FACTORALY - E31 DIETS

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Eating. Everone does it, but not everyone - or everything - eats the same things. This episode tackles the specifics of what we beat and why we eat it. And why we don't. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you today i'm tip top and spiffing both very good qualities to hold congratulations how are you i am uh not going to bother to think of a witty response because i think tip-top and spiffing have just piqued us out there so i'm all right thank you i'm pleased to hear it welcome to another episode of fact orally yes indeed for anyone who is here for the first time welcome for anyone who's here for the umpteenth time thank you so much for persevering are you not getting bored yet so this is uh this is fact orally this is a weekly podcast in which two beautifully soporific and soothing british voiceover artists come together and have a chat about random facts, useless trivia, and fun stuff like that. So Bruce, what is the topic we are going to be discussing this week? Diet. Diet. Or diets, depending on which way you want to look at it.

So we should really start somewhere, shouldn't we? Let's start with the word diet itself. Okay. Diet is one of those words that's come through quite a few different languages and a few different variations before arriving here in English. It's gone through French, it's gone through Latin. But originally, the word dieta, D-I-A-I-T-A, dieta, was a Greek word, and it simply meant a way of life. Okay. So, one's diet is the kind of food that you eat. That's a way of life. Okay. So one's diet is the kind of food that you eat. That's your way of life. There are subdivisions of all sorts of diets,

being a carnivore or something like that. Yes. You can be more specific, obviously. There are piscivores who only eat fish. Insectivores, things that eat insects. How about, okay, I'm going to give you a quiz now. Oh, goody. I love a quiz. Here we go.

Avivore. Someone who only eats birds. Correct. Corallivore, that's quite easy. Someone who only eats coral? Correct. Not someone, something. Oh.

Could be a fish, obviously. Could be a fish, of course, yes. Okay, caratophagy. Carats, something that only eats carrots. No, it's eating horny material like wool. So moths are caratophages. Is that right? Well pronounced.

Lepidophagy. Lepid. Lepid. Is that some kind of grasshopper? It means eating fish scales. Oh. Last two. This is quite easy. Vermivore. Ooh. Last two. This is quite easy.

Vermivore. Verm. Vermin? Worm. Oh, verm. Birds are vermivores. Oh, I see. Oh, well, that's brilliant.

And finally, which is one I quite like, ophiophagy. You won't get it. Ophi. O-P-H-I-O-P-H-A-G-Y. Ophiophagy means eating. Sure. It's like, you know you know vor it's the same thing yes no i don't know eating snakes i should know that because i'm aphidophobic oh there you go then so i should have got that there you go that would not be the diet for me those are just the carnivores

then there are herbivores you know things like uh frugivore one that eats fruit correct uh nectarivore one that eats nectar correct uh oh let's see if we can give you a slightly more difficult one folivore that's quite easy foliage yes leaves and things there's things that eat um non-living or decaying matter okay coprophage then you've got um kleptoparasitism which is stealing food from another animal and then of course you've got um vegetarianism veganism yes uh freeganism oh what's a freegan freegan is someone who only eats free food freegan l um so you know they they take advantage of places throwing out the food at the end of the day's shift oh right oh okay sort of scavenging in in you know in in waste so it's not like so just

going going to a restaurant just helping yourself to somebody else just refusing to pay yes that might come under freeganism as well, I don't know. So there are quite a few different varieties of diets, aren't there? There are. There's not sort of one size fits all. Different species, different creatures, different people, different habits eat different ways. And this is something that sort of makes it a little bit difficult to officially ascertain what is the right diet there are so many different ideas and fads of um you know a western versus an eastern diet a mediterranean diet versus i don't know something that's high in fat low in fat high

in carbs low in carbs everyone is so different some diets will work better for some people than they will for others so it's very difficult to put your finger on what is the best diet for any creature let alone us yes shall we come back from creatures to us shall we i can't speak on behalf of all the creatures um but there's i there's sort of a fairly unanimous agreement that um within humankind the mediterranean diet is quite good for you yes um not not necessarily perfect and not necessarily perfect for everyone um but the the mediterranean diet which is sort of practiced as the name suggests anywhere around the mediterranean um so you know greece italy spain spain france all the nice warm sunny countries and these diets consist of well they consist of quite a lot there's actually quite a lot of

