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May 24, 2006
Tears
I just got this forwarded email from a friend, claiming some interesting findings on human tears. This is the original copy of the email:
> Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. PC-to-Phone calls for
> ridiculously low rates.> From: "Evelyn"
> To: "Evelyn"
> Subject: Study on Tears
> Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 20:26:15 +0800
>
> Interesting piece of information...
> "There was a study done where a control group of 100
> people were divided into two.
>
> 50 people watched a very funny, tears-of laughter
> type movie. 50 watched a very sad and tears of compassion type
> movie.
>
> At the end of the sessions researchers collected the
> "happy tears" and the "sad tears" with eye droppers.
>
> They found that "happy tears" are made up of
> brine...salt water and not a great deal else.
>
> However the "sad tears" were found to contain the
> very same chemicals and enzymes that are found in tumours,
> ulcers and other such lumps and
> bumps and sicknesses through out the body.
>
> This test concluded that the body, when crying in
> sadness etc is literally flushing out all of the
> toxic-chemicals that accumulate and
> are a part of the sadness /heart ache experience.
>
> Therefore if one holds back those tears, those
> toxic-waters will find somewhere else to deposit
> themselves.....and prolonged
> lack-of-crying-release will guarantee that the body
> will accumulate a huge amount of internal pollution
> and toxicity that should have been released through the
> tears........is it any wonder that the eyes sting
> so much when we hold back our tears?"
>
It was not uncommon that these health-related emails are circulated among friends and families. Among some famous ones, which i'm sure some of you got them before, include how the acids in Coca-cola can wash a dirty toilet bowl shining clean, how kfc breed genetically-modified chickens which are headless and footless (!) to ease up the poultry processing part of turning those avians into finger licking good savoury, and again, how pouring Coca-cola on a piece of pork can force translucent worms squirming out of the meat. Eww..
Of course, the piece of interesting news about tears is not as extreme as what i have mentioned above. However, one can't help wondering about the reliability and credibility of the information source.
I was trained in the biology lab to be skeptical of all tertiary articles as such. No mention of authors, date of study conducted, which lab or university that endorses the research, etc etc. In short, there is no primary literature published to support all these claims. I ran a search in pubmed for any articles related to tear, ulcer and tumor, nothing relavant came out. I searched again for tear and brine, 1 hit. An article translated from German, but i couldn't access it. There is only a short paragraph on the peroxidase content of human tear, which as the study suggested, is not high enough to sustain a peroxidase-thiocyanide-hydrogenperoxide system (what a mouthful) that confer antibacterial properties to fluids such as milk and saliva.
Interesting.
Anyway, my bottommline: it's hard to trust emails these days.
(Btw, all the gruesomely graphical imagination induced by my words on Coca-cola and kfc is unfounded; they are all not true... At least i believe they aren't >.<)
Posted by peixin at May 24, 2006 04:45 AM
Comments
Phew, can still eat pork in peace, no translucent worms plz... lolz
Posted by: ls at May 24, 2006 11:51 PM
ah.. no translucent worms of course... but transparent worms.. hard to say, since they are transparent... :P
Posted by: px at May 25, 2006 01:37 AM
Hmm, translucent worms? Heard of the one on Mars? :P hehehe. There's plenty of these hodgepodge all over the 'Net, if you know where to find it.
Posted by: hm at May 29, 2006 02:41 PM