Science Friday - Immigration and the Microbiome, Spice Trends. Nov 9, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

‘Tis the season for pumpkin spice lattes. Even if you’re not a fan of the fall beverage, we’ve all been touched by the 15-year dominance of Starbucks’ signature PSL (that’s pumpkin spice latte in coffee lingo) and its pumpkin spice spawn. So what is it about pumpkin spice that made it a blockbuster, not just today, but centuries ago? And how do spice makers predict if something is going to be a hit or a bust? Senior flavorist Terry Meisle and food scientist Kantha Shelke join guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about spice trends old and new. Plus: Last week, researchers described the differences between ethnic Hmong and Karen people living in Thailand, to members of same groups after recent emigration to the United States. Not only were the new U.S. residents likely to have different microbes than those living in Thailand, but the diversity of their gut microbiota was much lower. This change persisted and even worsened in the second generation. Study co-author Dan Knights, a professor of computational microbiology at the University of Minnesota, explains the findings. Plus, NYU Medical School professor Martin Blaser weighs in on our growing understanding of how our gut microbes interact with our health, and the declining diversity of gut microbes in developed nations. Also, it's not aliens—probably. Ryan Mandelbaum of Gizmodo joins Flora to talk about the mysterious object ʻOumuamua and other science stories of the week in the News Round-up.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flore Lickman, sitting in for Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll take a look at what happens to your microbiome when you move to another country. But first, this Tuesday, people across the country went to the polls, with Democrats taking control of the House and Republicans expanding their representation in the Senate. But how about the science seat count? Americans voted in eight new legislators with backgrounds in science. Joining me now to talk about that and other science stories from the week is Ryan. Mandelbaum. He's a science writer at Gizmodo here in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Nice to be here, Flora. How's everything going? Everything is great. How about you?

I'm good. Okay, so this week, I mean, everyone was talking about the election. Who were these new legislators with science backgrounds? Sure. So there's a bunch of names. We've got Lauren Underwood, Joe Cunningham, Elaine Luria. I don't need to go through the whole list, but they're all Democrats. And they're a bunch of candidates that people are especially excited about because they've taken over Republican seats or their first timers. And they have, you know, backgrounds in science, such as nursing degrees and engineering degrees and even one worked in nuclear reactors. Here's what I want to know. Will it make a difference in terms of science policy? Like, if we look to the past and look at scientists in Congress or in the Senate, have they done more for science

than people without science backgrounds. In fact, I don't know. I think that we recently were, this past year, wrote an article about Bill Foster, who was the only science PhD in Congress, and he seemed to stress a bit more frustration. And in fact, recently Maggie Kerth Baker from 538 had written something along the lines of, we haven't decided what it means to be a science candidate at all or whether, you know, it'll do anything at all.

So we're unclear. I guess we'll wait and see. Oh, yeah. Okay, so there's another election coming up, a science election of sorts. Tell me about it. Yeah, so the kilogram, which, you know, approximately little more than two pounds, is getting a, it's getting redone. So we're frequently, you know, the old kilogram is actually just a hunk of metal in Paris. Wait, wait.

So there is an actual kilogram. Yeah, it's called Le Grande K. And is it, like, locked up behind in a safe or something? Three separate keys and underneath, like, bell jars. Yeah, totally. And this is, what is the purpose of having, this physical kilogram. So the kilogram has a long history dating back to when merchants needed to sell things,

they would sell them by weight, and they could always change things and lie. So they began standardizing the kilogram based on the measurements of water, but water is obviously a little difficult to carry around everywhere. So instead they made a kilogram. Now, countries across the world agreed on that piece of metal being the kilogram, and then they'd make copies and base their own measurements of what a kilogram meant on that kilogram on this physical kilogram on this piece of it's platinum and iridium i believe yeah piece of metal um but now what's going to happen is that is not good what if somebody loses it what if the building burns

down so yeah i can see why having a whole unit of measure tied to one physical object might be tricky might be a problem exactly so and i i do believe the vote is expected to pass that next week will actually see the kilogram instead be to redefined based on a constant of nature called plonks constant. Can you, is there a way to get into this without it being too, too technical? Yeah, sure. Plunk's constant is basically the relationship between a photon's energy and its wavelength. So just a packet of light, how much energy it has based on its color.