variety which is one of the benefits of it you're not just sort of pigeonholing yourself into any one particular type of food um but the mediterranean diet kind of suggests you should eat a high amount of fruit vegetables nuts legumes and of course we all know the difference between the two of those seafood and olive oil you should eat a medium amount of poultry eggs and dairy and a low amount of red meat so it's not ruling anything out it's just saying you know more of this some of that less of that and this mediterranean diet uh people who practice that diet seem to live a good long healthy life they seem to be less prone to chronic illness they seem to be less prone to depression yes um there's an awful lot of theory around these days

that the type of food you eat affects your mood is that correlation and causation though you know if you live in sunshine by the seaside yeah exactly what i was wondering yeah so we're living in that lifestyle does that does that correlate it's a nurture over nature um but there are other cultures that believe this as well i've i've been reading uh in my voiceover work, I've been reading some scripts from China. And they're constantly comparing themselves to the West, quite stereotypically sometimes. You know, look at us, we eat healthy food with lots of fruit and veg. Look at them, they eat nothing but hamburgers.

So, yeah, it's a little bit of a stereotype. But they are suggesting the correlation between food and mood. Well, it's garbage in, garbage out, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely that. So I can see that there's a correlation. But at the same time, I also know when I'm in a low mood myself, I just want to eat chocolate and ice cream.

So I don't crave a nice crunchy vegetable. No, no. I think I cheer myself up with this celery. Of course, in the east of the Mediterranean, you get eastern countries which have their own dietary, religious dietary laws. Sure, yes. their own dietary law religious dietary laws sure yes so there's there's there's kosher and there's um which is practiced um you know jewish dietary laws and there are islamic dietary laws you know like halal halal generally it's to do with what's allowed and what's not allowed in the specific book that each religion believes in yeah but i mean there are there are quite

interesting like joint things like both religions believe that you shouldn't eat animals with fangs okay cats dogs lions bears um both both traditions don't like that amphibians and reptiles very prohibited but there are some which are okay in in both, like cows. Right. To be kosher, aquatic animals must have scales and fins, for example. So no dolphins or whales? Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Insects. You're allowed in Islamic law to eat insects if they're dead. Yeah. There are kosher insects. Locusts and grasshoppers are kosher right but i mean they're both emphasized cleanliness purity and you know following the religious texts so part of a diet is when not to eat i mean for example you're on a intermittent fasting diet i am yes i'm currently doing if yes so i

abstain from food during the day yes and i only eat in the evening well that's a bit like ramadan yes it's a form of fasting yeah so the ninth month um you basically you fast from dawn until sunset and you um you you can you know you're allowed to eat what you like but not when the sun's up just at the appropriate time. Yes. Yeah. I mean, there are so many different diets and there are so many different points of view.

I've read very good scientific arguments as to why intermittent fasting is good and another one as to why it is bad. So it seems to be quite personal, quite subjective. Yes. As long as they involve Nutella, you don't really care. No, exactly. as long as i get my tablespoon full of nutella i'm absolutely fine

um so that that sort of led me to have a look around diets rather than diet okay um and there are millions of them there are far too many diets to to name. I was having a look around calories and the fact that, you know, back in my day, diets were all about counting calories. I was looking at what on earth actually is a calorie. Oh, okay. That's interesting. We read the little diagrams on the back of your pack of sandwiches that you get from the supermarket. It says this many calories, yada, yada. It suggests, and this is different country to country, culture to culture, but in the West it suggests that the average female should be eating

around 2,000 calories a day, the average male 2,500, to maintain your current weight. If you want to lose weight, you should eat fewer calories or burn more calories and vice versa. But a calorie, if you look at those little nutrition wheels on the back, calorie starts with a K. It's spelt K-C-A-L, cal. Which looks like kilocalories to me.

