SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Remember that story the other day about the military pilot who landed in a baseball field so he could get some A&W hamburgers? It all makes sense now. Pilots who eat the fattiest foods have the fastest response times, according to a new military-funded study.

University of North Dakota researchers have found that pilots who ate fatty foods such as butter and gravy had the quickest response times in mental tests and made fewer mistakes when flying in difficult cloud situations.

"We wound up analyzing the data every which way but upside down. It came out consistent every time," psychology professor Tom Petros told the Associated Press.

Pilots who took part in the test spent a week each on one of four diets - high-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-protein and a control diet - and performed tests in flight simulators. Test subjects on the high-fat and high-carb diets did quite a bit better than the high-protein eaters, while the high-fat dieters did a little better than the high-carb dieters.

The point of the study was to figure out ways of cutting down on human error while flying, which is the main cause of accidents. It looks like loading pilots up with Twinkies and pizza before they take off is the way to go.