Radiolab - Alpha Gal

Episode Date: October 27, 2016

Tuck your napkin under your chin.  We’re about to serve up a tale of love, loss, and lamb chops.  For as long as she can remember, Amy Pearl has loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her body wouldn’t tolerate it.  No steaks. No brisket. No weenies.  It made no sense to her or to her doctor: why couldn’t she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades? Something our evolutionary forebears have eaten since time immemorial? The answer involves mysterious maps, interpretive dance, and a collision of three different species. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. See? See?

Good. Okay. Is your mic on? Yeah. I'm getting, this is making me nervous. Maybe I should get my EpiPen. Are you allergic to radio greatness? Not that I know of. I haven't been really exposed to it yet. Anyway, let's go. Are we rolling?

We're good? We're going. We're rolling. Okay. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab, and today we're going to begin with a conversation between Dan Pashman. Okay. Host of a podcast here at WNYC called The Sporkful.

It's about food and Amy Pearl. Amy. Yes. A digital producer here at the station who likes food. And the conversation they had was about something that happened to Amy, which she never expected, certainly didn't want. And yet it could happen to any of us at any time. So years ago before any of this happened to you, just tell me what was your relationship with meat?

My relationship with meat. Yeah. Well, you know how when you're little and your mom is like, you can have any special dinner for your birthday? My dinner was meatballs. And she was like, except meatballs, they're so hard to make. So it was pot roast. And then, you know, Peter Luger. Famous steak.

I was in Brooklyn. Yeah. I used to go there quite often, and I live there, and I have a Peter Lugar credit card. Are those hard to get? You know, I don't know how they give them out, but nobody seems to have one. I don't think they give them out anymore. But, I mean, I was very into Peter Ligger. I was living in Williamsburg, and it just opened at, like, one o'clock every day,

and you could just walk in at one. They had an amazing bar. There was no tablecloths on the table, these old German waiters. They bring out your... Porterhouse for three. They put a little plate upside down and then put the big platter on top of it so it's tilted and all the juice runs to the end. And then they like have the special double spoon thing that they somehow like scoop juice onto your steak. And oh, so good.

And also like the smell of burning fat from a hamburger. What about hot dogs? Oh my God. I love hot dogs so much. When you bite into them and they're like, click and have like a snap. And, like, having a weenie roast out in the open air is just, it's like the, oh, God, it's so good. Anyway, I was always very into meat. What changed?

Oh, my God. It was terrible. It was what happened was I was having this beautiful, it was springtime. I was having a beautiful leg of lamb with some neighbors, and we, like, put it on the grill, and it was just a delicious, beautiful dinner. and I had served with it some ramps that I foraged in my mom's yard. A ramp, by the way, is just a wild onion. And so we had this delicious meal, and then, you know, I went home and I was going to sleep at, like, midnight, like a few hours later. And I just felt weird.

I was like, God, something's wrong. I feel like really anxious, like something's wrong with me. And I went in the bathroom and I, like, look in the mirror. And my face was like, all weird looking. And I was like, I was like, I. kept laying down and be like, I'll just sleep it off, whatever it is. But every time I lay down, I felt like I was going to faint. So I was like, prop myself up. And I was like, oh, God, I was having terrible, like, stomach cramps and just like a weird feeling of impending doom.

You know, but just like anybody, I'm just like, just get a good night's sleep. This will pass. I'm like, splash a little water on my face. I mean, I don't know what made me think this, but I thought, like, maybe a snail, a tiny snail, was on one of the ramps that I ate. And it was like poisoning me somehow. You know, snails, I mean, they probably poisonous. So I called my friends in the morning. I was like, hey, how you guys doing? How was dinner? And they were like, oh, so great. And I was like, really? So great. Nothing weird. No horrific panic attacks. They were like, and they were like, oh, that was so lovely. Thank you so much. Let's do it again. And I was like, wow, I really had a rough night. But I didn't think anything of it. And I went on with my

life, you know, just like, whatever. And then, about a week or two later, I made some cheeseburgers, and I ate a cheeseburger, and I was watching Goodbye Mr. Chips, really tear-jerking movie and a good book, too. And about a couple of hours after I ate, I was like, started to feel really weird. Again, I was, like, feeling like I was like, I had to stand up. I was like, I think I'm going to faint. I feel really lightheaded. I can't catch my breath. I feel like, really woozy, but if any time I lay down, I really felt like I was going to faint. So I was like trying to stay sitting upright, and I was like, oh, my God, this is very similar. I ran into the bathroom and I was like looking in the mirror and lo and behold, I had hives all over my stomach.

