Quirks and Quarks - What we hope to see on the far side of the moon, and more…

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

On their mission around the moon, Jeremy Hansen and his crewmates will become the only four people on Earth to ever lay eyes on the entire far side of the moon. Since joining the space program, the Artemis astronauts have been undergoing intensive geological training to help train their eyes to look for lunar features that satellites can't pick up. PLUS:How Neanderthals skillfully hunted and butchered a giant elephantFilming fish over their lifetime reveals behaviours that lead to longevityHow our food environment shapes our tastes — and health

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, This is Jeremy. We are going for all humanity.

A Canadian is on his way to the moon, and geologists hope he has a rockin good time. You know, the shadows are such on the moon that just at a certain angle they might see some features that perhaps we've missed in satellite images. And new analysis of a 125,000-year-old elephant skeleton shows Neanderthal hunting skills were impressively sharp. For me, it tells me that they were excellent hunters, and they were also not the brutes that maybe they were imagined like 100 years ago or 50 years ago. Plus, a new book satisfies our hunger for some clear nutrition science, and, well,

watching fish can tell us about how to live longer. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. It's the moment we've all been waiting for. 22 years after the U.S. declared humans were going back to the moon, 17 years after Colonel Jeremy Hanson, a fighter pilot from the outskirts of London, Ontario, was selected to be an astronaut, and three years after NASA announced Hansen would join the first crude Artemis mission to the moon. It was launch day for Artemis II. Welcome, and thank you for joining us live from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where we are beginning a new chapter in America's human spaceflight story. What a historic day to be here.

What a historic day to be here. Obviously, for what we see right behind us here, the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft on Launchpad 39B. Artemis 2 is a nearly 10-day flight test to prove NASA can safely fly astronauts around the moon before attempting to land on it in just two years, hopefully. Artemis II is the first human mission to the moon in more than 50 years and the first crude mission aboard NASA's powerful SLS, space launch system. And it looks like we're getting ready to ingress here.

Yep, thumbs up from Reid. Everybody configured with their suits, and so in we go. This was the second launch for the SLS. The only other time the super heavy lift rocket blasted off from Earth was in 2022 for the Artemis 1 mission test flight, which didn't have any humans on board. Go ahead, one instructor. Yes, sir. You have a go to proceed with countdown. Copy that, I'll put it in work. In their final checks, NASA officials detected a couple of minor issues they had to troubleshoot,

one related to their flight termination system, and the other, a battery issue with the launch abort system. GLS mainline has been initiated. T-minus 10 minutes and counting. At the time we're recording this show, it's the morning after the launch on Thursday. So the plan is that the astronauts will start testing Orion's flight and safety systems after they maneuver their way to high Earth orbit. One minute. Then they'll perform their last engine burn to prepare.

them farther than any humans have gone before, looping around to the far side of the moon before gravity pulls them back home. On the way to the moon, the crew will complete a series of checkouts of the Orion spacecraft. That's a test flight, so we're going to put the vehicle through its paces and check all the systems ensuring that everything is ready to go. And then all of those checkouts will be interrupted by a lunar flyby, and it'll be very enjoyable for us to watch the crew and enjoyable for them to watch as they flyers. fly past the moon. They're going at least 5,000 nautical miles past the moon, which is much higher

than previous missions have gone. And so the moon's going to look a little bit smaller. A comparison I can give you is if you held a basketball out from your hand. That's about a sight distance that the moon will appear to the crew in the window. Sitting on the launch pad with 8.8 million pounds of thrust underneath them, it was go time. And here we go. Ten, nine, nine. 8, 7, RS-25 engines, 8, 2, 1, booster ignition, and lift off. The crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins. At 6.35 p.m. local time, Jeremy Hansen made history as the first Canadian to journey to

the moon and beyond to deep space. Outstanding stand, we see the same, and we have a beautiful moon rise. We're headed right at it. Along their journey, Jeremy and his crewmates will become the only four people on Earth to have ever laid eyes on the entire far side of the moon. A team of geologists will be on standby to assist the astronauts on where to point their cameras and their eyes during their historic flyby. Here's what Jeremy said about this opportunity when I last spoke with him,

late last fall. The geologists have really been, you know, hammering that into our heads that you might make some really important observations from a scientific point of view. And it took me a while to believe them, but I'm now convinced that the human eye is an incredible instrument, and our brain is able to just kind of look across the surface of the moon and pick out things that are different. And they have been focusing in on specific areas that are different in the imagery that they have.

