SciShow Tangents - Candy

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

This week, we talk about the ol’ tippy top of the food pyramid: Candy! When you get done with this tasty episode, you’ll be saying “how sweet it is!” And we’ve got some big news! SciShow Tangents has a Patreon now! Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, such as bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsWe love making this show, and with your help we can make it even better!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Cotton candy blood vesselshttps://www.designnews.com/stub/synthetic-capillary-networks-artificial-organs-developed-using-cotton-candy-machinehttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/vu-ccm020816.phpCordite (forbidden gum)Picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cordite_Filled_Cartridge.JPGhttps://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3281990https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/cordite/1010201.articlehttps://www.britannica.com/science/nitroglycerinhttp://www.gumassociation.org/index.cfm/science-technology/ingredients-technology/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6954562.stmhttp://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/85/8532sci2.html[Ask the Science Couch]Candy preferences with agehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2764307/https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(17)30214-0https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.30.1_supplement.418.6https://now.tufts.edu/articles/craving-brain[Butt One More Thing]Sugar alcohol fartshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5093271/#

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I am your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week as always is science expert sari reilly hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello guys thanks for coming and hanging out with me today i think it's really important what's your favorite uh what's your favorite drinkable drinkable candy you think it's really important i think it's really important to my mental health oh yeah that's true that's definitely true my favorite i was thinking about this today while i was writing my poem if soda counts as a candy does soda is totally a candy

that's what i think too i'm glad that we're all on the same page or at least me and sam wait all right back up is soda a candy that's that's now the the debate i have sensed in the room and we must go after it i explicitly wrote solid in my definition oh no of candy because like there are gels and liquids gushers yeah gushers are candy but it's still solid mostly well but what about those wax bottles that you bite the top off of and just suck the insides out? Exactly. Gross, therefore not candy. Oh, no.

All right. Those are fun. Those were what I was going to say if soda didn't count as a candy, I was going to say. I like those things. I used to really love Mountain Dew, but it hurts. It physically hurts me to drink it now. Does it hurt in your nose or in your throat? No, my muscles

cramp. Oh, no. Not the intended effect of Mountain Dew, I don't think. No, I don't think so. My stomach hurts. Yeah, so I, but I do love a Coca-Cola. I love Dr. Pepper, but then when you drink a Coca-Cola, you're

just like, oh my, this is good. This is just better than every other soft drink. Yeah. I like grape soda. I know that's a controversial take. Oh no, I love that. Okay. I love that you have such a terrible take.

No, I thought you were going to agree. No, I love grape soda. It's my favorite. No, it just makes sense for you. Wow, yeah. No, I haven't had a grape soda my favorite. No, it just makes sense for you. Wow, yeah. No, I haven't had a grape soda since I was five. Where are they? Do they sell them?

Yeah, at the food farm, there's this tiny weird fridge in the back with glass bottles of soda, and you can get strawberry, grape, and orange. And so I alternate between grape and orange, but grape's my favorite. It's just a little sericooler they keep back there for you. Yeah, I wish I had an interesting take like that, but I really don't. I just love Coca-Cola. And I wish, like I wish beyond wish

that I'd never drank it ever again in my life because it brings me no like joy beyond the moment in which I'm consuming it. And I do know that it is inefficient to create and unhealthy to consume. It brings me nothing except momentary fleeting joy. But isn't life just momentary fleeting joy anyway? Let's move on to the science poem,

and we can talk a little bit about what our topic for the day is. Do you guys want to hear my science poem? Oh, did you write one? I wrote one. Oh, shit. Two science poems, y'all. You can read yours. Mine stinks on ice.

No, let's do both. Okay. I want to do both. Okay. Science poem is like people's favorite part of the podcast. That is accurate, yeah. Here I go. We'll see if we took similar tacks.