And then they started coming out on my hands. And I was like, oh, my God, something's happening. And at one point, I did get up and unlock my door because I did feel like I'm going to pass out, call an ambulance, and then they're not going to be able to get in. So, I mean, I was a little bit afraid of what was happening. And when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was Google sudden meat allergy. Because I was like, this seems like an allergy. And the only thing that was the same was meat.

And I'm going through, and like the second thing that came up was this article that was like, Florida man has sudden meat allergy. I was like, oh, my God, I think is it possible I could have this? And so I made an appointment with my doctor. I brought in the article. I'm like, I'm going to be this person. I can do it. I had the article in my pocket. What person? You know, the person who goes to their doctor was something I found on the internet.

So I brought the article. It was in my pocket. And like, I got through the whole, like, checkup. And I was too chicken. I went when I was paying the receptionist, I pulled it out and gave it to the receptionist. And I was like, could you give this to the doctor? So that was like the best I could do. And then I did call my doctor and had a conversation with him on the phone, asking him if I could get tested. And he was like, no, there's no such thing as a meat allergy, blah, blah, blah. So some people think allergies are just, like, in your head. This is science writer Peter Smith.

We got in touch with him after we heard Amy's story because Peter is an investigator of many things, including strange allergies. And people are like, mushrooms hurt them or they think... Wi-Fi hurts them. Yeah, Wi-Fi hurts them. And when our producer, Latif Nassar and I got into the studio and we told him about Amy's story, he said, Yeah, all right. I know exactly who you need to talk to.

Hello. Yeah, hi. Thomas Platt's Mills. This is Thomas Platt's Mills. That's right. How are you? I'm very well. Dr. Plats Mills is down at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

He's a professor, and he works at an allergy clinic. In an allergy clinic, we are constantly sifting through stories, which not only you don't believe, but are actually, Nonsense. And he told us in the last 10 years or so, he started hearing lots of stories just like Amy. Right. Somebody shows up at the office convinced that they're allergic, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, to red meat. The first time I heard it was probably as early as 2004. And every single time he heard the story, he would tell the patient exactly what Amy's doctor told her.

No. No, no, no. It's not possible. Right. So what was wrong with these complaints, you know, in an orthodox medical way? Oh, everything. Adults don't become allergic to something they've eaten for 40 years out of the blue and certainly not read me. So you're basically saying to these patients, I think you must be making this up because I can't explain it.

Well, I don't use language like that. I say they're there. I was trying to do your inner voice. Oh, you don't want to know what doctors are thinking. thinking in their inner voices. You know, you often think in the middle of an interview, is it possible that he's got, you know, some ghastly disease? Mad cow.

Yeah, you know. The point is that when he'd hear a story like Amy's, he just didn't believe it. But then, everything changed. Thanks, oddly enough, to a cancer drug. This new cancer drug called cytosimab. In New York today, Martha Stewart was indicted on criminal charges relating to... This is the very drug that got Martha Stewart.

Stewart in all that trouble for insider trading. Remember that? I went to jail for six months? Yeah. Anyway, very promising, exciting new drug. But then? Doctors were giving people this injection, and they would just end up on the floor of the doctor's office. In shock? Yeah, they would be an anaphylactic shock.

Their hearts would start beating faster. They'd get short of breath. It'd get stomach cramps. Their immune system would start to overreact to something new, an alien that came in with the drug. Basically, a classic allergic reaction. So the mystery lands on Thomas Plotz and Mills' desk. Yes. So we were asked to look at cetachshamount to see if they could figure out what was causing the reaction.

And he tests two groups of blood, a control sample, and then people that have this allergy. And he quickly zeroed in on a particular molecule, a sugar that was part of the drug. This sugar, galactose alpha-13 galactose, or alpha-com. Alpha gal? Yeah. As in a particularly great lady? Yeah. Better than the beta or gamma gal?

It's like alpha male, but alpha female didn't quite have a ring to it. It's the alpha gal. Anyway, it seemed like alpha gal was the culprit. Yeah. And if you told me four years earlier that there's a whole lot of people out there who are allergic to this sugar, I'd have thought you were smoking, you know, vaping again. Because not only does this sugar alpha gal show up in the cancer, drug, and this is where we get back to Amy, it also shows up in the blood of mammals.