Now it's got a unit of kilogram built into its measurements at the end of this number, and it's always the same from our understanding. So the, because of that, you could derive the kilogram from our base measurements of Plunk's constant instead of the other way around. So you wouldn't need the physical kilogram anymore? No, instead you'd need this big machine called a kibble balance, but... A kibble balance? Yep, but you could...

Countries have kibble balances, and you could build a kibble balance. Oh, okay. So when is the vote? It's next week now. I don't remember the exact day, but it should pass. And the vote is to get rid of the physical kilogram and move to this other way of defining the kilogram. That's right.

Okay. What about this alien frenzy? this week. Yes, if you were on Twitter at pretty much any point this past week, you may have seen a little bit about an alien space rock. Now, back last year in October,

a asteroid whizzed through the solar system and flew off, and it's not orbiting the sun. It was what we think is the first interstellar visitor. What does that mean? Like, it came in like a boomerang? I mean, pretty much. It just in, sort of said hello, and then whizzed out.

initial measurements, you know, sort of estimates, people thought it was a 800 meters by 80 meters by 80 meters. And cigar shaped was sort of what they thought. But the issue is that it's accelerating too fast. And people wanted to know, well, what is causing it to accelerate so quickly? Accelerating too fast as in faster than what you would expect it to be doing? Based on gravity alone. So the idea is perhaps it's being pushed along. by the radiation from the sun, which would work,

but according to a paper from Harvard scientists, it would have to be really big and flat, like an object we've never seen before in order to experience its acceleration. Now, obviously, we all wrote debunkers that were like, it's not aliens, it's obviously not aliens. Like, you need to rule out everything else, like all the other asteroids it could be

before saying that it's aliens. But it is, at the same time, an interesting question to ask, why is this thing accelerating so quickly out of the solar system? And what are the parameters around it? What does it look like? I mean, I think the only way to answer these questions is, of course, to hope for another one. So these scientists in this paper suggested maybe it is aliens. They told.

So. What did they actually say? They did absolutely say that it is perhaps a solar sale from visiting the solar system, I'm a solar sail being this propelled, you know, big giant sun-propelled thing. Yes, they did, in fact, imply that it could be aliens. How did other scientists react? Varying. I would say most said, no, it's obviously not aliens.

A lot were mad that sort of this hype was being built around it being aliens before definitively ruling out non-alians. And I would say that we should leave open. the possibility that it is something weird because that's how science works. I mean, scientists create hypotheses and then they try and rule them out. But if it was something, you can't just say it was aliens. You can't go aliens first. But you can keep your mind open.

And in fact, these scientists behind this mission are currently working with the breakthrough initiative to develop a solar sale. So it's sort of almost beneficial for them to say like, oh, maybe somebody else built a solar sale first. Now we can build one and see if we can get to a new star. That's my own speculation, but who knows? Is there anything else we can learn from this object or any other questions people are asking about it? In fact, there are. I think, again, this why is accelerating so quickly is a good question. I think the other question is just, where's it from?

What is it? What's on it? I mean, we recently wrote a story over at Gizmodo that was like maybe, you know, it's storing some information from another star system that maybe there's hints of life or hints of the composition of another planet. it. And maybe, you know, Jupiter, for example, has some moons orbiting in it that seem to be moving incorrectly, which I've spoken about on Science Friday before. And maybe this, Jupiter's captured an object like this that we can go find and see if it came from another star system.

Speaking of mysterious, oversized things, there was some other news about a bird this week, right? Oh, yes. Bird fans might be familiar with the elephant bird, which was the height of an elephant, the weight of a horse and is extinct for about a thousand years. So at one point did live around the same time as humans did. Height of an elephant. And we recently found out that it perhaps was also blind and nocturnal. This is mind-boggling to me. Yeah, it's like a big, pathetic bird.

It's amazing that it existed at all. A blind bird the size of an elephant. Oh, yeah. I mean, so this bird would have been cousins with the other flightless birds, Kiwis, emus, casuaries. But the difference, I mean, and so actually the reason why we think that it might be nocturnal is because Kiwis are

nocturnal and they've completely lost the part, or mostly lost the part of their brain in charge of vision. So now this bird also, based on scans of the inside of its skull, seems to have lost the similar part of its brain. But the question is that the kiwi has a really good makeup system, the sensory, you know,

for smelling and for getting around, but we don't know if the elephant bird had that same system. How can you tell anything about whether the elephant bird could see or not, given that it went extinct a thousand years ago? Thankfully, there are museum specimens of sort of, you know, skulls and pieces of the bird, and this inference that it may have been blind and nocturnal came from a scan of an inside of a skull.