And they want to know if we can tell, if any of the world, of them are a different kind of different is the best way that I can describe it. This is why Hanson, along with the other Artemis astronauts, have been undergoing intensive geological training in locations around Canada, the southwestern United States, and Iceland. Back in 2024, we spoke with Jeremy after one of those geological excursions in Iceland. Here he is. Just letting the air out of our tires before we head into the really rough terrain to get to our campsite today. I was pretty lucky to have the extraordinary experience of heading to Iceland with just a wealth of knowledge from our geology instructors to learn about volcanic activity.

And basically Iceland is just one volcano after another. Traveling here in Iceland with my buddy Patrick, NASA geologist from Goddard, and we're just making our way into our campsites. So we've got a few more hours of driving, and starting the train is starting to change now. So kind of like we're heading to the moon. Going to different places, we're seeing different aspects of geologic formations. We're seeing what it looks like when you see ice, ice water. You know, we now know there's going to be ice on the moon. We don't know exactly what it'll look like.

But Iceland is, of course, one of the places in the world where you can see ice breaches, not too far below the surface. And so we were able to see some examples of that. The weather changes quickly. So you've got to be ready for everything. You know, there's a little bit of discomfort involved in that. And my experiences with exploration and my expectations of space exploration are there's discomfort involved in it as well.

So if you're on the moon, you're in a space suit. You don't have to worry about wind or rain. But being in a space suit, it's just uncomfortable. You can't do little things like scratch your nose, but you also can't grab a snack or use a restroom. Being explorer is about willing to sacrifice a little bit for the sake of science and the sake of learning. In Iceland definitely felt like that. But that's fun and exciting. I feel very grateful for the opportunities to participate in Earth exploration in some extraordinary places with some extraordinary explorers here on Earth. That was Jeremy Hansen in 2024 on a geological

expedition in Iceland. One of his geology instructors, who Jeremy and the other Canadian Space Agency astronauts have been out with on several research excursions, also led one of the Artemis Field Geology training trips to Labrador. Dr. Gordon Ossinsky is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Western University in London, Ontario, who will be part of the official geology team for the next Artemis mission to the lunar surface. Dr. Ossinsky is in Florida, where he was a special guest of the Canadian Space Agency, who got him closer access to the launch than most. Hello, Dr. Ossinsky. Welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me back on the show, Bob. Now, I understand this, was your first launch? How did it go?

It sure was. And what a first launch to witness. It was a thrilling day yesterday, but yeah, probably all the most stressful a few minutes of my life, too, waiting for that rocket to launch, knowing that Jeremy Hanson, who I've got to know as a good friend now, was strapped to the top. Yeah, what was that like to see Jeremy, who you've been working with all these years, actually take to the skies? I mean, absolutely amazing. You could argue who's been waiting his entire life for this, but he's been an astronaut since 2009, has been waiting a long time for his first mission. And again, you know, for him, what a first mission, right? first time humans are flying in the Orion spacecraft,

first time launching on this rocket, and first time we're returning humans to the moon since 1972. How close will they get to the moon surface? It will be getting, depends on the exact final trajectory, but they'll be getting to within a few thousand kilometers. It could be kind of five to six, seven thousand kilometers of the lunar surface, so relatively close. Well, how scientifically valuable are you expecting their observations may be of the geology of the moon,

especially since we already have satellite images of the far side? Yeah, the science of this mission I really consider kind of icing. You know, first and foremost, the goals of Artemis II are to put the spacecraft through its paces so that we're getting ready to go back to the lunar surface. And, you know, Jeremy and the astronauts have talked about this quite a bit. They see that as their first and main goal. They'll be doing some kind of health sciences-type research too, you know, monitoring the radiation environment,

particularly as they leave the protection of Earth's magnetosphere and get to the moon. And then they do have some really nice high-resolution cameras and they will be taking some images of the surface of the moon looking if there's any potential small impacts that occur, if there's any impact flashes during their time. and they will have a unique perspective, though. So even though we've seen and we've imaged the far side of the moon with satellites,

they will be seeing it from a different perspective than any robotic, really, or human spacecraft has seen. And, you know, the shadows are such on the moon that just at a certain angle, they might see some features that perhaps we've missed in satellite images. There is some interesting signs that they're going to be watching out for just as they go into shadow, then reappear from the far side of the moon at these kind of terminator positions. There's some evidence that dust gets lofted up, and so they'll be in a really excellent

position to perhaps capture those very short period effects happening. Well, give me an example of a specific geological feature on the far side of the moon that you're hoping they might spot. There's quite a substantial science team that will already be working away in what we call the new science evaluation room at the John. and space center. And they've been working over, you know, the last couple of years to come up with a series of targets that hopefully the astronauts can image.

