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venomtots:
Symbiote Nutrition: Revised Guidelines
Hello to all my experimental subjects! As the new head of the Interspecies Relations department, I researched what the best ways are to keep your slimy sweetheart satiated and snuggly.
The thing about beta-phenylethylamine is that there isn’t a whole lot of it in humans. As measured by content in urine, an average child has 52-56 micrograms of PEA per gram of creatinine (Kusaga 2002). Since a normal adult produces .6 to 2.9 grams of urinary creatinine a day, assuming that ratios stay the same, an average adult will have between 31 and 162 milligrams of PEA in their urine (Stephens 2017).
In the movie, we see Venom eat 1) one of Drake’s minions, 2) two more of Drake’s minions, and 3) one minion’s head in the space of two days. (I’m not sure how long the timeskip is at the end of the movie so I’m not including the robber). So that comes out to three bodies and a head, which if we follow Benton 2004 and Blinkov and Glezer 1968, has roughly 13-14 nanograms of PEA in it. Let’s say that each minion has 96 mg of PEA in their body, and let’s round up to include the head. That comes out to 289 mg, or 144.5 mg/day. For all that the movie plays up the symbiotes’ “monstrous appetite”, that’s a pretty small amount.
There is a common idea among many hosts that the PEA generated by increased emotional closeness is enough to feed their symbiote. This may be true - a surge of 10-60 mg, which is used in depression treatment, can make a difference, but it depends on how much you were producing at first, which in turn depends on body size (Sabelli 1996). There is a real risk of PEA depletion. In addition, many hosts, including our own Eddie Brock, have ADHD and/or autism, which causes the brain to have far lower levels to start with (Kusaga 2002). Specifically, people with ADHD have PEA levels one-fifth or less of the non-developmentally disabled population, with autistic people having slightly more. Always remember that the host’s health is crucial for both partners!
So then we move on to our next-favorite food - chocolate. A 50-g bar of chocolate has 300 milligrams of PEA in it (Benton 2004). More than enough. However, I also want to draw your attention to a lovely little amino acid named L-phenylalanine. In the body, this is converted to either L-tyrosine or, you got it, PEA. The highest concentration of phenylalanine is in raw soybeans, which has around 2 g of it per 100 g / 3.5 oz (Amerman n.d.). This is probably the best way to get large amounts of PEA into your body cheaply, including buying supplements. For all of you serially unemployed reporters out there, a can of beans is a lot cheaper than special mail-order pills.
We can take a Doylist perspective and say that the idea of Tom Hardy desperately chomping a Symphony bar is a lot less dramatic/horrifying than vomiting up trashbin chicken, and also that Ruben Fleischer doesn’t know much about neuroscience. But we can also take a Watsonian perspective. The fact that Venom barely considered non-meat foods, the insistence on living meat with biochemicals still present, and the fact that they seemed to take for granted that they were starving the entire movie suggests that
1) Earth is unique in having such a range of PEA-rich foods, or
2) there is a Klyntar cultural bias towards being carnivores, so that Venom would not even think to survive off of things that are not meat.
In conclusion, the filmmakers’ efforts to create a “horror hunger” situation inadvertently led to an alien predator that needs less food than a goldfish. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
–CITATIONS–
Amerman, D. (n.d.) Foods with phenylethylamine. In: Livestrong. Livestrong. <https://ift.tt/2u41nTK>. Downloaded on 10 March 2019.
Benton, D. (2004). The biology and psychology of chocolate craving. Pages 207-220 in Astrid Nehlig, editor. Coffee, tea, chocolate and the brain. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.
Blinkov, S.M. and I.I. Glezer (1968). The human brain in figures and tables. A quantitative handbook. Plenum Press, New York, New York.
Kusaga, A. (2002). [Decreased beta-phenylethylamine in urine of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autistic disorder.] No To Hattatsu [Brain and Development] 34:243-8.
Sabelli, H., P. Fink, J. Fawcett, and C. Tom (1996). Sustained antidepressant effect of PEA regimen. Journal of Neuropsychiatry 8:168-171.