Oh, interesting. So you can use that to kind of recreate what the brain looked like. Exactly. And then deduce whether it had big lobes related to vision. Right, precisely, just like that. Got it. You had another piece of bird news for us? Yes, I am chock full of bird news.

Well, and other than the duck, which I also recently wrote about, I love the Central Park duck. I love the Central Park duck, too. I'm glad we can get that shout out in. Excellent. But the other, I've written actually two stories in the past month about birds using tools. And one story was New Caledonian Crows can construct compound tools. So they can see something that's a little too far away from their reach, take one piece of what was like these, cylinders, plug it into another, and then go reach for this thing, which, I mean, that is

mind-boggling. And then the other one is that goffin's cockatoos can bite out little pieces of cardboard with their beaks and judging by the distance of the object build a tool the length of the distance of whatever that object they want to reach is. The coolest part about that paper was the fact that these birds were building cardboard sticks that were like a little too short to reach the object, and then dropping it as soon as they were like, no, that's not going to fit. They didn't even try.

They didn't even try using it. They were like, this is too small. And then they built a longer one. They built a short tool. They looked at it and they said, ugh, not good enough. I got to go back to the drawing board. Not in every case, but in some cases.

You know, cockatoos are amazing birds, though. This doesn't, did we know that they used tools before this? I don't remember reading it. I mean, they're not known to use tools in the wild. These cockadoos had been taught. A lot of them already knew how to make these cardboard sticks, but actually seeing them adjust the length of the cardboard strips in, you know, just by,

the length and the distance of the food was pretty amazing. And shout out to the crows, too, because crows are also amazing. Absolutely. Have you seen videos of cockatoos destroying, like, complex block sets from kids? Oh, I've seen all sorts of cockatoo videos. I mean, this news about cockatoos does not surprise me. Excellent. Ryan, thanks so much for being with us today.

Thanks for having me, Florida. This is great. Ryan Mantelbaum is a science writer at Gizmodo here in New York. After the break, what happens when your microbiome goes globetrotting? How immigrating to the U.S. could change your gut and are there health consequences? This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Each one of us houses billions of tiny residents, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and we know our microbes can influence our health. But what influences their health? They're affected by what you eat, what medicines you take,

How about where you live? That's one of the questions we're looking at next. How does where you live affect what lives in you? And what does that mean for your health? A new study may provide some clues. Researchers found that Hmong women who moved from Thailand to the U.S. saw big changes to their microbiome within nine months of getting off the airplane. Here to tell us more are my guests.

Dan Knight's Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He's co-author on this new research. Welcome to the show, Dr. Knights. Thank you. Good to be here. And Martin Blazer, Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at NYU School of Medicine here in New York. He's in our studios here in New York. And just a note, he was not involved in this research.

Welcome back to Science Friday, Dr. Blazer. Thank you. So, Dan, let's start with this study. What happened to people's microbiomes when they moved to the U.S.? What we found is that moving to a new country? at least for the people in our study meant that you pick up a new microbiome people almost immediately began losing some of their native microbes and began picking up the new US associated microbes and and we found that that was not

enough that the microbes that they picked up were not enough to compensate for the ones that they lost so they actually had an overall loss of diversity over time spent living in the U.S. And this happened fast. That's right. We saw almost immediate changes within the first six to nine months of living in the U.S. People had up to a tenfold increase in the amount of U.S. microbes relative to their native microbes. And is there health implications of this work?

Well, we know from many previous studies that having the wrong set of microbes can cause a wide range of diseases, diabetes and obesity, inflammatory diseases, allergies, and can increase your risk of infection. In our study, we didn't actually show that these changes were causing obesity in this population, but we did see that the changes were associated strongly with obesity. We've got a correlation, not causation situation. That's right. So the lead author on this work was Dr. Padjao Van Gaye, who couldn't make it on the air with us today.