All non-primate mammals. So every time you eat lamb or beef, goat, camel, even tripe, or pig's kidneys, you're also eating alpha-gal. So I'm reading this article and it says, like, it's this thing called alpha-galactase or alpha-gal or whatever. So it made no sense that someone like Amy who'd been eating meat all her life would suddenly somehow be allergic to the alpha-gal. I just was like, this was so stupid.

So, one day. It's getting to be barbecue season. I usually have, like, a couple of barbecues where I just do a whole pork butt and a brisket and, like, hang out all day doing it. And I was, like, very wanted to do that. And I was like, I'm just going to not eat meat and not even know. So I was like, forget it. My doctor will test me.

I'm going to test myself. So I was, like, going to be very careful. I got a thing of Benadryl. And I was like, I'm not going to do it alone. I'll do it with my mom. My poor mom. And so I went up to my mom's and she's like really into food too. So she was like, oh, this is so exciting.

I got two Porterhouse steaks on salad stews. Did you explain to her what you were testing? Yeah, I did because I had talked a little bit about it with her. So like fire up the grill, do the porterhouse. I even think I like Instagrammed it as a joke. Like ha, ha, ha. this might be the last time you hear from me. But so, you know, we're having a nice summer day, just me and my mom having our steak.

I only ate like a couple bites because I was slightly nervous. And I was like sitting in the grass with my dog and reading a book and trying to think like, do I feel normal? Which try it, folks. It's hard to figure out when you start asking yourself, do I feel normal? is this, am I breathing? Oh, is my stomach hurt? Is something wrong?

And I was like, after a while I was like, I feel pretty good. And the neighbor came over and was like chatting with us. And it was in the middle of that conversation where I was like, I kind of feel like I have to go the bathroom, but maybe I just have to go to the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom and I was sitting there. I was like, oh, God, something feels bad.

And then I was like, oh, God, I definitely. definitely, this is not right. Something's wrong. And I went in to get the Benadryl, and I took the Benadryl, and I went on my bed, and in the guest room at my mom's, and I was like sitting on there, and I was like, I just don't feel right. Maybe I just take a deep breath. I'll just stand up.

Maybe I just put my hands over my head like this. Oh, that does feel slightly better, I think. And then I was finally like, I think we should go to the hospital. And I went outside. I was like, Mom, I think you have to drive me to the hospital. She was like talking to her neighbor like, what? Oh my God, honey, what? Oh, let me go change my clothes.

Change my clothes. Like, mom, you know, she's not wearing the hospital level clothes. So I'm like, okay, hurry up, mom. Mom, are you ready, mom? And then I was like, while she was changing her clothes, I suddenly was like, oh my God, got my wallet out and my cell phone and I, like, threw it towards my mom's bedroom door. And I was like, here's my insurance card, call an ambulance. And I just like hit the floor.

Eventually, the ambulance arrives and I got stabilized. I was strapped to the thing. I was in the emergency room. Like, they were shooting me full of, I don't know what, epinephrine and adrenaline. And the little, like, 12-year-old emergency room doctor runs in. And he was like, I looked it up on the internet. Alpha-Gal, fascinating. What?

That's terrible. I've never heard of that. Could it be true? Yes, it's true. Like, they're all having this discussion there. Then when I went back to my doctor after that, and I was like, hey, just. get out of the emergency room because they tested me for alpha-gal and I'm allergic to meat. So this is an allergy? Yeah. So all of a sudden you're looking at the quote crazies and they're

not so quote crazy anymore. Absolutely. We suddenly had a blood test and of course what turned out is all these patients who've been telling us this story were allergic to alpha-gal. But it's still like a mystery. Right. There are... Thomas Platt's Mills couldn't figure out why people like Amy, who had lived for 40 years eating Porterhouse steaks at Peter Lugers with a credit card, why would she suddenly develop an allergy now? There would got to be some kind of trigger. Yes.

So we were looking for anything that could explain it. It could be a mold. It could be a nematode. A worm or a fungus. But then he looked again and noticed that all the people who had had bad reactions to the cancer drug. They were in a particular area of the country. It was Virginia, North Carolina, Southern Missouri, Arkansas. No cases in Salt Lake City, no cases in Denver. Just smattering's down the west. So he turned to his technician, Jake, and he said, I said, you've got to Google every

map you can find and say, what matches that area? Creatures or diseases that appear wherever the allergy appears. So Jake starts Googling. Googling and Googling and Googling and... And eventually, he comes across a map that matches where the cases are very beautifully, the maximum area for Rocky Mountain spotted fever. So he made this little map, and it's like the shaded, dark areas of the country or places with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and then there's like some stars where, you know, this allergy had appeared.