It really is quite interesting that if you look at images of the far side and the near side of the moon, they're very different. You know, we're used to from Earth pairing up at the moon on a full night. And you see those really big, roundish, dark areas. Those are that areas of, you know, thousands of square kilometers where larvae, came to the lunar surface and filled in these giant impact basins. The far side of the moon has very little of those volcanic kind of eruptions, but there are a few, and there's some very distinctive ones in certain craters that I know are on their list,

that they'll be targeting. What kind of geological training did you do with Jeremy and the other Artemis astronauts to help them better understand what they'll be looking at at the moon? Like this mission, it was also a trip that we took the Artemis two astronauts on to also prepare for the surface mission where this kind of training is even more important. So back in September, 2023, I had the pleasure of bringing up Jeremy and Christina and actually Jeremy's backup, Jenny Dibbons, up to this unique impact crater that we have here in Canada in northern Labrador called the Camastastasthan Lake impact structure. And so, you know, the crew is not, you know, geology trained. And so it's kind of brushing up their basic fundamental geology skills, you know, how you do field work, what you do when you look and collect samples. But also in this site, teaching them about the impact cratering process, the products of impact cratering that we will see on the moon.

And then getting into some very specifics and why we go to this site is that it's not only an impact crater that's quite well preserved, but it also, formed in this rock type of north of site. And so when you look up at the moon, all of that light gray kind of whitish area is anorthosite. And it's pretty rare rock on Earth. It's very common on the moon, but we had it in this impact crater in northern Labrador. Wow. So, I mean, how similar or different are the impact craters on the Earth compared to the ones they'll be looking at on the moon? They're basically identical. You know, this is a geological process that is ubiquitous throughout the solar system. They form the same way. You know, you hurtle a giant chunk of rock at a planetary surface, and you form craters in much the same way. So the crater

form, you know, the shape and morphology doesn't change. It changes because of gravity. So, for example, these small bowl-shaped craters we call simple craters that we have here on Earth like Meteor Crater in Arizona. Because of the lower gravity on the, the moon, those are stable on Earth up to about 20 kilometers across as opposed to about three or four kilometers on Earth. But you just scale it for gravity and everything is

identical. And then the products, you know, the new rocks that are produced from the impacts are also the same. You know, there's this one amazing outcrop at this Camistastasin lake structure that is just a brecher so completely broken up rock formed by the impact and it's

100% this endothosite rock and, you know, you can put those rocks right next to Apollo samples, and you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference. It's interesting how Canada is an analog for the moon for astronaut training, because I think the Apollo astronauts came here as well, didn't they? They did. They came up to Sudbury for the final two missions, Apollo 16 and 17. They came to Sudbury, and it's not because as many people think You know, Sudbury was blackened and there was no vegetation back then. It really truly was because of the unique geology of Sudbury,

which is a gigantic old meteorite impact structure in southern Ontario. Now, I hear that you were in contact with Jeremy leading up to the mission. What was your last message to him? My last message was a text message, kind of the day before launch, just wishing him, good luck, and, you know, hoping that the launch, which was then, tomorrow, goes on. without any issues. And we're all with you in that sentiment,

so we'll see him when he comes back. Absolutely. Dr. Olsinski, thank you so much. Thank you. Dr. Gordon Ossinsky is a professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Western University in London, Ontario. Fly me to the moon.

Let me play among the star. It's okay, June. I understand. I have been watching you, your whole life. I was watching when you were born. I was watching when you took your first step. That's a scene from the 1998 movie The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey plays a character

who lives his entire life inside a dome under the watchful eye of thousands of cameras as part of a reality TV show. Fortunately, that's not the kind of thing we do in real life, at least with humans, but scientists have done something like that in the lab with fish. In a new study, researchers recorded African turquoise killifish over the course of their entire lives to study the aging process. And they found that by

analyzing the video footage of these fish in minute detail, they can predict how long a fish will live based on the behavior it displays early in life. Dr. Claire Bedbrook is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. She led the study. Dr. Bedbrook, welcome. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. First of all, what can you learn by observing these fish from birth to death that you can't learn otherwise? What we've really found in this study is the behaviors in animal exhibits just throughout the 24-hour day really teach us a lot about not only an animal's sort of current health and current age, but also tells us about their sort of aging trajectory where they're headed and even.

and how long they'll live. Well, tell me about these fish. Why were they the best subjects for the experiment? Yeah, so we focus on the African turquoise killifish because it has a naturally compressed lifespan. So these fish live for between four to eight months, meaning that we can really quite rapidly study the whole aging process from beginning to end.