But she wanted to emphasize that the microbiome changes couldn't be blamed solely on those Americanized diets. And I think that almost everyone that I talked to about this study thinks that it's just diet, you know, that it's the diets that are changing. And that's why everybody's gaining weight or developing diseases and whatnot. But we didn't actually see that. We saw that the microbiome changed a lot faster. And it makes sense that these diets aren't changing that much because, you know, there's been a lot of nutritional studies that have looked at dietary changes in Wong, for example. And they see that even first and second generation Wong, they're not eating completely American diets.

Martin Blazer, does this then open a mystery of why this is happening? If it's not just diets, why? Well, first, I think it was a really beautiful study. They really took advantage of a great situation and made great science out of it. But these were not two ordinary countries. This was Southeast Asia. These were countries where people lived traditional lifestyles,

and then they moved to the United States, which is an industrialized country, where many things are different in addition to diet. So I don't think it would be the same, let's say, moving from France to the U.S. or vice versa. It's speeding up industrialization, you know, a hundred-year process by one jetplane flight. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, you know, what do we already know about how people's gut microbiomes differ around the world? Well, what we know is that people who are from very traditional cultures,

hunter-gatherers, people living in villages far, far away from the modern accoutrements of life, Their microbiome has very high diversity. And people in industrialized countries, it's much lower. So this study kind of encapsulates that. And the people in the traditional societies, they're living on different continents. They're different ethnicities. They have different diets. And the same with the people in industrialized countries who've been studied.

So it's not diet ethnicity. I think it's modernization. Modernization, but what specifically? Dan, do you have any theories? One of the major culprits, apart from diet, is antibiotics. And, you know, it's been shown in many studies that antibiotics can deplete the diversity in your microbiome. And even that you can pass on some of those missing, the depletions in the microbiome to your children. It's been shown in animal models.

So that's one obvious culprit. I think, you know, there are still some factors in the diet. People in the U.S. tend to have very low fiber content in their diets. And some of the microbes are very picky about which types of fiber they like to eat. So we do think that loss of fiber is another factor, you know, that's causing some of the microbes to disappear. Yeah, was there a trend, Dan, in terms of what people lost? What kinds of microbes? People living in the USA tend to be dominated by this one group of microbes called bacteriodes.

It's kind of a U.S. marker of living in the USA. And we saw that people in our study tended to lose their dominant microbes, which are from this other group called Previtella, and then began picking up more and more bacterioreides. And as we saw this happen, it seemed that they were losing, when they lost these Previtella microbes, they were losing the ability to digest certain types of plants. Martin, do you think that this is the key, which microbes are being lost? I think two things are happening. One is this loss of diversity, which Dan mentioned, and the other is this substitution. This previtella and bacteriarties, they're kind of cousins. and the country cousin has been replaced by the city cousin in a way.

And this work confirms previous work of other investigators showing the same thing. It seems to be happening all over the world when you look at more people from more industrialized countries. And these immigrants, they've entered the industrialized country, and this displacement has occurred. So we see the displacement occurring really fast over the course of months. But what happens over the longer term? Dan, did you look at first generation and second generation immigrants? Yes, the changes start almost right away when people get to the U.S., but then they continued over time. We had people in the study who had been in the U.S. for decades, and they continued to lose diversity and pick up more and more of the U.S. microbes over time.

Another surprising part of the study was that we saw this very sharp drop in diversity in the children of immigrants. So these are second generation immigrants who were born in the U.S., but whose parents had immigrated from Thailand. And they tended to have significantly lower diversity than their parents. We thought this might happen because we've seen similar things in animal studies, but it was pretty striking the way that it happened within a single generation in humans. Martin, does this hold across the world the sort of make-up difference that we see in this study, the Previtella versus the bacteriides? Yes, but I want to comment on the generational thing because I think that's really important.

About 10 years ago, Dr. Stan Falco and I proposed that the microbiome was being lost generation by generation. that instead of the microbiome resetting with each new generation, that each generation in this loss process was passing on, moms were passing on a reduced microbiome to the next generation. And there are studies in animals that are supporting this. Now we have this beautiful study of the immigrants providing further support for the idea that this intergenerational transfer of microbes, which has been going on since forever, for all mammals,

it seems to be things each generation is getting worse. Does that mean you inherit your microbes from your mom or your parents? You inherit a lot of your microbes from your mom, and there's lots of support for that idea. Mom is important. Is there any way to intervene? Can we repopulate our microbes? Well, many people are interested in this idea,

starting from babies born by cesarean section. trying to do vaginal seeding, which people have called bacterial baptism, to give back bacteria. And the idea of potentially restoration is very important because with losses of this magnitude, we can't get them back with just one or two strains. It's going to have to be much more significant. And are there any other interventions that seem to work? Well, Dan's point about fiber is very important. That's one of the big differences between those traditional diets and ours.