Yeah. And they overlap. Ah, very interesting. And then all of a sudden, it clicks. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a tick-borne disease. This is the distribution of the Lone Star Tick. And actually just a little before this, it turns out an allergist down in Australia, Cheryl Van Nuyn. First name Cheryl, S-H-E-R-Y-L, Van N-N-N-N-V-A-N and then N-U-N-E-N-E-N.

And I'm from the tick-induced allergies research and awareness center in Sydney, Australia. She says she was now being visited by all kinds of people who claim suddenly to be allergic to meat. And whenever I take a history, so for example, I'd ask them, was there a family history of rhinitis, eczema, asthma, stinging insect allergy, and they say they've all been bitten by ticks. When we started asking patients, we suddenly heard the stories just out the kazoo. But at this point, Dr. Platz Mills, all he has is a map, some stories, and a hunch. Right. So, so what does he do? He decides, well, maybe I'll I'll just do this to myself.

He does what? He decides to test it on himself. Oh, my God. He sort of, like, denies that he did it intentionally. I know I had no intentionally. I mean, I think he also likes to walk and amble and think about things. Right. So he goes for a long walk along the Blue Ridge Mountains.

And I knew I wanted to be off trail because I'm actually rather allergic to humans. So he's walking and walking and walking and along the way. Ah. He bumps into a whole. bunch of ticks. And if you walk into a nest of those things... Oh my God. This sounds like a nightmare. Yeah, absolutely. I got 200 seed ticks. Oh, boy. And then in November that year, I was taking out to dinner, and the lamb chops were particularly delicious, and the French wine was delicious. And six hours later, I woke up covered in hives. He's got an allergy to red meat, all just because of a tick bite.

Tick bite. That's right. We'll bite you right back after this. Hi, this is Sarah calling from Asheville, North Carolina. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab. Now we go back to Amy just when she's discovered

that the allergy to meat that she's developed comes from a tick bite. A tick bite? Hang on a second. Because, like, a few weeks before all this started happening, as I said, I was foraging for ramps in my mom's backyard, and I had a tick on my arm. Now, it turns out that not only was that tick bite

a terrible thing for Amy, it was a kind of double tragedy. Hidden from view amongst the trees and in the undergrowth. And I think it's only right at this point to back up is a fascinating world of wonders. And consider the story from the ticks point of view. Okay.

So I'm Graham Hickling. I'm a wildlife disease ecologist at the University of Tennessee. So I was wondering if you could help us tell the story of, in this case, the lone star tick that bit Amy. Oh, yeah, sure. So they start off. and this little pile of eggs, perhaps a mass of 2,000 eggs, under the leaves. The proud mom who just gave birth.

At that point, she's just a kind of a withered husk, meaning dead. But anyway, a few weeks later, those eggs will hatch, and this mass of 2,000 baby ticks emerge from under the leaves. Could I see them with my naked eye? If you ran into a mass of them all up together, you would feel like you've got a little smudge of dirt, and then the dirt starts walking. So they'll just climb up and they'll potentially all be on the same leaf

or the same twig looking for something to feed on. Now one teeny little tiny problem for these teeny little tiny ticks is that they dry out. So when they come up from under the leaves, they come up briefly and then they go back down.

Get a little water, come back up, get thirsty, go back down. And rehydrate. So they like commute. Exactly. And we refer to the behavior as questing. Oh, questing. So if you were one of these

little baby ticks up questing for food. While you're up there, you are essentially Velcro. Because on each one of your little legs, you have little kind of hook-like structures, and so you're flat against the leaf. Sort of sniffing in the air with your two little front legs.

That can detect CO2 heat movement. So let's say one day you're sitting there on your leaf, and you pick up the scent of a nearby mouse. Mice of the potato chips of the ecosystem. Everything eats them. Which means you might be about to have your very first meal. So you basically stand up, stretch out all your little legs,

and do a tick dance. And so it's kind of interpretive dance like movements. While you're waiting for that mouse to come just close enough that you can grab onto it. So you're dancing and you're waiting and you're dancing and you're waiting. And you're dancing and you're waiting and you're dancing and you're way. To be honest, you are probably going to wait your entire life and die. unfulfilled. Because there are

2,000 of you starting off and a stable tick population there's only going to be two of you that survive. Oh my gosh. So, 1,998 little baby ticks are born. And then that's it for them. But let's say that you're one of the

lucky ones. And one sunny day, there you are hanging out on your little leaf when you detect two incoming mammals. One is a 40-year-old hominid. The other is her dog. So you perk up who thrust your legs out. Wave, do the tick dance.

