We’ve all been there. A meeting runs long and you end up skipping lunch, or the daily commute proves especially tough and you miss dinner. You feel both hungry and angry -- “hangry.”
But did you know there’s federal funding to study this important, new-found emotion?
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On Wednesday, Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) took to the Senate floor to give his weekly speech on government waste, lambasting the National Science Foundation for dishing out a $331,000 grant to study “hanger.”
"Now I am told by my younger staff that there's a new word around called 'hangry.' I didn't know what that was. But hangry, as we've looked into this, means that if you are hungry, you tend to get a little bit disjointed and you're more angry than you were if you're not hungry,” said Coats, chair of the U.S. Joint Economic Committee.
How did the NSF-funded study look at the issue? Well, in 2014 researchers at Ohio State gave voodoo dolls to married couples and recorded how many times they stuck the figures with pins relative to their blood sugar levels.
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"After three years study and $331,000 spent, yup, we proved it. Hangry occurs when you're hungry," Coats said.
I have a fun #WasteOfTheWeek speech planned for this afternoon. Tune in around 4 PM pic.twitter.com/gbRqPQed6o
— Senator Dan Coats (@SenDanCoats) March 9, 2016
Coats, who will retire next year, chastised another NSF-funded study that looked at whether a massage really makes a person feel better after "physical effort.” Rather than test the theory on humans subjects, though, researchers used a special Swedish massage machine to stroke rabbits.
Scientists looked at “the grin on the rabbits -- I don't know how they determine -- the rabbits really couldn't turn around and say 'yeah, that feels good,'" Coats joked.
Spoiler alert: The study found massages do, in fact, help after physical activity.
The study cost $387,000. And the rabbits that received the massages were eventually euthanized.
While the examples Coats used are amusing, they lose a little of their humor when you remember that the national debt is creeping past $19 trillion.