That's exactly what it is. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So it turns out a calorie with a small C is a scientific measure. Yeah. A calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree celsius wow okay i've learned something today that's brilliant it's not bad is it it's a good definition um and it's the equivalent

to about 4.18 joules okay for anyone who's interested um very niche um so that is one calorie it's a very small amount of energy required to do a very very small task then you have a calorie as we use it in nutritional terms which is 1000 calories okay a calorie is so small that it's irrelevant um so the calories that we count are actually batches of 1000 calories with a small c so from this point on in the podcast when we say calorie we mean a thousand calories killer calorie okay yes exactly there are some creatures that only have like four mouthfuls of food a day yes of course uh but then they do get quite a lot of calories from like four mouthfuls of food a day yes of course uh but then they do get quite a lot of calories from those four mouthfuls sure for example the blue whale i mean it's got a

big mouth for a start and it only has four mouthfuls of food a day okay but each mouthful of food contains 457 000 calories oh my goodness so they have like three or four mouthfuls a day they they need about you know one and a half million calories a day wow but then again animals can get a bit big there's a there was an elephant in alaska that was was like putting on a bit of weight right and um it was uh it was it was up to about four and a half tons and so uh they they they built a six meter long treadmill for her it was like a like a running machine right to knock a few pounds off her and um yeah so and they changed her diet a little bit they made her hunt for food a bit more and they reckon that she lost about half half a. So, I mean, you know, that's definitely, in Alaska, that's beach body ready for an elephant.

Wow. Actually, talking of beach body ready, did you know that if you diet on holiday, you're three times more likely to argue with the person you're with? Really? Yeah. That's a great study. Yeah, you don't really go on holiday to diet, do you? You go on holiday to relax do you go on holiday to relax and sample the local cuisine yes

that sort of led me into thinking about are there different times of life different tasks different periods of which you need to take in more calories that's the average that a person should be taking in per day in order to maintain their weight okay but you sort of think about athletes or uh you know bodybuilders or mountain climbers mountain climbers people crossing the north pole all of that stuff people using you know a massive massive amount of calories to get through what they're doing. And that led me to Shackleton. Okay. Thank you to a particular listener who suggested this

because I was having a conversation with them and they said, oh, have you thought about Shackleton? You know who you are. When Ernest Shackleton and his team went on an expedition to cross Antarctica in 1914, they took a lot of food with them, knowing they were going to be out there for a certain period of time and therefore that's that's how much food they took with them i read a menu for their their christmas lunch okay christmas 1914 they served up anchovies in oil jugged hair

right turtle soup whitebait mince pies christ, figs, dates and crystallized fruit, tea, biscuits, rum and stout. Now, sadly, their ship got stranded and they were left on the ice for months and months and months before being able to be rescued. Yeah. And all of that food ran out. So they had to sort of turn to what was local, which was to say not an awful lot. No, of course. But in order to keep their calorific intake to to cope with the cold to cope with the trudging through the ice they had to keep their their

calories up somehow they they came up with a recipe for something called hoosh hoosh h double o s h hoosh hoosh and this was a a soup okay made of or penguin meat, quite a large quantity of seal or penguin fat, snow, which they obviously have quite a lot of, and crushed up ship's biscuits. And they essentially lived off this vile stuff just in order to sort of keep their energy high enough to get through um yeah brutal brutal conditions yeah there are you know the diet options you know there's there are special diet foods that you can buy for example there's diet coke yeah sure um who was a woman who was born in 1379. Right. What? That means explaining. So there's a Britain's National Archive.