And say that you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping and you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping and you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping. And slowly the dog's getting closer and closer and you reach out with one of your tiny little little so you get... Grab on and eat and survive. But the reason that tick ended up on me was... I slept in bed with my dog naked. I mean, she's always naked, but I was also naked. I mean, that's not gross. I don't, I mean, does that sound weird?

No, but how do you know that's when it happened? Because I know that, like, I did a good tick check on myself, and I took a shower and everything, and then in the middle of the night, I woke up with an itching sensation, and I went to the bathroom, and I couldn't really see what was on, like something was on the back of my arm,

and it was a tick. So as the tick is biting into Amy, what is it giving Amy that's going to make her allergic to meat? Well, actually, I need to stop you there, Robert. Diffical one, Robert. I don't know the answer to that. That's Peter Smith, and rejoining us is Cheryl Van Nuen and the scientist. It's all up for speculation. We don't really know, but here's the theory.

Normally, when you eat a piece of meat, you put alpha-gal in your stomach, and your stomach digest it, and it's in your body, and there's no big deal. But the tick cunningly will drill into you, poke into you, and injects its saliva. We'll call that tick spit. Tick spit into its victims. Straight into its victim's largest organ. The skin. And Tick spit has an anti-clotting factor, an anesthetic, anti-inflammatory compounds. And we think, the alpha-gal.

Now, Peter says the thing about the skin is... The skin is like this enormous, like, surveillance system. It's always on the lookout for invaders. So, when the alpha-gal comes through your skin, covered by all that bad, bad tick spit stuff, that's going to really, like, set off your immune system. The immune system freaks out. Like, oh, uh-uh. And the alpha-gal, covered now in bad spit, almost sort of...

By mistake, gets labeled bad. And now it's on the bad guy watch list. So, therefore, the next time you eat meat, the meat comes in. And then... The body unleashes wave upon wave, upon wave, of chemical attack. to do battle against this alpha-go. And this reaction gets way out of hand. You've got so many antibodies multiply, multiply, multiplying, multiplying, multiplying, multiplying,

making you, rather in this case, Amy, feel just horrible. Right. I mean, it's very weird. It sounds like a science fiction movie. It sounds like the beginning of a science fiction, at least kids' book. Let's not go to a movie. But, like, it's just strange. Which all goes to say that this.

really is a kind of double tragedy for Amy and her tick. Yeah, because ticks didn't evolve to bite humans. Right. We're a mistake. Like, we have opposable thumbs. We're either going to pull them off. I actually woke my mom up and she helped get it off. Or if they drop off, they're going to drop off in an airport terminal or a Walmart car park or somewhere like that.

Or a shag carpet. Or a shag carpet indoors and they're doomed. And for us, well, we lose something that historically anyway is a big part. part of who we are. Yeah. Because we have, we, we, we adapted in the grand evolutionary schema things to, like, eat flesh to eat meat. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'm actually sitting here picturing a steak, but actually the thing, I mean, hot dogs, like wrap ramps around a weenie and roast. Yum, that sounds so good, my mouth's watering. Weenies and ramps. Yeah. But I am going to my allergist tomorrow because I did, you know, I was reading about this allergy a lot when I first got it. And I read that for some people, the allergy can fade away. So I'm going to get a blood test to see what my blood level of alpha gal is. So I'm a little.

So what are you hoping for tomorrow? I want to be normal again. That was the end of, uh, uh, of the Dan and Amy conversation. She was going to go to the doctor, get herself tested, find out whatever. So we asked her back in to find out what happened. So I actually did get an appointment with my allergist, Dr. Corn. My name was Dr. Corn.

She's really nice. So I got the appointment. I got the blood draw, whatever. And a few days later, my doctor called me, and she said that my numbers were still really high. And I was like, well, how high are they? And she was like three. And I was like, three, that's not high. And she's like, they're supposed to be like one or something. So they had gone down, but they were still, you know, many times more than they should be. So when you left and were waiting for the call, were you waiting with the hope that you would soon be eating a bit of

hot dog? I mean, honestly, I was hoping no. No? No. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I Wait a say, you are the great, you are. No, but I was afraid that she would be like, oh, my God, your numbers are so low. I think you could probably eat meat. Let's do a food challenge. I would be like, ah, because like, that's such a scary memory. Yeah, I don't, you know, actually just the other night I was eating at an Indian place and I was eating vegetarian. But like, I felt something and I pulled it out.