And a lack of fiber seems to be selecting for some of these particular changes. What are some of the health implications? We talked about obesity for this study, but there are broader health implications, right, of losing your microbes? Yeah, well, you know that I've written a book about this called Missing Microbes. And my point is that we have all these diseases that have arisen essentially since World War II. asthma, obesity, diabetes, juvenile diabetes, inflammatory abilities, they've all been going up. And maybe they have 10 different causes, or maybe there's one thing that's underlying at all. And my hypothesis was it's the loss of microbes, this loss of diversity in this kind of substitution that's being shown.

So it's one of the reasons I like this study so much is that it provides a lot of evidence that supports that this is actually happening. Martin, is this a radical idea, yours? You know, that's hard for me to judge. Why don't you ask Dan? What do you think, Dan? I think there's increasing evidence. You know, as I said, it's been seen in animal models very clearly, and now we're starting to see it happen in people. So I think anyone who, you know, found it radical previously, I think is probably more inclined

to accept it. Dan, can these findings be used to help immigrant communities? Well, you know, some of the things that we took away from this are really about the importance of the traditional lifestyle. This study was run in a close collaboration with the Hmong and Koren communities here in the Twin Cities. They helped design the study and helped design the interpretation and dissemination of it. And one of the things that was important to them was that preserving their traditional, lifestyle, their traditional diets, may have health consequences, you know, beyond just preserving their cultural heritage.

So I want to talk a little bit about how you do studies like this in the right way. You know, the Hmong and Corinne groups are coming to the United States as refugees, and we know that the history of science is riddled with bad stories of exploitation of groups. So we asked Dr. Van Gogh, the lead study author, about this point. Definitely, the still samples, any time you're giving some part of yourself away, I think there's a little bit of questioning what you're going to do with the sample. And then second, I think a lot of people may not be familiar with research. It's a new concept for these community members.

That said, on the flip side of that, some people are familiar with it, and they may have had negative experiences. And so that makes it a little bit difficult, too. I'm Flora Lichten, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So, Dan, let's start with you. How do you do these studies in the right way with these considerations in mind? Well, this was really a great experience for me as a researcher, because we used a process called community-based participatory action research,

or CBP-A-R. We had a close collaborator, Kathy Colhane-P-P-R-H who's in the community and a doctor who's worked with these populations for a long time. And she helped us set up a community advisory board who was an integral part of the entire planning process of the study and of carrying it out. And we also hired community-based researchers. So, you know, they're There are co-authors on the study who are Hmong and Karen, you know, members of the community. We hired them and trained them to enroll in consent subjects and, you know, collect samples. And so they actually got to be a part of doing the science. And I think that connection has helped us keep the science relevant for the people involved

and help them find meaning in it and actually be glad that they participated and not feeling that they were taken advantage of. Martin, I know you've worked all over the world, too, cataloging the microbial populations of people from all over. Have you had to convince people to work with you? Has that been challenging? Well, I'm the person who carries the bags.

It's actually my wife, Maria Gloria Dominguez, has led a lot of these studies. And she tells the story that people are often reluctant to give their blood. But then they say, well, you've come all this way to get our poop. They're very amused because it doesn't seem to have so much value to them. Martin, I'm worried about my microbes going extinct. Not mine. The whole world's microbes going extinct. Is this a problem I should be concerned about?

Yeah, you do. You need to be concerned. You need to be concerned for your children and your grandchildren. children, because this seems to be happening. So a few weeks ago, a group of us, led by Maria Gloria, wrote a paper in science proposing that we establish a vault, a microbiome vault to protect these organisms from going extinct so we can save them for future generations. It's almost like a big game reserve, but a little game reserve. You know, there's a seed vault up in Svalbard in Norway, And this is kind of based on that same idea.

Preserve the diversity while we have it, because once it goes extinct, it's gone. Do you think that that could happen? We hope so. We've started a nonprofit foundation to move this forward because the time is now. These populations, antibiotics are everywhere and change is everywhere. And I think all the populations of microbes are under threat, some more than others. And we have to preserve the ones in those developing countries. Dan, any last thoughts in the few seconds we have left?