Stephens, C. (2017). Creatinine blood test. In: Healthline. Healthline. <https://ift.tt/2VYyrbT>. Downloaded on 10 March 2019.
venomtots:
Symbiote Nutrition: Revised Guidelines
Hello to all my experimental subjects! As the new head of the Interspecies Relations department, I researched what the best ways are to keep your slimy sweetheart satiated and snuggly.
The thing about beta-phenylethylamine is that there isn’t a whole lot of it in humans. As measured by content in urine, an average child has 52-56 micrograms of PEA per gram of creatinine (Kusaga 2002). Since a normal adult produces .6 to 2.9 grams of urinary creatinine a day, assuming that ratios stay the same, an average adult will have between 31 and 162 milligrams of PEA in their urine (Stephens 2017).
In the movie, we see Venom eat 1) one of Drake’s minions, 2) two more of Drake’s minions, and 3) one minion’s head in the space of two days. (I’m not sure how long the timeskip is at the end of the movie so I’m not including the robber). So that comes out to three bodies and a head, which if we follow Benton 2004 and Blinkov and Glezer 1968, has roughly 13-14 nanograms of PEA in it. Let’s say that each minion has 96 mg of PEA in their body, and let’s round up to include the head. That comes out to 289 mg, or 144.5 mg/day. For all that the movie plays up the symbiotes’ “monstrous appetite”, that’s a pretty small amount.
There is a common idea among many hosts that the PEA generated by increased emotional closeness is enough to feed their symbiote. This may be true - a surge of 10-60 mg, which is used in depression treatment, can make a difference, but it depends on how much you were producing at first, which in turn depends on body size (Sabelli 1996). There is a real risk of PEA depletion. In addition, many hosts, including our own Eddie Brock, have ADHD and/or autism, which causes the brain to have far lower levels to start with (Kusaga 2002). Specifically, people with ADHD have PEA levels one-fifth or less of the non-developmentally disabled population, with autistic people having slightly more. Always remember that the host’s health is crucial for both partners!
So then we move on to our next-favorite food - chocolate. A 50-g bar of chocolate has 300 milligrams of PEA in it (Benton 2004). More than enough. However, I also want to draw your attention to a lovely little amino acid named L-phenylalanine. In the body, this is converted to either L-tyrosine or, you got it, PEA. The highest concentration of phenylalanine is in raw soybeans, which has around 2 g of it per 100 g / 3.5 oz (Amerman n.d.). This is probably the best way to get large amounts of PEA into your body cheaply, including buying supplements. For all of you serially unemployed reporters out there, a can of beans is a lot cheaper than special mail-order pills.
We can take a Doylist perspective and say that the idea of Tom Hardy desperately chomping a Symphony bar is a lot less dramatic/horrifying than vomiting up trashbin chicken, and also that Ruben Fleischer doesn’t know much about neuroscience. But we can also take a Watsonian perspective. The fact that Venom barely considered non-meat foods, the insistence on living meat with biochemicals still present, and the fact that they seemed to take for granted that they were starving the entire movie suggests that
1) Earth is unique in having such a range of PEA-rich foods, or
2) there is a Klyntar cultural bias towards being carnivores, so that Venom would not even think to survive off of things that are not meat.
In conclusion, the filmmakers’ efforts to create a “horror hunger” situation inadvertently led to an alien predator that needs less food than a goldfish. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
–CITATIONS–
Amerman, D. (n.d.) Foods with phenylethylamine. In: Livestrong. Livestrong. <https://ift.tt/2u41nTK>. Downloaded on 10 March 2019.
Benton, D. (2004). The biology and psychology of chocolate craving. Pages 207-220 in Astrid Nehlig, editor. Coffee, tea, chocolate and the brain. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.
Blinkov, S.M. and I.I. Glezer (1968). The human brain in figures and tables. A quantitative handbook. Plenum Press, New York, New York.
Kusaga, A. (2002). [Decreased beta-phenylethylamine in urine of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autistic disorder.] No To Hattatsu [Brain and Development] 34:243-8.
Sabelli, H., P. Fink, J. Fawcett, and C. Tom (1996). Sustained antidepressant effect of PEA regimen. Journal of Neuropsychiatry 8:168-171.
Stephens, C. (2017). Creatinine blood test. In: Healthline. Healthline. <https://ift.tt/2VYyrbT>. Downloaded on 10 March 2019.