Nothing keeps me going like that sugary spike. That flavored sucrose mouth punch is such a delight. I'll eat it in the morning and I'll eat it at night. Almost any kind of candy is my favorite type. Bottle caps and runts and peanut M&Ms and more peanut M&Ms because my love for them never ends. Milk duds and lollipops and Charleston chew. Snickers bars may just be my favorite food.

Reese's Pieces, Good & Plenty, Boston Baked Beans, Google Cluster, Jujy Fruits and Butterfinger Heath. And I'll even eat a Tootsie Roll if nothing else is around. Every candy is amazing except motherfucking mounds. Hank, you're never going to believe it. I wrote exactly the same poem as you. Wow. Wow.

It happens. Okay, here's mine, and then people can decide which is better. The humble carrot grows in the dirt. From the maple tree, sweet sap does spurt. A cow makes beef inside its bod. Recipe for apple? A seed and sod. But one could never grow a gummy or have chocolate eggs laid by a bunny.

Because while some food comes from Mother Earth, candy has a more science-y birth. Bring heaps of sugar to extreme temps and throw in some yummy additives. Maltodextrin, red lake number five, artificial flavors, naturally derived. Colors and hues that weren't meant to be cooked up in big vats for you and for me. So let's all enjoy candy, sweet bounty of science, but don't eat too much or you'll need a dental appliance. And so two poems in it's pretty clear that our topic for the day is candy sari what is candy okay so maybe my definition is kind of controversial because there's not a clear science boundary around what is candy and what is not so the criteria that i came up with

are relatively small so it's not like a giant thing. Those are novelties. Mostly sugar. So like you can have a candied almond or something like that. But that's not mostly sugar. That's like a thin coating of sugar. A candied almond is different than like a piece of candy. That's candy applied to an almond.

And they're two separate things. Yeah. Right. I wrote solid. So not gel or liquid. There are gels and liquids. That's maybe the most controversial part of this things. Yeah. Right. I wrote solid, so not gel or liquid. There are gels and liquids. That's maybe the most controversial

part of this definition. And then sugary, plain flavored, or flavors are possible. Let me hit you with cupcake. I don't think baked goods fall into the candy.

Yeah, I don't think they do. But it fits into all of Sari's definitions. Oh, God, Sari. Except you did say it was mostly made of sugar, but I also don't think that candy is mostly made of sugar because Snickersmart is not mostly sugar.

Just like a Hershey's Kiss is probably more oil and chocolate than it is sugar. I would say a cupcake is too big to be candy. Maybe that's where the small comes in. What about a mini cupcake then? How small are mini cupcakes? One bite size. This is interesting to me because it seems like candy mini cupcake then. How small are mini cupcakes? One bite size. Yeah. This is interesting to me

because it seems like candy is a sweet treat that is not a baked good. I don't like to define things by saying what they aren't, but there does seem to be like, it doesn't count as a candy if it's got fucking weed in it.

Yeah. It's not a baked good. And I think chocolate overlaps with candies so you can have like chocolate candy but not all chocolate is candy because you can have a chocolate cake chocolate is a flavor that you can add to candy but what if it's just chocolate like what if it's just like a hershey bar that's candy is it's a bag of chocolate chips candy now this is this is it isn't it i saw a saw a piece of media i think it was a tiktok and it was somebody saying anybody else have hippie parents and so they just find themselves walking

around with like a bowl of chocolate chips because it's the only fucking sweet thing you have in your house and i'm like yes except i'm the hippie parent and i'm walking around with a bowl of chocolate chips huh i guess when i was writing my poem the number one thing i was thinking was does not occur naturally. And chocolate kind of does. And sugar does. Yeah, there is sort of a place where like a chocolate bar isn't quite candy. I don't like it.