And in the dim light of an Indian restaurant, like, why are they all lit like that? I was like, was this bacon? And I suddenly, you know, like, you just get this drop in your stomach. And I'm like, what time is it? Four hours from now if I, you know, because it's, there's something about it being delayed that makes it so difficult. It just is like. Like a suspense movie with you the victim. It's like it could happen in the next three hours or maybe not.

I don't know. I mean, honestly, the only thing that the real reason I want to be able to eat meat is so that I will be prepared. to eat it in case of emergency. I mean, I went on a canoe trip in Adirondex, and I was like, well, what happens if I gets stranded out here? And like, what if I have to hunt? But I can't even eat meat. I would have to hunt fish.

But then when the lake freezes over, what would I eat? I can't survive. Something's wrong with me. I feel evolutionarily challenged. This is what I think about before I go to bed every night. Would I be able to survive if I had just what's on me right now? A pen, underwear, my dog. And so, yeah, I mean, that's a real issue is like, it's not a real issue.

Obviously, it's never going to happen and live in Brooklyn. But I do, for some reason, I always think, like, I want to be prepared in case. But, yeah, you know, I don't think I would go back to eating meat necessarily. Like, you are still more, more frightened in game, so to speak. Well, also, like, I wish I could be a vegetarian for ethical reasons because it's not so much just the eating meat, but just like, you know, the factory farming and that kind of stuff. So I feel like morally superior now. I can be like, well, I don't eat red meat. Of course, I'm forced to not eat it.

But at the same time, I would if I had the willpower, I'd probably go that way anyway. And then also, I think it's great. It's like we're all evolving to be on this planet, which is getting. harder to be on. And we know that meat takes a lot of resources. And like, now I don't, now I'm not doing that. So, like, the tick is helping me evolve into a better human being. Like, so one could, instead of thinking of the tick as your teeny weeny, irritating enemy, you could think of it as a guiding light, making the world safer to share with your fellow earthlings. Yeah. So you may have lost your relationship with meat, but at least you have your moral superiority.

Yeah, I mean, I am superior. Yeah. So, huge thanks to Amy Pearl for telling a story which never stopped, never stop being scary and wonderful. And to the fellow who brought her into the room, Dan Pashman, whose podcast, The Sporkful, is it's all about food in every conceivable way. He talks about eating it, preparing it, worrying about it, as you've heard, getting sick from it, getting fat from it, whatever. And you can find his show on iTunes or Stitcher or on the internet at sporkful.com.

And this story was produced by Annie McEwan and Matt Kilty with reporting help from Latif Nassar. See you next time. Received Thursday at 9.50 p.m. This is Dan Pashman from the Sporkful podcast. Hi. is Amy Pearl. I'm allergic to meet. And I'm Susie Von Eggers, Amy Pearl's mom. Radio Lab is produced by Chad Apparrod. Jad Abumrod. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Doran Wheeler, Senior Editor. James Jamie, Jamison York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler. Brenna Farrell.

David Gable. Matt Kielty. Robert Crowich. Annie McEwen. Lachif Nassar. Malice O'Damo. Or Melissa O'Donle. Ariane. Ariane Watt and Molly Webster With help from Tracy Hunt Niger Fattali Phoebe Wang Katie Ferguson Alexandra Lee Young

W. Harry Portuna and Percy of Erlin Percy of Erlin Percia Verlin And Percy of Berlin All right That's like all the options I can come up with

Our fact checkers Areva Dasher And Michelle Harris Yeah all right I think I got that one Bye bye Bye bye Bye

Bye End of message If I get like cut off from the group when I'm out on a tour of the woods or something and I have to sleep overnight and I could eat like a frog, a bug,

but I couldn't eat like a squirrel, a mouse. I guess I could eat a bird. I mean, I don't know. You know, there's another option too, though, Amy. What? Kill myself? No, but the alpha gal is in all mammals but not in primates. I know.

It's so like a chimp burger. Well, maybe think even more darkly. A human, another human, baby. Baby? No, we say baby. I don't know. The good old ordinary cannibal night.

Yeah, but if I'm really going to go for it, I mean, shouldn't be a baby. But turkey meatballs are fucking awesome.