The Cambridge Chat Thread

Yeah. While not being on the level of being able to study it at university, I was fairly good at languages, yet still did more work for french AS than I probably did for maths, further maths and physics full A-level combined.

But Maths, F Maths and Physics are your strengths, Spanish was mine. I always found that I could do the work pretty quickly and didn't find the exams hard.

Oh, this is turning into boasting I'm just trying to say that in terms of quantity and difficulty of work, English Lit and History were way above Spanish for me.

Cotto's on East Road is really nice. Three courses for £30 per person, and the food is gorgeous

And Alimentum's meant to be amazing too, but I've never been.

Well its not publically available necessarily. You need access to journals through an institution. Its basically a friend of mine who is a massive health geek and reads journal articles as bedtime reading I've read some of the stuff myself, but alot of it is him summarising the content of the studies he reads. But when he has time he says he'll gather some links together.

And I think our ideas of 'disastrously unhealthy' are quite different. You seem to be thinking of it like I mean poison or something. I'm comparing unhealthy foods and their effects on the body to healthy foods. In terms of the many detrimental effects that sugars, carbs, grains etc have on the body it is disastrous when you compare it to other foods a person could be eating which conversely lead to high improvements in health. Apart from carby foods actually being linked to slowing down metabolism, studies have also found them to be anti-nutritious in the sense that they inhibit the ability of the body to store or utilise vital micronutrients like key vitamins or minerals, and they weaken the body's immune defence (this is all off the top of my head from many of the articles he described to me recently) those are only a few details too - I'm not mentioning alot of the significant diseases which its strongly correlated with.

And on the sweetner and insulin spike thing, again I see it as 'disastrous' in comparison to the impact of other healthier foods on insulin, whereas I'd imagine that regulatory bodies compare the spikes caused by sweetners to some sort of measure of 'how high can this person's blood sugar increase and drop without it risking their life?' As I mentioned before, they approve of diabetics eating starches and complex carbohydrates (not to mention fruit) which are the sorts of food that cause the insulin issues that the research I refer to has linked to loads of major health problems.
In terms of what you said about it being less calories - yes I agree that that is a benefit. In my first reply to you I clearly delineated between ways in which it is not like sugar and therefore is better, but there are also sides in which the body responds to it as it does to sugar, and in those specific senses it will be harmful.

Can anyone recommend a decent restaurant in Cambridge that isn't a national chain or Teri-Aki? The kind of thing you might go to if a parent or rich friend were coming to visit...

Fair enough. As I said, I was talking about it as a sugar substitute. I assume that, since you think sucralose is "disastrously unhealthy" you also think that sugar is, too. In which case, we are arguing over nothing since, like I said, I was talking about it only in the sense of it being a substitute for sugar. Thus, if someone is deliberating over whether to choose sucralose-based product or sugar, choosing the former is NOT "disastrously unhealthy" compared to the latter.

It sounds like this was good preparation for Cambridge, though?

My school was the complete opposite. I had timetabled lessons all day and they were in small groups of 8-12 so were quite immersive. There was lots and lots of teacher support. It was easy to ask questions and the programme of study and homework was really well structured and clear. This, in my opinion, was an amazing way to learn and definitely got me the grades I achieved, BUT was really bad preparation for Cambridge. I now realise just how spoon-fed I was at A-Level (as if they're not obvious enough..). We were told exactly what to learn, copied it down - and learnt it. I miss the structure and support that I had at school so much here, and find it difficult to self motivate myself above the bare minimum needed to get by. It's obviously a personal problem so I can't completely "blame" my school, but nonetheless it didn't help.

I guess in everyday speech, "or" does often mean xor, but it's not as if "You need the permission of A or B" could possibly be interpreted as "if A and B both give permission, you cannot do it".

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Can anyone recommend a decent restaurant in Cambridge that isn't a national chain or Teri-Aki? The kind of thing you might go to if a parent or rich friend were coming to visit...


On the education issue, I did the IB outside the UK so can't really comment on how hard A-levels/sixth form are. I certainly did more work for the IB than subsequently at uni though (pre Cam). In had about 26 contact hours per calendar week, and several essays (2 @ 750-1500 words typically) and assigntments due each week.