Sarah, do you know where the word candy comes from? I do. And it's actually quite interesting. It's from a Sanskrit root. And I'm not going to pronounce it right, but it's K-H-A-N-D, khand, which means to break. So I think it comes from like broken pieces of candied sugar because sugar came in different forms. You could have granulated sugar, but then you could also have like sheets of sugar, which they would break into pieces and that would be candied sugar. And so that is like the context in which candy first arose was

like a type of sugar. You could have granulated sugar or candied sugar. That was weird because sugar cane was used for its juice. And then eventually people were like, oh, we can use it for solid stuff too. And then it became sugar candy in French and Italian. And then it found its way into English around the 15th century. And then by the 17th century, candy became a standalone word as opposed to candy as an adjective. It's funny, the 15th century when things started to be not as awful a little bit, we were like, you know, maybe we could have something that doesn't suck. Maybe a little treat would be nice. We've been through a lot.

Maybe a little treat would be nice. We've been through a lot. All right, everybody. Well, in our candy theme, I have a game for you that I would like to play. So look, I'm going to be talking about neural nets, which does, is that seem candy like? Not really. A neural network is a kind of machine learning that takes inspiration from the way that our brains work to learn from data sets and try to solve problems. And like a lot of artificial intelligence,

the results can range from really quite brilliant to making absolutely no sense at all. And you may have heard that in 2018, a research scientist and writer of the blog AI Weirdness, Janelle Shane, decided to train a neural net on all of the candy heart messages she could find. And then she got the network to generate some of its own messages and the results were mixed. So in this game, you will be presented with two candy heart messages. And one of them is the product of Janelle Shane's neural network. And you are going to have to choose which it is. Are you ready?

Yes. Yes. Sari, you get to go first. Lovebot or Jump for me? Lovebot is the neural network. Lovebot is the neural network. You are correct. Yes. I eliminated Jump for me completely. I was like, there's no way a neural network's learning the word jump from candy. Oh, well, if that's your qualification, I have terrible news

later on. So, Sam, now you get to go. Is it sick wink or great flag? Oh, I like,

I like sick wink. Do you like sick wink for the neural net? Yeah. You are correct. Oh, good. Sari,

don't try or cool cud. Oh, dear. Don't try. No, it is cool cud. Cud? Is what the neural net learned enough from Candy Hearts to say cool cud. So that's a zero for Sari on that one.

Sam, love bun or one-on-one love bun or one-on-one what a pleasing thing to say out loud yeah it is it's nice oh one-on-one the answer is love bun i'm sorry sari is it partridge for two or Stank Love? Partridge would be so hard to fit on one of them hearts. I want this on a heart. Stank Hearts? Stank Love? Stank Love.

I'm sorry. I got it wrong. The answer is Stank Love. You are correct. Wonderful. All right. Sam Schultz. It's time for my favorite one.

You get it it's either dance skeleton dance skeleton or love 2000 hogs yeah dance skeleton twice just the phrase dance skeleton two times okay or love 2000 hogs yeah i think it's as much as i want it to be dance skeleton i think it's love 2000 hogs. Yeah. I can't believe you didn't go for Dan Skeleton. It is. You are correct. I thought I was going to have you on that for sure. You and dancing skeletons,

it's your favorite thing in the whole world. Yeah, it's delightful. But Love Hogs, that sounds like something you could learn from a nasty candy. All right. Sari, this is your last one. Is it Swan Time with an exclamation point or you a goo? Can you spell the second one?

Yes, that's Y-O-U-A-G-O-O. You a goo. Like you're accusing someone of being a goo. Okay, I think the first one, swan something. No, I made that up. I just thought, what sounds good? Swan time.

In fact, the AI came up with you a goo, which I could see that. I could put that on a candy heart and be like, I love you, baby. You a goo. Sam, is it swoolmat

or foothug? Swoolmat? That's S-W-O-O-L-M-A-T. Swoolmat or foothug. I like swoolmat. Swoolmat is correct! Incredible, Sam. What a romantic message.