Well, I guess monitoring an animal for four or five months is easier than monitoring a person for 100. years. Yes, definitely for the time frame of a postdoc. So how do you go about monitoring these fish over their entire lives? So our setup is we have cameras mounted on the ceiling that have a bird's eye view into tanks where animals are individually housed. And those cameras go constantly at 20 frames per second. And animals are put in these tanks when they reach adolescent. So for the fish, that's one month of age, and then they stay in the same tank all the way until their natural death.

And we just record the process continuously. How many fish were involved in the experiment? We've recorded whole lifespans for around 100 animals, but we've now accumulated quite a lot more data for shorter segments of animals' lives. So these animals, they start out all at the same age and they're all the same species. what kind of differences did you see over their lifetimes and their behavior? So these are animals that are relatively homogeneous genetically. There is some underlying diversity there still,

but we are struck by the very large range in kind of aging trajectories that we observe. So we have some animals that we are sort of shorter lived and some animals that are really long lived. so around 100-day difference between those two populations. Wow, that's a lot. What about similarities? Did you see any patterns in how they aged? Yeah, so overall, across the population, we see that animals actually go through a pretty similar kind of progression throughout aging,

meaning we see, we observe these kind of stages that animals go through as they age that are characterized by different combinations of behaviors. And consistently across the population, we see animals go through similar stages. However, when they transition from one stage to another, varies depending on which animal you're looking at. So what are you saying, that aging is not sort of a gradual change? It comes in steps? Yeah, that's really what we see. And something that I was really surprised when we got the data.

sort of initial hypothesis going into the study was that aging is a pretty gradual process, where, you know, each day you're kind of getting slightly worth compared to the day before. But instead, what we're seeing when we're using behavior as a read out of aging is that animals will stay really consistent, behaviorally consistent one day to the next for quite long periods of time, followed by these relatively abrupt transitions into kind of a distinct life stage where they exhibit a different combination of behaviors. Well, how much can their individual behavior tell you about how they age? Early on in life, differences in behavior, especially behaviors such as sleep and activity during the day versus night, tell us a lot about an animal's future aging and future lifespan.

So sleep behavior during the day was seeing a lot more in animals that were destined for a short lifespan. So sleep restricted to the night period was really correlated with lifespan, longer lifespan. Wow. So get a good night's sleep. Yeah. We also see just looking at. at kind of peak activity, so sort of sprint speed or the maximum velocity that an animal will reach within a given day, that is elevated in animals that are destined for a longer lifespan. Wow.

So get lots of sleep at night. Stay active. Yeah. Anything else? So really, when we look across all the behaviors that we're monitoring, there are many different behavioral changes that are contributing. I'm really focusing on ones that are probably the most. relatable. Were you surprised to see such a clear relationship between behavior and lifespan?

I think it makes a lot of sense that behavior is a good readout of our current health and age, just because behavior is really sort of the functional readout of all of the systems in our body. But I was surprised at how well it could separate out animals that were destined for a long lifespan versus short lifespan, even pretty early on in life. So I think I was surprised at how informative it is at an early age. Well, if you saw this relationship between activity and sleep and lifespan and these fish, how widely do you think your findings apply to other animals? We, of course, have focused on fish here, but my guess would be that what we're observing in fish would be conserved in mammals and maybe even humans.

I will say that there's really exciting data in humans that, for example, the sort of stage architecture of aging that I was talking about, it looks like something like that could also be happening in humans based on recent data. So my prediction is that a lot of what we're observing would be conserved, but of course we would need to test it. Well, of course, that's the question we all have is how does this relate to human activity? Yeah, exactly. And I agree we probably don't want to recreate the Truman Show at a large scale, but I think it would be really interesting to use more cross-sectional data that people, for example, you know, monitoring activity levels just from your Apple Watch. Data like that might be really informative about your sort of current biological age as well as even what trajectory. you're moving along. So I think that would be a really exciting direction to move into. Dr. Bedbrook, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Dr. Claire Bedbrook is a bioengineer and neuroscientist and a basic life research scientist at Stanford University. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, we get some clarity on why nutrition is so confusing, from myths about metabolism to why we can't stop eating ultra-processed foods. Maybe just people like ultra-processed foods more, but it turned out that folks didn't rate the meals any more pleasant on the ultra-processed diet than they did on the minimally processed diet. So there's something else going on. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves.

