Your kids can learn to crave Broccoli. Here is how..

If there is one vegetable that is loathed in our household, it is the humble broccoli. I am not sure what it is about this vegetable, but our kids hate it and don’t want to touch it. I believe that that is the same across many households around the world.

So what if you could train your (and of course, your kids) brains to actually crave and want Broccoli? Sounds crazy doesn’t it?

But new research suggests that it can be done.

Scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University and at Massachusetts General Hospital have shown that you can train your brain to fire the same “feel good” neurotransmitters for healthy food that you get when you eat a chocolate or donut. The brain “rewards” you by firing dopamine and it “sparkles” for fatty foods. But you can train your brain to do the same for Broccoli.

It all has to do with eating a low calorie, high fiber diet. Combine that with educating yourself over the effects of a nicer diet and you can, over time, actually crave that nice juicy piece of Broccoli, the same way you are craving a donut right now.

Want to give it a try?

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns.

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated.

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches.

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look.

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI.

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in.

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]

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