Before we discover who won this round, I would like to tell you a little bit about candy hearts. In 1866, Oliver Chase was a pharmacist in Boston and he invented a machine that made it easier to cut lozenges. And then he realized that he could use it to make candy. And his brother, Oliver Chase, invented a way to print words onto the candy

with the vegetable coloring. They started out as conversation candies and they had a bunch of different shapes. They had shells and baseballs, and the heart shape emerged in 1902. The candy hearts are made from a combination of sugar, corn syrup, cornstarch, gums, and color and flavoring, which are mixed into a dough and then pressed flat in a machine. The original conversation candies were apparently much bigger and had really long phrases on them. Here was one. How long shall I have to wait? Please be considerate, which sounds very neural net. And that was a conversation starter. I guess they were conversation candies.

I'm not sure how you would actually use them. I guess you like lay this big, big heart that says, how long shall I have to wait? Please be considerate at a doorstep of your, the person you fancy. And then wait, I guess. Continue to wait. Oh, please be considerate is a little bit of a hard push for me. I think you need, that's, it's a little strong. It's creepy. Passive aggressive a little bit too.

Of like, if I was taking a long time to get ready and then open the door and there's this big candy heart on the ground, I'd be like, please be considerate. I'm turning back around, closing the door. In 2010, this was Necco, by the way, the New England candy company. They came out with a series of bolder flavors, blue raspberry and green apple. And the change made people very angry. And so they went back to their original formula

the next year. But they're nasty. People like the nasty, I guess, though. People love it nasty, Sam Schultz. Calculations have been finalized. Tuna has confirmed that Sam is the winner of our game, Neural Net or Not,

which I never said the name of the game before we started. We'll get there. We're still working on it. Next, we're going to take a short break and then it will be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sam is headed into the second portion of our show. And a slight lead.

And it's time for Sari to see if she can redeem herself during the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Here it is. There have been half a dozen well-documented experiments

conducted to determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Researchers have created licking machines, applied mathematical theories of fluid flow, and just patiently licked and counted. The most recent experiment by Luthien Carver of Bellarmine University used 130 human lickers and took into account flavor, gender of the liquor, time of day of the licking and the time since the last meal and also handedness. They really went deep on it. Approximately how many licks did the Bellarmine study find it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Yeah, this is like a wildly successful advertising campaign. The world may never know. Yeah, they just put The World May Never Know at the end of it

and then a bunch of scientists were like, we'll see about that. I'm still calculating. Sam is licking, is mind licking right now. Yeah, okay. You lick in your mind

and then I'll guess based on that. I'm going to guess 850. I was also thinking 800. 1,200. Wow, you guys think that it takes a lot of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. 175. What?

That seems very low to me. Maybe my tongue is bad. I don't think I could do that. Maybe they've made Tootsie Roll lollipops smaller since, I don't know. I guess I haven't had one since I was a child. Maybe you've gotten bigger. Maybe Sari Riley's tongue has gotten bigger. No, Hank, they've gotten smaller. I mean, I think I would have gone lower than 175, honestly. Maybe I'm just a big licker. I thought it would take 100 licks to get to the center. And then I times that by the diameter of the Tootsie Roll Pop.

That was my method. Well, you don't have to lick all around it. I think it's just to get to the center. I'm a fool. I was picturing finishing the whole boy off. I mean, there have been a number of studies and they range up to 411. That's the highest. So woefully overestimated.

Yeah. So that means, Sam, that you get to go first, right? Well, I could choose to not. Or you get to choose. Yes, correct. I'll go first. Candy is, by its very nature, frivolous and useless, like me. But even the most seemingly unimportant things can have secret helpful talents

just waiting to be discovered, also like me. So one big goal in medical science is to figure out how to grow or 3D print organs and bones out of organic material, which would greatly reduce the demand for donor organs and hopefully considerably reduce the waiting time of people who need them. But one huge hurdle to this is that the circulatory system, which, as you know, is needed to carry blood through organs, both real and man-made, branch into teeny tiny capillaries that are so small and complicated that they're super difficult and time consuming to construct. So researchers are able to keep extremely thin layers, like one cell thick layers of living tissue alive, just like in a fluid. But cells need to be within a few microns of blood or some other fluid that has nutrients in it to live.