I think it is murder. just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts. In 1948, quarry workers in Leringen, Germany, made a surprising discovery. They found the skeleton of a 125,000-year-old straight tusk elephant after its bones kept getting stuck in their equipment. And embedded in its ribs was a long wooden spear, which would have belonged to the Neanderthals known to live in the area at the time. Further excavation revealed impeccably preserved plant remains and thousands of other bones from 16 different animal species. Now, for the first time, researchers have done a detailed, analysis of all the material from the site, and their findings confirm that the Neanderthals

really knew what they were doing when it came to hunting down a good meal. Evo Ferhia is a zoo archaeologist who led this research. He's a PhD candidate at the University of Tubigen and works with the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hanover, Germany. Hello and welcome to our program. Thank you very much for inviting me to the program. Very happy to be here. First of all, take me back 125,000 years. What was life like for these Neanderthals

at this particular site? To me, it looks like a paradise. So temperatures were a bit warmer than today. You should imagine it's quite forested. Maybe some open landscape, but most of it is quite forested. And you see a variety of animals. So you see elephants,

you see rhinos, plants growing everywhere. and it's situated just around a nice little lake. What was the discovery of these elephant bones that made them such a big deal? First of all, such a big deal, of course, because they found a spear associated with it. And this is something that's never occurred before. Like skeletons of elephants have been found more often. But finding the murder weapon together with the victim is something unusual. Murder weapon? What do you mean?

So I always like to look at the sites we're excavating at like crime scenes. So what we're looking at, we're trying to prove that Neanderthals were hunting these animals. So you have to go in and add it as a detective. And murder weapon, yeah, it's a hunting weapon, of course. But the goal, of course, is to kill the animal so you can eat it. How big was the spear? The spear was two meter 40s. length. So you should also imagine it's not a throwing spear, but it's a thrusting spear that we found in

Leringer. So how did you go about proving that the Neanderthals actually hunted that elephant and just didn't stumble upon one that had died naturally? To go back to the crime scene, you always have to look at the motive as well. And that was a piece of evidence that was somehow missing in this case. So we knew that the skeleton was found together with the spear, but there were a lot of doubts because there were no pictures at the time taken of the fine situation itself. And somehow there was also no research done on the elephant bones themselves to see if there were maybe cut marks. Because these cut marks, they can prove on one side that Neanderthals were there and they were taking meat. But you can also see more or less at what time they were there.

Well, an elephant's a pretty big animal. What level of hunting skills would it take to bring something down using a spear? It takes a lot of skills, indeed. There are different strategies. You can hunt elephants with spears if you're doing it with the big group and try to throw spears at it from different sides, distract the elephant, try to wound it. And something that elephants naturally do then, they flee,

and they go towards water bodies. because if an elephant is in pain, it likes to go into water because it eases the pain a little bit. And this is probably the site where it ended up in Leeringen, because we're dealing with a lake situation, and maybe that's where either the final blow was given by this thrusting spear that we found, or maybe the spear was already inside the elephant

and it just died at this location. Wow. So it takes knowledge of the animal, it takes a group effort and also the animal's anatomy to know how to kill it off at the last minute. And then to also butcher it. So they really knew what they were doing with this animal. What did you find when you took a closer look at the bones?

I was quite surprised that some people have already studied these bones, but more from a paleontological point of view. So looking at the anatomy of the bones, but nobody noticed these cut marks. and they're quite obvious if you see them in person. And what we did is recorded every cut mark that we could find. And we saw that they were mainly on the vertebrae and on the ribs of the elephant. What did the cut marks look like?

They are very sharp and thin lines, so to say. Like Neanderthals were not using steel knives, of course. They were using knives made out of flint. And these leave very particular marks on the bone. surface. So the Neanderthals were skilled tool makers so that they could do the butchering as well. Yes. So what they were using mainly were simple flakes made out of stone. But these are the sharpest tools that you can find. And even to butcher an elephant, you don't need a huge hand axe. A small flake is enough. And also these flakes we found around the elephant skeletons.

So how much food then would they get from an elephant carcass? So if you have an elephant that's just below four meters, it can weigh up to 10 tons. So that's a huge amount of material. But from that, you also have, of course, the bones and unusable parts. In terms of meat, it would maybe be about three and a half tons, so to say. Boy, keep me through that. What were they after? Based on the cut marks, we could also see that they were not just cutting off meat from the outside of the carcass. so from the ribs, but also from the inside of the ribs.

And these cuts are cuts that you make if you want to take out the organs of the elephant. And elephants also have large pockets of fat, especially in the feet, which are also very interesting for hunter-gatherers, because fat is very necessary in terms of energy. Now, you mentioned there were other animals around besides the elephants. So what other indications of hunting did you see? We also found cut marks on the remains of aurochs, of bear and of beaver. And especially for the beaver, I was personally quite surprised.

What were they getting out of the beaver? If they can take down an elephant, a beaver is pretty small. A beaver skin is really nice. So the quality of a beaver skin is really good. And what we saw from the cut marks is that they were actually after the skin of the beaver, but also took the meat, of course. So they're using it for clothing? So one of my colleagues always suggest they were wearing beaver hats.

