From the wiki on Arecoline which is found in areca nut (Puwak/Betel Nut)
Arecoline is an alkaloid natural product found in the areca nut, the fruit of the areca palm (Areca catechu). Owing to its muscarinic and nicotinic agonist properties, arecoline has shown improvement in the learning ability of healthy volunteers. Since one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease is a cognitive decline, arecoline was suggested as a treatment to slow down this process and arecoline administered intravenously did indeed show modest verbal and spatial memory improvement in Alzheimer's patients.Hmm, I did not see that coming. Puwak/Betel Nut and by extension chewing Betel improves learning ability for the healthy and shows modest improvements in verbal and spatial abilities of Alzheimer's patients.
Now the big question is how should the Betel be chewed. Here is a comparison between the Burmese and Papua New Guinea (PNG) ways to chew betel from an gloves off article on Papua New Guinea (PNG)
If you have some time to waste during the day, though, you might try chewing betel. PNG [Papua New Guinea] is the second country I’ve visited where people do that; Burma was the first. Only, Papuans chew it differently. The Burmese dry out the nut, slice it into discs and wrap the discs in a leaf with a slurry of calcium hydroxide (that is, slaked lime that’s been slaked again) and various aromatic seeds and herbs. The lime reacts with the nut and turns it bright red, sort of like the dirt in my old town — seeing betel-cud splattered on a sidewalk always reminds me of Roebourne on a rare, wet, muddy December day — while releasing arecoline, the actual drug behind the betel high.For those who think that that habits like chewing Betel are only in the East/Third World, tobacco chewing is equally disgusting and prevalent in rural America, specially among white Gun toting rednecks.
Papuans can’t be fucked with all that delicate drying and slicing. They get their betel (“buai“) fresh — the fruits look like little green coconuts — and crack open the husk with their side-teeth. (You can see dried husks by the thousands lying across town, like mini grass skirts for a mountain of Hula Barbies.) If the nut inside is white, that means it’s good for chewing; the whiter the better. Red-brown, oxidized-looking nuts are thrown away, replaced by the vendor for no extra charge, since they supposedly smell bad. You pay a kina ($0.50) for a nut, crack it open, chew it, spit out the latexy sap, grab a little loofah-shaped seed pod (the “daka“), bite the tip off, moisten it, dip it in a bag of lime (“kambang“) and try to chew on the nut-pod-lime mixture for as long as possible.
So now for Population Pyramids and the possibility of revolution in Burma (the thread/link connection was Burmese Betel Chewing habits)
But there’s a snag: popular uprisings really only succeed in countries with large populations of angry young men. Poland in the early 80s. Romania in ’89, Czechoslovakia in ’89, Indonesia in ’98, Egypt in ’11 – look at the population pyramids for those countries, and you’ll see they had an awful lot of 15-25 year olds, right when the shit hit the entrenched-ruling-elite fan.So, given Sri Lanka's Population Pyramid, where the biggest segment of the population is over 30 its unlikely we will have a LTTE or JVP like uprising which we saw in the last few decades. Can this be said of our neighboring countries, where the majority of the population is still very young and male dominated because of birth selection. Could invasion be a possibility in the next few decades from our immediate neighbors.
Same goes for the pro-Western “color revolutions” in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan: demographic spikes in the 15-19 and 20-25 groups followed by rapid regime change. With revolutions, it’s age that matters. More than geography. Maybe more than ethnicity. Definitely more than fucking Twitter.
In Burma people hit twenty during the last decade, and, sure enough, massive protests suddenly broke out in 2007 after 19 years of relative tranquility. Media sources never failed to mention that the protests were “monk-led,” but no one seems to have caught the significance of that. By Southeast Asian standards, monks are basically college students (especially in Myanmar, where the government was smart enough to close most universities after the ’88 riots).