Well, Marty, we'll be sending you some microbes to preserve. Sounds good. I hope it happens. I want to thank you both for taking the time to be with us today. Dan Knight's Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis and Martin Blazer, Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine here in New York. Thank you both. Thank you.

It was a pleasure. Thanks to Pat Jao-Vangay, lead author on The Immigration Study. She couldn't be with us, but you heard her thanks to the magic of digital recording. When we come back, life after the pumpkin spice latte, is there a spice that can top it? We'll jump into the spice world after this. This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. So coming into this week, I had a question.

Is anyone working on the next pumpkin spice? It has been 15 years since Starbucks launched the pumpkin spice latte. I know, 15 years. And if you are like me, maybe you are feeling some PSF, pumpkin spice fatigue. But as it turns out, we might not be able to blame Starbucks alone. The pumpkin spice latte was bound to be a hit, whether the coffee chain popularized it or not. That familiar taste of cardamom and clove, people around the globe have been into these flavors. for centuries. So what is it about pumpkin spice that makes it a blockbuster, not just today,

but centuries ago, and how do spice makers predict if something is going to be a hit or a bust? And who decides what next year's trendy spice is going to be? To answer all of these spicy questions and more, we have to ask the tastemakers. Terry Measley is a senior flavorist with Fona International in Geneva, Illinois. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Kantushelke is a food scientist and founder of Corvus Blue LLC and a member of the Institute for Food Technologists in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Sarah.

And a question to our listeners. Do you have a question about your spice cabinet? I know you do. Give us a call 844-724-8255. That's 844 SciTalk or tweet us at SciFri. Okay, Kantel, let's start with you. Why is Pumpkin Spice? Such a hit.

Nothing says fall and celebrations like pumpkin spice. It's just the mixture of, as you said, cardamums, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg. But no matter where you are in the world, it means celebration. It means festivities. In the east, it's a little more savory. So whether you were in Iran and having some kind of a korma sabzi or in a northern part of India and having a muglai cuisine. and having a rich meat dish, it's the same set of spices that Starbucks so cleverly took

to make the sweet pumpkin spice latte that everybody craves at this time of the year. Terry, how do people in the flavor world think about pumpkin spice? Like, is it passe? Is it revered as a pinnacle of invention in spiceology? At this point, pumpkin pie spice is pretty much a universal. There's a lot of good reasons for that. I can talk a little bit technically about it if you'd like. Maybe not technically, but I would love to hear why.

Right. Well, these are old spices that we've been using them for thousands of years. And at harvest time, that's cooking. That's when we're cooking the pumpkins, but cooking the apples. And clove is really the key here. It's like the center of the plates where it's reinforcing the flavors of the apples, reinforcing the flavors of the pumpkins and almost everything else you cook it with, have the same compounds that Clove does.

So if you think about flavor theory for a minute where you have food pairings, where you're like and like versus, say, mint and orange, which don't work, clove works with all of these things because it reinforces the flavors that are there. And then the other stuff like your cardamom, like your cinnamon and nutmeg, kind of sit on top and they add a little bit of extra bit. The other thing that works in the wintertime is that these are, warming spices. They actually affect the trigeminal nerves, just like mint does feel cool and capsicum feels hot. These have a warming, mild, but very long lingering spice. So when you drink it,

it feels good for a really long time. That's a perfect pairing for the cold weather. Absolutely. Kanto, when we're talking about pumpkin spice lattes, you know, we know that it has, it tastes like nutmeg and cardamom and ginger cinnamon. But is it? Is it a little bit of pumpkin spice latte? But is it, made up, is that spice mix made up of spices in my cabinet? Not really. So while all the spices that Terry mentioned are definitely there represented in pumpkin spice, what Starbucks did that was so clever was not put pumpkin pie spice, but the combination of aromas and tastes and flavors of an actual pumpkin pie baking. So if you went to your kitchen cabinet and took those spices and put them into your drink,

what you would get is like a traditional Indian chai or a masala tea. But what Starbucks has, which is pumpkin spice today, and what everybody loves, is the actual feeling of as if you are near a pumpkin pie being baked with the sugar and the butter, etc. But without all those calories. So you're replacing the flavors of the pie, the baked pumpkin, not so much the spicy. themselves. Exactly. Terry, if a customer were to come to you, like a Starbucks or another big company and say, Terry, we want the next pumpkin spice to put in our coffee drink or whatever.

