The people who fought in it are dying, so it’s a dwindling group.
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“WWII”
For my mother it was probably the Great Depression (then WWII) for my father probably WWII and (then Korea).
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It is such a funny thing with kids: mine go through phases where they will eat 10 oranges a day, and then next thing you know, oranges are okay but nobody wants more than a slice. Toddler will sometimes eat 4 bananas a day, and other times does not like bananas. Similar things happen with eggs, seaweed, spinach…
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My favorite is when I cook her favorite food and she announces with great indignation, “mommy, don’t you know that I don’t eat this??” Of course, I don’t know because she used to love it until about 3 seconds ago. It also happens at the worst possible moment, when I have nothing else she’d eat in the house and no opportunity to shop for something else.
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DRUMROLL…HERE’S THE ANSWER:
For men who’ve been to war — ANY war — where they were in combat situations and had to kill other men or be killed, those memories are the most vivid of their lives. The study found this to be a consistent trait in veterans, even elderly men whose combat experience had occurred fifty years earlier, and who had led full, eventful lives since then.
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Oh no! It was an utterly predictable answer. I thought that it was supposed to be something surprising. I completely overthought this. Haha. And for women, it’s probably giving birth. Oh well, it’s good to have predictability in this world, I suppose!
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Ah, that explains why it doesn’t turn up in the reminiscences of the men in my life. They’ve all been deployed: WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan… but both grandfathers, Dad, and my brother all lucked out and never got put anywhere they had to kill anybody. Got shot at, yes, but as Dad says: when you’re in an airplane over the jungle it’s nothing personal. Long range fire apparently doesn’t count.
It makes good evolutionary sense that dangerous situations imprint themselves so brightly in memory. Remember, learn, or die next time.
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Addendum: I’ve had three kids, all of them born entirely without complications or drugs so no reason to be hazy on the details… I remember those reasonably well, but they are not seared into my brain quite like the handful of life-or-death emergencies I’ve experienced. There was a car accident I was a passenger in once, when I was about twenty-three? Nobody was hurt, but I came within about a foot of being pulped against a utility pole. I clearly remember what could not have been more than a couple of seconds like a weirdly attenuated half-hour, with a crazy amount of detail.
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As I always tell Klara, the two most amazing moments in a woman’s life are 1) when her child is born and 2) when she removes her bra at the end of the day.
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Hear, hear!
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Or as my old aunties used to say (riffing on a dumb commercial): “N-O-B-R-A spells relief!”
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