Maybe that's a good solution for the beaver. That's very Canadian. We appreciate that. But yeah, beavers, again, are also very fat animals. So it's a very nice nutrient to have a beaver in your diet. So when you put all of this together, a variety of plants, a variety of animals, including a giant elephant that was butchered, what do these findings tell you about Neanderthal culture?

For me, it tells me that they were. were excellent hunters. They knew about the behavior of these different types of animals. And they were also not the brutes that maybe they were imagined like 100 years ago or 50 years ago. And it's really adding up to the knowledge we've gathered from the past two decades, more or less, that Neanderthals were very much like us. They were excellently skilled survivors. And I can imagine after taking down the elephant that evening, there'd be quite a feast, quite a party. Yeah, I can imagine that as well. And especially I would go for the best parts of the elephant if you hunted it.

What's the best part of an elephant? I was afraid you were going to ask that question. I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience with eating elephants. But to me, it's probably the organs. So maybe the heart, the liver and the fatty parts, of course, from the feet. Mr. Ferhaya, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you as well.

Evo Ferhaya is a zoo archaeologist who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tubigin. For something so universal and essential to life, food can be a complicated, confusing affair. It seems almost mind-boggling that we can't seem to agree on what to eat, how to eat, where to eat, and even when to eat, in order to properly fuel our brains and bodies. Nutrition and metabolism scientist Kevin Hall has spent his career trying to unpack this confusion. During his two decades as a leading researcher at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, his work has included studies on the metabolism of participants in the reality show The Biggest Loser and digging deep into the effects of ultra-processed foods on our bodies.

Now, he's teamed up with a lot of the world. with health journalist Julia Ballouz on a new book where they try to break through the myths and the hype and clearly lay out the latest science of how what we eat affects our bodies. The book is called Food Intelligence, the science of how food both nourishes and harms us. Dr. Hall, hello, and welcome back to our program. Thanks very much for having me. Well, your book goes into a huge amount of detail about what happens when we eat, but let's just go over some of the basics. Just break it down for me. What happens inside our body when we take in food? Yeah, it is an incredibly complicated process. One of the things that we're doing is digesting and absorbing the key nutrients that we need,

and those nutrients are broken up into the macronutrients, the carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, as well as the micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals that our body needs to function. And depending on the composition of the food that we eat, our body does very, very different things. If we're eating more carbs, for example, we will burn more carbs and spare the fat that was eaten for storage if we're eating excess calories. More importantly, I think, is that people are often unaware of the fact that we have signals inside our body, a variety of hormones and neural pathways that are telling our brains something about our needs, our body's needs. And we're only beginning to understand the neuroscience of this. But basically, we have these

internal signals that help us determine over long periods of time to get the nutrients that we need. And much of our eating, despite the fact that we are consciously aware of, every bite that we might take, is operating with some sort of control over our appetite and being guided by these internal signals below our conscious awareness. You mean like when you get a craving for something, your body's talking to you? Yeah. I mean, even below that level of craving, just how much you, just how much you, choose to eat, when you choose to eat, paying attention to environmental cues, like when you walk

past a pastry shop or something like that, whereas in some occasions you might just walk straight past in other occasions, those signals might, you know, peak your interest and you go in. Those signals from the body are talking to the brain in ways that we're only beginning to understand. Well, in the book, you talk a lot about the food environment and how that's causing so many people to struggle with things like obesity or diet-related diseases. What do you mean by the food environment? Yeah, I mean, it's one of those really intriguing topics, which is trying to understand, you know, what are the main drivers of the fact that we have such high rates of obesity

in Canada, the U.S., and many other industrialized nations. How is it that these seemingly amazing control systems that our body has with these signals telling our brain what our needs are, how can they potentially become disrupted in ways that cause us to overconsume calories? The food environment is more than just the foods themselves. That's how they're marketed towards, as how readily available they are, how convenient, how inexpensive, the fact that many of the foods that would have taken your grandma, you know, hours to prepare as a special treat on a weekend, are now available in packaged form, ready to heat in minutes. these kind of beyond the foods themselves aspects of our food environment are also making these

opportunities much more prevalent, and the systems that we have evolved for appetite control and regulation of body weight are no longer as effective as they once were. So how much of an influence do you think the food environment has on what we eat? I think it has an influence that is a very large amount and much larger than most people are aware of. It's really fascinating that, you know, You know, we all seem to think that our food choices and what we ate was primarily determined by our willpower and our self-control. And there's certainly an aspect of that, but I think that, like in many areas of science, the more we learn about it, the more we realize that there are biological controls in place as well that we can struggle against for some period of time, but eventually biology seems to win out in the end. Well, one of your more notorious studies was on participants of the reality show,