Where would you start? How would you go about creating that? Right. Well, we work with our marketers. We work with people who kind of scour the market and see what's going on around the world. For coffee, especially, I would look at other traditions, Middle Eastern traditions, Scandinavian traditions, that sort of thing, see what we can introduce that way. And when you think of those, they're used with desserts in Middle Eastern, you're serving it with nuts and such. Maybe we can bring some of those components together. Maybe in Scandinavia, you've got your baked goods and your cookies. Maybe we can bring some of those flavors together with the coffee and provide something that's in the same family as the pumpkin

pie spice latte, but it's different. Is there a next pumpkin spice? I mean, what is coming down the pike? That's, a lot of people are working on that, and that's, it's going to be a tough one to top. Is this a trade secret or something? Give me some examples. Well, like I said, those are the, it's going to be tough to do that. We, I would look toward the baking industries as far as that goes, try to bring some. some cookie profiles into the coffee, things that you would be dunking into your coffee already, that's the sort of thing I would start looking into.

What about Conta? What about you? Actually, I think we already have it, and it's chocolate. Chocolate. See, I can hear it in your voice. So when you mention chocolate, when you mention the brownie baking, the very thought conjures up this celebration and the richness, et cetera, and people have been trying to replicate that in beverages. So coffee, coffee with brownie flavor, coffee with chocolate aroma and flavors is very, very big.

So people have been trying that for a very long time. When somebody hits it, let me tell you, watch out pumpkin spice. Terry, I know that companies like McCormick put out these flavor forecasts every year. Do you know what are the trends I should be looking out for in 2019? I think we're going to see a lot more of, say, exotic comfort foods. Your old standards with a new twist to it, think of stuff that's hit already like Saracha donuts and the Asian barbecues. So exotic to us comfort foods in the West?

Right. It's the same food, but now you're pairing it, you're turning it into something a little bit more exotic. Soracha donuts? I don't know. Oh, that's great. That's terrific. Have you tried Syracia ice cream? in Syraccia and chocolate.

It's wonderful. And it only brings out the subtle flavors of chocolate, et cetera, but gives it a little bit of a peak that especially millennials love. So Terry is spot on. Katha, I feel like serracha ice cream is a flavor only a flavor scientist could love. That's true. It may be a flavor only younger people love, but those things have a tendency to spread and to bring something new.

In our research for the segment, we came across a flavor called Kakumi. Yes. You both know it. Yes, sure. I love how you're responding with enthusiasm. I had never heard it before. Kantah, what is Kakumi? Kakumi is that feeling where you look into a bowl of soup and you look for the chicken inside it.

And all you have is a liquid soup, a clear broth. And you go, where is the chicken? That's Kakumi. It's deliciousness. It's that meatiness that you can only get from kukumi. Is it like umami? It's the next... It's related to.

Yes. Would you add anything there, Terry? Yeah, it is related to umami. Umami is essentially our body sensing protein. And we crave the protein, so we have this reaction to it. Cuckumi is a little bit more than that. It's more like tasting the whole proteins and the whole, the nice juiciness, everything that's released.

as you cook foods. I think the best way to describe it would be deliciousness. Yeah, literally, I think that's what it means, right? Really? Yes. And it's in chicken soup is where I could find it, anywhere else? You could probably find it in chicken soup. You can find it in tomato paste.

You can find it in mushroom soup. Things like that that people like, but when it is made properly and made with artistic creativity, people actually look in there and go, kidding. This is just liquid. Where is the mushroom? Where's the chicken? You just look into it because it is so delicious. Let's go to the phone. We have lots of questions. Let's go to Zachary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday, Zachary. Hi, y'all. What's your question? I want to know what makes root beer taste like root beer and where can I get from? Terry, that's your question. Sure. Syracia donuts for the win. Saracha donuts and apple cider donuts, right?

The root beer is interesting. It started out as a brood from the roots of birch trees, and those have compounds that are related to, or sometimes the same as wintergreen. So if you take your wintergreen lifesaver, it will taste very much like root beer. You add some vanilla in there with it, and now you've got a good beverage.

