By Celia Rivenbark
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
I don’t normally get around to reading my scientific journals until much later in the week…OK, never, but I did happen to read about new findings that low blood sugar can make husbands and wives behave aggressively toward one another.
According to the study which was published in a journal I can’t even pronounce so I will simply call “The Journal of the Most Obvious Stuff in the Universe” it finds that when women are hungry, they are more likely to stick voodoo pins into a doll representing their husbands.
Naturally, when I read that, I thought they were speaking metaphorically. But, no! Turns out the science community actually gave 107 married couples voodoo dolls and 51 pins each with instructions to stick a pin in the doll representing their spouse whenever they felt a, ha-ha, stab of hostility toward them.
It should be noted that some participants didn’t use a single pin, even when blood sugar levels were low.
These were, I’m guessing, Southern Baptist wives who think putting pins in voodoo dolls seems like it might be kinda Satanic, a sin on a scale of “definitely worse than dancing” but “not quite as bad as watching “Naked and Afraid” even though it is on the Discovery Channel which is quasi-educational.”
Scarier to me were the few participants who used all 51 pins when their blood sugar dipped and, I’m guessing here, offered to buy pins off the others so they could “finish what I’ve started.”
As part of a longstanding and deeply held conviction about this column, I do not want to bore you with facts. But you should know that if you don’t eat when you need to, your glucose levels will crash and this can lead to diminished self-control, which can lead to anger and a marked uptick in hateful behavior.
I believe we can all agree that the “take away” from this study that probably cost many thousands of dollars is, if you’re hungry, you should probably eat something. Thank you science!
Of course there was more to the study than voodoo dolls. At the end of three weeks, participants were told they were going to play a game that let you torment your spouse via headphone noises (dentist’s drill, nails on chalkboard, anything by the Black Eyed Peas…) based on how angry you were feeling toward them.
Again, low blood sugar had spouses turning the volume on high. (Don’t worry; they weren’t really hooked up.)
This led scientists to decide that, and I am not making this up: “Food curbs aggression and this could be useful in prisons, psychiatric hospitals or schools.” Since all three of those institutions are, apparently, equal.
Next time a fight breaks out in Cell Block 3 or ninth-grade gym class, just slingshot in some yeast rolls and all will be well.
Stay tuned next week when the science community discovers that wives hate it when their husbands drink milk directly from the carton.
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(Celia Rivenbark is the author of “Rude Bitches Make Me Tired” and six other humor collections.)