the biggest loser, where people struggling with weight problems were put on intensive exercise programs to see who could lose the most in the shortest time, I guess. What did that study tell you about how metabolism works? Right. It was really kind of a crazy study that we were involved with, a so-called natural experiment. Not so natural, it turns out, where these contestants, were engaging, as you said, in extreme dieting behavior and extreme exercise behavior and losing weight at a very rapid clip. And at the time, there was this idea that if people exercised

enough, they wouldn't have a slowing of metabolism and they would have the greatest amount of weight loss rather than folks who didn't exercise. And so we decided to look at metabolic rate in these participants in the biggest loser competition. We found exactly the opposite. It was that people who were the most successful engaging in these weight loss efforts who had the greatest slowing of metabolism and that the exercise didn't really impede that slowing of metabolism, the way that had been hypothesized before. And not only that, but the slowing of metabolism didn't seem to predict who would regain the most weight in the future after this unsustainable intervention went away and people went back to their day-to-day life.

And so this notion that metabolism was somehow causally determining how much weight somebody either lost or were able to maintain didn't seem to play out in the biggest loser experiment, which again, once again, teaches us that, you know, we actually have to look at the data and go beyond our preconceptions about what that relationship might be. Well, were you surprised by that? I mean, what's going on there? Yeah, at first, I was extremely surprised by the fact that when people were followed up six years later and had regained on average two-thirds of the weight that they'd lost, that their metabolic rate didn't seem to change on average. The working hypothesis is that these people became so physically active over the course of that six years, and they actually did become quite a lot more physically active than they were at the beginning, that there is some relationship between. how we budget our calories for physical activity versus other aspects, including our resting metabolism. This is an idea that has a long history in human ecology and evolution. And it's this idea that we have trade-offs in our so-called energy budget so that if we budget more calories for physical activity, we might tune down and turn down some other properties of our bodies to save those calories. And maybe that's

we were observing in the biggest loser folks. Boy. Now, in your book, you not only talk about the experiment you do, but your co-author put herself through the ringer as a test subject for a number of projects. Tell me about that. Sure. Yeah, my co-author is an amazing Canadian health journalist, Julia Ballouz, who participated in some studies at the NIH, which I wasn't involved with, but she also participated in some self-experimentation by signing herself up for various precision nutrition companies who would take poop samples and try to test microbiome, as well as putting continuous glucose monitors on her arms to measure her glucose fluctuations throughout the day, and blood samples and genetic

testing. And we were really interested in trying to see how consistent the results were from various companies that were making recommendations and doing these various different tests. And what we found was that they all provided pretty good advice for diet that is pretty generic, you know, eating more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes and things like that and cutting down and added sugars and saturated fat and whatnot. But interestingly, when you dug into a bit of the details, there were some, you know, market differences that seemed contradictory between the different programs. Foods that were on the go-to list for one company were on the no-no list for another company.

And so it's hard to square that those details are really providing, you know, beneficial information. It always comes back down to what your grandma told you. Eat right and exercise. It does. And I guess the real thing that we're trying to add to that conversation is how much more difficult it is nowadays in the food environment that we have, given that it is making it much more difficult for folks to stick to that sort of advice. Well, you spend a lot of your research time looking at ultra-process foods. First of all, what do you categorize as ultra-processed, and what are they doing to our body?

Yeah, this concept of ultra-processed foods is a pretty new concept. It was devised by a researcher named Carlos Montero from Brazil and his team. It has a very long definition, but the upshot is that if it contains ingredients that you wouldn't find in your home kitchen or a chef-wif. typically use them in a restaurant, then that probably categorizes the food as ultra-processed. And so what we were interested in is basically the idea of, well, is it really more about the ultra-processing of foods that's driving poor health consequences, or is it something about the nutrient content of foods? And so we've done studies when I was at the National Institutes of health where we would match various different food environments for the calories presented and the

nutrients and vary the number of foods that were so-called ultra-prostis, either from zero to up to 80 percent of calories that were presented to people. And in our study that we published, this was the first randomized control trial of diets varying in ultra-processed foods but match for these different nutrients. We found that people, when they were exposed to an ultra-processed diet, they tended to overeat calories and gain weight. whereas when those same people were exposed to a diet that had no ultra-processed foods, they spontaneously lost weight, even when we told them they shouldn't be trying to change their

weight. They should just eat as much or as little as they liked. And what they didn't know is that we were measuring all their leftovers to determine exactly how many calories they ate. So what is it about the ultra-processed food? Is it that what? It's like higher in salt, so you go after it or high in sugar or something like that? What is it that makes it so appealing to us? That is a great question.

