Oh, google autocomplete. You’ve done it again!
Last night I was talking about farts, as I often do. I was telling my stepson about how beans aren’t the only food that can make people fart and, in fact, broccoli is actually more potent in that task. He then looked at me like I was crazy. The kid didn’t know that broccoli makes you fart and didn’t believe me when I said it does.
That’s fine. I have the internet. A mere 15 years ago I’d have to dust off an encyclopedia or eat a bunch of broccoli and wait an hour but today I can just google it. In fact, I was so confident that I told him that it’d probably be the first autocomplete response when I typed in “broccoli makes”.
Turns out it was the second answer. The first? Well…
Uh…
Great. As if we didn’t have a hard enough time already getting the kid to eat his vegetables.
This is the first I’ve ever heard of it but enough people have searched for it online that it’s the first autocomplete response when anybody types “broccoli makes”. Holy shit.
Okay. After seeing this I had to look into it. Most of the links on the first page were just to yahoo answers and cha cha pages of people asking the question and getting answers like “no dummy their full uv vitamins that maek yer brain healthy lol”.
Shit. There might be something to this.
Wikipedia had nothing on the subject at all. In fact, the only website I could find that supported the claim was reposting Cracked articles and seemingly not crediting the author, it lets Wiz’ fans know about all the latest stuff going on in Current Biology magazine. Seriously. There’s a whole entry talking about how our bitter taste bud receptors were made to warn off things like broccoli cuz it can make you all Sling Blade.
Now, normally I’d trust the scientific reporting of a meme aggregation service owned by a rapper who says he spends $10,000 on weed a month but I thought I’d take a look to see if there was an actual article since Planet Khalifa wasn’t kind enough to link it’s sources.
Turns out there totally is an article about the stuff. Now, the article itself is way over my head and I had a hard time discerning if they were actually saying that broccoli can cause disabilities or if Planet Khalifa was taking what they reported out of context but I’ll just trust Wiz and never eat broccoli again. Or any vegetable, for that matter.
Might as well steer clear of fruits while I’m at it.