The Dracula Diet – Glitches in the Matrix

The Dracula Diet – Glitches in the Matrix – by Liam Sweeny.

We just passed through Halloween a week ago, and if I had run across the factoid to come then, I might have posted this story on Thursday, a hair out of sequence. And this is actually about sequence, or sequencing. And it’s also about vampires, one in particular: Dracula.

Dracula was based off of Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. “Vlad the Impaler,” a fifteenth century Romanian ruler with unbridled cruelty and a love of, you guessed it, impaling people. Author Bram Stoker brought Tepes to life as a blood-drinking immortal, and the world kind of forgot he was a real person.

Yet he was real, and he wrote letters that he touched, and a little tiny piece of him went onto every letter. And this is where “sequencing” comes in. Really that word is a misnomer. Gleb Zilberstein is the pioneer of a protein extraction method that allows us to grab proteins off of things people touch. And when they did that to Vlad’s letters, they came to an interesting conclusion:

Vlad Tepes, a.k.a Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. the immortal scourge Dracula, was probably a vegan.

No, he didn’t love animals; he impaled spiders when imprisoned. Food was scarce back then because it was colder than it is today, and meat was even more scarce. So even a tyrant had to figure out a million uses for cauliflower.

There is one really fun fact to come out of this. They believe that Vlad Tepes had haemolacria, or crying blood tears.

It’s interesting that they can now figure out your diet by analyzing the envelope your power bill came in, but I would say they could do that with just a sniff test if I just got done with a meatball sub.

Long story short, Vlad the Impaler never thought to impale anyone horizontally over an open fire and have a good old fashioned “long pig roast.”

From The Daily Star.

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