January 5th, 2009
That afternoon crash will kill you
Two years ago Emerald Nuts ran a Super Bowl ad starring the late Robert Goulet that had me rolling on the floor.
It was geared around the mid-afternoon, when your lunch has digested and your blood sugar level crashes. They had Goulet wandering around an office, eating notes, pouring coffee onto keyboards, and generally wreaking havoc.
The sales pitch was that a handful of Emerald Nuts “will keep Robert Goulet at bay…until tomorrow.” And as a man crunched the nuts there was Goulet behind him, crawling away on the ceiling.
Turns out the message is deadly serious.
Those normal changes in blood sugar take a toll, even for the non-diabetic, and according to an Annals of Neurology article published by Columbia University researchers, causes the cognitive memory loss we experience as we age.
It’s important to note that the ability to control blood sugar goes down naturally, and none of the people studied were diabetic. Exercise can help, study author Scott Small told The New York Times. Exercise improves glucose regulation.
I thought about using the headline “Robert Goulet will kill you” for this piece, and if I were writing around 3 PM I might have.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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