So it's impossible to keep anything thicker than the width of a few human hairs alive without a circulatory system. And if you stack them up, eventually they'll grow their own kind of circulatory system as you build up layers. But it takes weeks for them to create that. So you're just like laying on a human hair, waiting a couple weeks, waiting and then laying on another one. That seems bad.

It doesn't work so good. So in 2016, Leon Bellin, a mechanical engineering professor, was talking to a surgeon who was talking about the circulatory system limitation. So Leon Bellin was thinking about ways to solve this problem when the concept of the circulatory system with its thin, dense systems of extremely thin strands reminded him of something. Cotton candy. So cotton candy machines spin out thin networks of dense strands of sugar

and he thought maybe he could make them spin out networks of other stuff too. I hate it. Well, okay. It's not as gross as it sounds. So he went to Target

and he bought a cotton candy machine and he tweaked it to spin out strands that were as thin as this sounds. So he went to Target and he bought a cotton candy machine and he tweaked it to spin out strands that were as thin as 55 microns, which is as thin or thinner as many of the smaller blood vessels in organs. So he figured out a recipe

for a material that changed solubility depending on temperature and he spun out a homemade circulatory system out of this material. Then he took what was basically jello infused with living human cells

and poured it over his homespun circulatory system, let that set, and then he melted out the plastic circulatory system scaffold and left behind a network of super thin tunnels in the jello. So if you're familiar with how like metal or bronze casting works, what he did was basically the lost wax technique and Belling called it the sacrificial cotton candy technique. So then he pumped a blood-like fluid through the vessels. And after seven days, 90% of the cells in the jello were still alive compared to 60 to 70% of the cells in jello that didn't have the scaffolding

or were using a different already established method of making fake circulatory systems. And at the time of this paper being published, the researchers were working to improve the equipment so it could make even thinner strands. But it's not really like a solve all way to make a circulatory system, but they can use it to grow things

that are really thick with blood vessels like kidneys and bones. So that's what they're working on now. And he was able to put this plastic into a cotton candy maker, just a Target cotton candy maker, and it spun out plastic. What else can I make cotton candy out of? Like, can I just like put stuff into a cotton candy maker? I think so.

I think it has to melt easy and cool easy. Is that right? I don't really know how cotton candy works, but. Will it cotton candy maker? I think so. I think it has to melt easy and cool easy. Is that right? Okay. I don't really know how cotton candy works, but. Will it cotton candy? It's my new YouTube series. Just like throwing stuff in there and seeing what happens. I love it. That's very good, Sam. And I also love someday getting an organ when I need one. Get some extra bones put in. I could have some, I could, I could totally use some bones at this point. Sarah, what do you got for me? So mine's kind of the opposite

of that danger candy. Chewing gum is definitely a candy is the first line of this that I've written. But it's weird because it's made out of inedible compounds that are molecularly similar to plastics and rubbers.

So we like chewing gum for the sensation of chewing. And yes, thousands of years ago, some birch tar in Finland or mastic gum in Greece tree resins were possibly chewed for mouth health because they contain antiseptic compounds. And nowadays, chewing gum recipes have sweeteners and flavors in addition to the chewy bits.

But regardless of all those other things, it's clear that humans like to chew gum, which has gotten us into sticky situations where we treat not candy as candy. Like in 1889 in Great Britain, cordite was developed as a chemical propellant for army weapons instead of gunpowder. It looked like little strings, kind of like if you untwisted a red vine and chopped it into little bits. And it didn't make large plumes of smoke or loud bangs. And there were several slightly different formulas for cordite, but one was petroleum jelly as a stabilizer and lubricant, nitrocellulose, which is highly flammable, and nitroglycerin, which is highly explosive, but also sweet. So basically, it became the forbidden chewing gum.