And it certainly wasn't those other aspects of the food environment because they didn't have to prepare the foods or buy the foods and they weren't being marketed to them while they were living with us. There is something special about diets, high and ultra-processed foods that were only beginning to work out what that might be. We have various different theories, and we've designed follow-up studies to try to test those theories. One that was a leading theory until we started to look at the data more closely was that maybe just people like ultra-processed foods more. But it turned out that folks didn't rate the meals any more pleasant on the ultra-processed diet than they did on the minimally processed diet. So there's something else going on. Our top working theories are that in the process of making these ultra-process foods, what manufacturers tend to do is they dry out the foods, they disrupt the so-called food matrix and remove a lot of the water.

That's to extend shelf life and prevent bacterial growth. But what that ends up doing is concentrating the calories in the first. food. So for every bite that you eat, you're eating more calories. And those foods tend to be softer and easier to chew and swallow, so your eating rate goes up. And then there are other properties of the foods like pairs of nutrients passing certain thresholds, so foods that are high in both fat and sugar or fat and salt or salt and carbs, these so-called hyper-palatable formulations of foods that might be, again, driving our cravings and our wantings that go beyond our conscious level. of saying whether or not we like them. So should people avoid ultra-processed foods entirely?

It's a great question. A lot of people would say that that is wise advice, and I would say that if you are one of those privileged people who can avoid, you know, something like 60 to 70 percent of the food supply, which is what it is in Canada and the U.S. right now, which are ultra-processed foods, and do you have a backyard garden or something like that and really enjoy cooking? and have the skills and the motivation to do so, sure, it might be beneficial for you to do that. For the rest of us who don't have that level of privilege, it's going to be really tough to avoid ultra-processed foods. And so what I think we need to do is we need to look to, you know, our old friend, the nutritional profiling, the fact that there are some ultra-process foods that may not be bad for us.

That's not an oxymoron to say a healthy ultra-processed food when it comes to their nutritional profile. they can include lots of fruits or vegetables and legumes and whole grains and be low in saturated fat, added sugar, and sodium. Read the label, in other words. Read the label. Know what you're trying to avoid, what you're trying to accomplish, and choose the ultra-process foods that make it easier for you to stick to grandma's good diet advice. You know, having the sauces pre-prepared for you that are. you know, she would have had to prepare over hours over the stove to make a tasty, healthy meal. Use those kinds of foods as long as they're not too high in sodium or added sugars and things like that.

Why do you think there's so much disinformation out there in the food space? It's a great question. I think that there are many, many people who believe they've got it all figured out, that they have appreciated enough of the science to think that they have a unique, perspective, and maybe they've seen health improvements in themselves or their friends or their colleagues and assume that they've got it figured out and they want to spread this word to the masses. And they have now platforms and the opportunities to do that in ways that are much easier now than there were in the past. And again, I think it's, you know, the neglect of science to say, okay, well, we've seen something that works. That's really the, you know, potentially the first

step, right? There's this hint that there might be something unique here. How do we design an unbiased, randomized control trial to test this idea in a wider group of people? And many people aren't willing to take that step or to try to generate the funding or work with scientists to kind of test their ideas and test whether or not their view of the biology inside humans is actually at work. And what we do as a scientist is we try to take that step. And, of course, science has a much slower progress so that by the time we have the answers to those questions, either a diet fad has taken off and crashed or has persisted over time, and people are perpetually confused by these very convincing-sounding folks who generally are true believers

in their way of eating. So where do you think people should turn to get information at a time when even our most trusted institutions seem to be giving conflicting advice? Well, you've set me up for saying maybe you should read our book, Food Intelligence. That's a good place to start, yes. That could be a good place to start. I think that what I hope that the book allows people do is kind of get an appreciation for the history and the hard won victories of science in understanding what we currently know about our food and how our body uses food and how it affects us both for health and for harm and be able to. use that sort of knowledge and that historical perspective to be a little bit more critical,

maybe about when they hear the next fad diet or the next magic supplement. Dr. Hall, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me. Dr. Kevin Hall is a nutrition and metabolism scientist who spent more than two decades leading a research program at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He's also the co-author of the book Food Intelligence, the science of how food both nourishes and harms us. And that's it for Quarks and Quarks this week.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at CBC.ca. Our web page is cbc.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can listen to our audio archives and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Facebook.

play. Quicks and Quarks is produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, and Dan Falk. Our acting senior producer is Amanda Bukowitz. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.