They have a couple of Yorkshire whose name was Coke, which is thought to be a variant of cook. Okay. Had named their daughter Diet, spelt D-I-O-T. And she was born in 1379 in the west riding of yorkshire so we have the first record of a diet coke is is 1379 oh that's so obscure how do you find these things presumably every time she stopped doing some work she was having a diet coke break oh dear the the sad thing is that the humor would have been completely lost on them at the time back onto the idea of increasing your calorific intake for special quantities of work

yes um i had a quick look around athletes and and that sort of thing and i read an article about michael phelps the american swimmer oh right okay um and when he went to the 2008 beijing olympics he uh you know packed in an awful lot of calories to give himself the strength and energy he needed for his training um he was consuming around 10 000 calories a day which is sort of four to five times as much as the average person requires according to that earlier survey and um the amount of food that he ate in order to get these calories was astounding uh for breakfast i know we've already done an episode on breakfast but yeah let's do it again for breakfast every day he had three fried egg sandwiches with cheese tomatoes lettuce fried onions and mayonnaise followed by three chocolate chip pancakes followed by a five egg omelette three sugar-coated slices

of french toast a bowl of grits and two cups of coffee for breakfast every day congratulations you're now dead all right um for lunch he had half a kilo of pasta two large ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread smothered with mayo and a couple of energy drinks for dinner he had a pound of pasta with carbonara sauce a large pizza and some energy drinks every day and how big was this man slim you know he was he was a professional swimmer in the olympics he just needed that amount of calories in order to do the energy just to get through yeah yeah so that just sort of shows the balance of what you take in and what you do how much you expend that's amazing if i were to eat that many calories and lead the sedentary lifestyle that i lead yeah it would be enormous yes but if you're training to be an olympic swimmer

it balances itself out wow that, that's a diet. Isn't it? We'd mentioned very early on fad diets. Yes, go on. What have you found? Well, there are loads. There are. I mean, there are loads. I mean, we know there are lots of different diets.

I mean, you've got 32 teeth. Sure. So it makes sense to chew each mouthful of food 32 times before swallowing. Doesn't it just? Yeah. And this was a chap called, an American guy called Horace Fletcher. Right. Who invented this diet in the 19th century called Fletcherism.

Okay. Horace Fletcher was known as the great masticator. And yes, chewing each mouthful 32 times. Right. Elvis Presley was very fond of a diet called the sleeping beauty diet okay and this was basically you would you would sleep while sedated and the idea is that you don't eat when you're sleeping and you don't feel hungry oh so you just spend a large proportion of your day asleep and therefore yes you're not consuming yes and there's scientific evidence that it may be true because there's there's a hunger hormone called graylin and um if you if you sleep well um you have less of this hormone that makes you hungry oh i see

so obviously it's and it's hard it's difficult to eat while you're sleeping yes i would imagine so yeah or you could spark up you know you could get yourself cigarette in the early 20th century cigarette makers uh were advertising their products as a weight loss aid really oh yeah one uh in in 1929 there was a there was an ad that said lighter lucky and you'll never miss a sweet that makes you fat wow please note dear listeners we are not advocating any of these diets don't smoke no don't it's horrible even even even if it does suppress your appetite don't do it yeah uh you could always avoid a swamp i try to do that on a daily basis you do yeah in 1727 there

was a guy called thomas short i think he mistook uh causation for correlation right because he observed that fat people tended to live near swamps so he's basically he suggested that they move away from the swamp i'm i i really want to throw a shrek joke in there but i can't think how well maybe maybe you could do a shrek reference with the tapeworm diet. No, what's that? So you eat a tapeworm in a pill. Okay. And then these baby tapeworms grow up.

But there's a slight problem with this because they grow to about 25 feet long. And they cause seizures, meningitis, dementia. And they were outlawed by the government. Okay, so we won't do that then no you could try eating um cotton wool balls instead oh i read about this one basically you just dip them in juice or something and then you eat cotton wool balls um it's not recommended really and they sort of fill up in your stomach and make your stomach think that it's fuller than it actually is and then then stop eating yeah um but that's been widely condemned hasn't it for it has the fact that you can you can choke on the cotton balls and the cotton gets in your intestines and all sorts of nasties i mean they were saying you can use tissues instead but frankly it doesn't doesn't make any difference fine okay okay uh