Wintergreen is the heart of root beer? It's the same compound. I'm really surprised. Yep. taste them I'm gonna have to I'm next time I've root here I'm gonna think about that let's let's go to the phones let's go to

Mary in Sutter Creek California hi hello hi yes hello cilantro which most people love tastes like soap to me and I know there are a few

others who have this sort of cilantro I don't know why and I think it's related to coriander hello what is the deal with that

with cilantro tasting like soap I think it has to do with the fact that cilantro is coriander and in some cultures the types of soaps and the aromas that were used with soaps had something very close to coriander

And so for those who are not used to it, it has a soapy toast. But to people in the east, or even if you're in Mexico, you cannot have a salsa without cilantro. Salantro is very polarizing. People either like it or they don't. And a lot of that is how you grow up. If you grew up eating it, you tend to like it. They rely on similar compounds that we put in soaps to make them smell fresh. these are naturally occurring in cilantro.

So you are smelling the same thing. Yes. The same family of compounds. I'm Flora Lichten, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Contha, how does spice trends spread? Do they go from one part of the globe to the other, typically? Well, today, with the disintermediation of the Internet, it just catches a blaze instantly.

So there might be someone very young out in the Philippines who comes up with something. And the next thing you know, there's someone out in Ghana. And then there are kids and millennials out in Carson City or North Dakota that pick up on it because they've got something else that connects them. And that which connects them also connects them on the spice and or flavor front. So that's how you see all these very, spices like flaming Cheetos when it came out, it was because somebody said, you've got to try it,

and that's a dare that young people cannot pass by. It's like a flavor meme, the flaming Cheeto. You're absolutely right. I wonder, are there spices in our kitchen cabinet that aren't actually spices at all? Like, I feel like I've heard about liquid smoke. What's going on with that? Terry or Kanta? Well, liquid smoke is just a distillate of the aromas, et cetera,

that you'd find in something that is smoky. Terry, take it from here. Right. Liquid smoke is literally, it's smoke captured via condensation. So you burn it, you capture it in a distill, in a still in a medium in water, and you preserve it. It's actual smoke? So it is actual smoke.

Wow. So if you were to scrape the sides of a smokehouse or swab the sides of a smokehouse after you've been using it, those are the same compounds. That's the same thing. We got a tweet from Amanda. Are new spices being discovered or are food scientists just trying out new combinations? We've discovered every spice that there is today and we discovered them more than 2,000 years ago. That's a bold claim, Kanta. No, no, no, it is.

We've got nothing new in the market there. But what we are doing and what food scientists are doing now is bringing them to prepared foods. So if you were out, you know, 50, 60 years ago, and you were looking for prepared packaged foods, all you got was salt, pepper, and maybe one or two spices. Today, walk into a supermarket, and you can see jalapeno flavored, harbunero flavored, Sri Racha flavored. That, folks, is brought to you by the marvel of food science. Well, speaking of those.

So these spices have to be put into a form. that can be used and into a product so they can be delivered. And that's the big difference here. Where it was just at specialty markets, at an Indian market or a Korean market or something, and now it's available to everybody. Well, speaking of the marvel of food science, are there holy grail flavors,

like flavors that exist in nature that cannot be reproduced? There are very fragile flavors, things that are good, fresh, but don't hold up to any processing. Like what? And you can think about fruits in general are very difficult, and they need some flavor help most of the time. So if you think of a fruit juice, it has to be pasteurized, it has to be brought to a market in a stable form. But often you lose a little bit.

So that's where we help out, bringing some of those components back. Also, things that just don't last long. Yeah, and then there's this flavor of mom's cooking, or grandmom's cooking. You hear about it, and everybody talks about it, and they go, but it's not just like what my mom used to make. So that, we still have not been able to replicate. You can't scrape that down and put it into a bottle. Everyone's tried, not yet. This is so fascinating.

Unfortunately, we run out of time, but I'd like to thank my guests. Terry Measley is a senior flavorist with Bona International in Geneva, Illinois, and Kanthashekelki is a food scientist and the founder of Corvus Blue LLC in Chicago. Thank you to you both. Thank you, Laura. It was a pleasure. Charles Berkwis is our director. Our senior producer is Christopher Intagliata, and our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Heiler. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and social media. And if you have a smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday.

Whenever you want, every day is now Science Friday. You can email us at SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Ira is back next week and you can find me on the Every Little Thing podcast. Every Little Thing is available wherever you get your podcasts. In New York, I'm Flora Lichten.