Edible Explosives
Before my life-transforming heart by-pass operation, I controlled angina pain by taking tablets containing nitroglycerine. Since this is a highly explosive substance, one of my friends speculated that I might be banned from flying if I got too close to the sniffer dogs at the airport!
Nitroglycerine is so easy to detonate that it wasn’t widely used until a Swedish chemist discovered how to make it relatively safe. Alfred Nobel, the founder of the famous Nobel Prizes, mixed nitroglycerine with a clay to make dynamite. So a very useful heart drug contains the same stuff from which dynamite is made!
The use of nitroglycerine as both an explosive and a drug is an interesting example of the way many chemicals have very different functions. How they act depends largely on the concentration and the conditions. The concentration of nitroglycerine in medication, and the moist environment in the body, make it impossible for it to explode.
The low concentration of nitroglycerine that’s absorbed by the body is sufficient to dilate the blood vessels, increase the blood supply to the heart, and reduce the workload of sending blood around a body. Angina pain is avoided as the heart muscle receives the oxygenated blood it needs for good functioning.
So next time you see someone taking heart pills, don’t feel that you need to take cover.
When I saw the Science Short for today, I couldn’t help remembering an occasion when I took a nitroglycerine pill just to see what would happen. I was in my early twenties. An older friend had just popped one and I asked him what it did for him. In answer, he offered me one. Bad idea! Don’t try it! One thing I learned was that the effect of nitroglycerine on the body is immediate. I got a roaring headache that lasted for several hours. As a result, I’ve never been tempted to take another one.
Unfortunately, not all of the bad ideas we have give us such immediate feedback. There are many dangerous substances we might try which give a fairly pleasant immediate effect. The negative consequences only come along later. Without being extreme, look at what abusing sugar can do to a healthy body, or polysaturated fats, or caffeine, not to mention the “bad” substances. There’s no instant unpleasant outcome, so we keep going back, doing ever more damage to our bodies until we have major problems which require major medical intervention.
Once a pattern is established, we can easily come to depend on whatever it is that gives us pleasure or comfort. It becomes a habit. Once we reach that stage, reason goes out the window and we follow our conditioned response even though we “know” it is bad for us – maybe even killing us.
Even if you can’t think of any consumables on which you are dependent, there are behaviours in which we all engage which not only harm our bodies, but also our souls. We are all bent toward selfishness. But it leads us into a path of desperate non-fulfilment. The harder we try to please ourselves, the more disappointed we’ll become. We’ll see others who have the goodies we want, the beauty or strength that are beyond our grasp, the confidence and influence that eludes us.
Because there is no instant negative consequence to our self-seeking ways, we think that there is none at all. We don’t notice the gradual poisoning of our own psyches with self-occupation. And along the way, we may encounter some very significant pleasure.
There is another path. It seems counter-intuitive because along it we find lots of personal inconvenience and worse. But the long-term outcome can’t be beat. It serves to bring meaning to our lives which selfishness will never achieve. It’s God’s way – and it leads to Him.
David Humphreys and Ron Hughes