there's the slimming soap diet right in the 1930s uh people believed that wash you could wash away fat with soaps like there's one called fat oh no it's like fat hyphen oh hyphen no brilliant and they were just hand soaps okay and you would eat that uh no you would just wash away the fat wow that's very odd there's one that you and i might quite like go on um the drinking man's diet okay listening no restrictions on gin or vodka right uh you can eat steak and martinis lovely you have you have like alcohol at every meal okay um and this was a book that was published in the 1960s um but it was um it was declared unhealthful by harvard university i know that's a shame i know there's a diet that lord byron i was very keen on right um he and

actually it's a diet that these days people still like which is the vinegar diet oh i've not heard of that what's that so you eat um whatever you like and you have like a like a shot every so often of vinegar with the mother in it and the mother is what makes vinegar vinegar it's like the the cloudy stuff okay and um he had a along with a cup of tea and a raw egg and then we i think we had an we had an episode on cereals didn't we we mentioned um mentioned the reason for cornflakes oh yes we did as a as a means to reduce one's lustfulness yeah sylvester graham right the inventor of the graham cracker okay yeah uh he believed that people were fat due to too much sex really yep okay so he was he basically had an

abstinence focused diet right and and he he would ask you to replace sex with graham crackers i mean oh there's just there's so much to say about that i know probably most of it inappropriate yes it's a bit blue isn't it a little bit blue but that's another thing of course you can do is wear blue glasses that's that's the vision diet right uh that's based on the idea that red and yellow colored foods are most palatable you know meat and fries and ripe produce and if you wear blue glasses this makes your food look less appetizing which means that you technically might so you just want to don't fancy it so much yeah isn't that clever that's what a way to play a trick on your mind and finally there's there's

one which is basically a clip your nose while you eat diet so basically you cover your nose or or clip your nose with your fingers so you can't smell yes while you eat because we know that the sense of smell is actually quite a lot of the sense of taste please listen to our previous episode on smells and so this blunts your sense of taste which means you focus on the actual appetite and you stop eating when you're full because it's not doesn't taste of anything right those are a few fad diets anyway i had a quick look as often i do in these cases at the guinness book of world records oh yes there are loads there are just so many records to do with this highest number of calories consumed lowest number of calories

consumed longest period of time gone without eating food it's just over a year what still don't actually know how that worked but it was is that with drinking still drinking but no actual food no solid food for just over a year very odd um wow but i found the guinness world record this is quite subjective but um apparently according to guinness this is the strangest diet in the world ever and um this was a french gentleman called michel lotito uh who was uh in 1950, around the age of nine, he suddenly realized he could eat glass and metal without it damaging him. I've heard of this man, I think. I've no idea how he could eat these things without it damaging him, but apparently...

Monsieur Mange-Tu. Yes, so his nickname was Monsieur Mange-Tu. Mange-Tu meaning eat everything. I thought it was those little peas. It is, but you eat them in the pod and therefore it's called eat everything. I thought it was those little peas. It is, but you eat the, you eat them in the pod and therefore it's called eat everything cause you eat the whole thing. But anyway,

um, so from, from 1959 up until his death in, um, 2007. So he lived, you know, a reasonable length of time for someone who had such a strange diet.

Um, he had almost nothing but, but metal and glass and plastic and things like that. For example? For example, 18 bicycles, 15 supermarket trolleys, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, didn't say whether it was single or double a pair of skis a cessna light aircraft and a computer um i don't actually know how that works without you know ripping your insides to shreds breaking your teeth um i don't understand it at all but i guess people swallow wedding rings don't they so yeah but they're quite small i mean quite small he's picked apart a light aircraft bruce very odd so yes that's uh that's the world's strangest diet according to guinness that is

definitely a strange diet so that's all the information we have around diet and diets thank you everyone for listening we really appreciate it thank you so much for for tuning into us and subscribing and liking and telling your friends absolutely all the things which you are undoubtedly doing um please come again next week where we'll uncover some more interesting facts from another seemingly dull subject yes thank you all for listening see you next time cheerio bye bye bye now