Letters.

Farm physics

In your article "A call for more college science and math" (SN: 4/10/99, p. 239), you report on the findings of an expert panel that concluded that undergraduates should be required to take more science and math courses to help them make "technically competent decisions about their health, communities, and economic lives." As someone with multiple physics degrees, I can state from experience that very little I learned in my math and science courses is much help in making such decisions. When I worked on a friend's farm, I learned more about health, communities, and economic lives than I did in any college course. Perhaps we should require more farmwork from college students.

David Mantell Rochester, N. Y

Hard-hearted reality

The correlation of coronary artery atherosclerosis with hostility ("Bad attitude may be bad for heart," SN: 4/17/99, p. 255) fills in the causal chain shown by J.C. Barefoot, W.G. Dahlstrom, and R.B. Williams in 1983. Medical students scoring high on the hostility scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory had markedly elevated coronary risk when followed up 25 years later. Similar results were obtained by Barefoot and others in a 1989 study of law students.

Paul E. Meehl University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn.

It's all in the water

In response to the report "Souping up and other tricks produce satiety" (SN: 4/24/99, p. 261), I'd like to suggest that the ineffectiveness of drinking water in providing satiety, as opposed to water used to `soupify' the casserole, may be a result of swallowing compared with chewing.

Maybe power to satiate depends on both amount of chewing and the volume ingested. It would be interesting to test this possibility by checking whether the amount of chewing correlated with portion size in the second study reported in this article.

Louis A. Mulieri Hinesburg, Vt.

I noted that the article concluded that water in different forms may have different effects on satiety. I think an alternative hypothesis is more attractive: In the process of soup making, chemicals are leached out of the vegetables into the water. I suspect that the chemical leached out is magnesium. Magnesium is known to induce satiety. To confirm this hypothesis, cholecystokinin levels and caloric intake could be measured after soups with differing levels of magnesium are administered.

On hearing of the soup experiment a few months ago, I started several of my patients on soup with meals and magnesium supplements. Not enough time has yet passed to assess the effects.

Stephen Holland Peoria, Ill.