Yeah. Am I right that if you chewed it, it became the forbidden chewing gum. Yeah. Am I right that if you chewed it, it would be super bad? Super bad, but also super good. When European soldiers had a hankering for candy, they would get into their ammo

and munch on some cordite. The nitroglycerin added a sweet flavor, but it also dilates blood vessels. And for that reason, nitroglycerin has been sweet flavor, but it also dilates blood vessels. And for that reason, nitroglycerin has been used in medicine to help with heart conditions. So soldiers reported a, quote, stimulating and exhilarating effect, like small doses of alcohol. So they didn't want candy. They wanted drugs. Yeah.

But chewing gum drugs. And if they chewed a lot of cordite, they got more intoxicated or hallucination, headachy effects because there was too much nitroglycerin. But their heads wouldn't explode, right? Next sentence. The most obvious danger from chewing this forbidden gum was putting a literal explosive in your mouth. Human teeth are very strong and can sometimes chomp hard enough to set off said explosive. And according to

a newspaper article from December 31st, 1914, at least three soldiers have exploded because of this habit. So military authorities were clamping down on not candy eating

as soon as they learned of it. But they didn't really know until newspapers reported on it. And they were like, oh no, they're chewing the ammo. So in conclusion, there are all these warnings nowadays about like, high sugar candy being addictive and bad for you,

or gum being associated with obnoxious teenagers. But at least it's actual candy for human chewing and not candy from the inside of guns. At least the public safety campaign isn't that complicated. It's like, so you've been doing this and Lieutenant Jeff blew up, so stop. You want to know what? I'd chew it.

You just got to be careful, right? I bet I could hold myself back from chewing too hard. You just chew it really slow. Oh God, those are both great. And I love the creation of this special plastic that you can, you know, melt out really easily

and that you can put into a cotton candy machine without any problems. I love all of that. But there's something about Gone Gum that is making me... That it's sweet and delicious.

It's drugs. and it is a high stakes game all of those things at the same time so I'm gonna go ahead and give Sari Riley 24

to Sam's 22 points okay which means Sari Riley has come out on top that gum is addictive

why do people like chewing gum so much? I hate it. So like, I really don't get it at all. My guess is that some sort of like repetitive action. Something to do. Yeah, something to do in the way that people like jiggle their leg when there's nothing else going on.

So. I just jiggle my leg. Yeah, I do too. I don't have to worry about chewing all the time, getting all my saliva out. You need that stuff. I only make so much of that. You got real food to eat. That's right.

I do. So now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Jordaddy asks, why does candy seem less appetizing as you get older? Oh, interesting. Well, I personally have not noticed this because I still, as indicated in my poem, love candy. I still love candy too, but Sam's an old man apparently. Yeah, candy kind of hurts me.

Candy makes me feel like Mountain Dew makes you feel, I think. It makes my teeth hurt. I haven't been to the dentist in three years, so that might be part of why it makes my teeth hurt. You should probably do that. So I should probably go to the dentist. None of my explanations have to do with teeth hurting. So I think that is something you should go to the dentist for. Oh, okay. Well, and as a kid, I could like polish off a whole bag of any candy you hand at me. But now I'll have like three gummy worms and that's the perfect amount of gummy worms. Oh, I can still go really hard, especially with chocolate. I can eat way too much chocolate.

And I know that we've sort of like put that in the fuzzy barrier between candy and not candy. But I can, you know, sometimes they have like those Snickers bars where you get two in the pack and it's like one for later. Nope, they're both for now. But do you feel worse after you do it? Not noticeably? I feel worse whenever I have anything with a lot of sugar. Okay. Even just like a big baked pretzel.

Like I still get, like my blood sugar gets a little out of whack and I get tired. I don't know if that's old or if that's just me. I think it's old. Because that is what I found as like one of the two physiological explanations for this. So there's no definite answer. And we know this is a biological pattern, but anything I'm going to explain has a little asterisk as per usual with the science couch segment. But a big thing we know is that your metabolism changes as you grow up and you break down food more slowly because you need less energy to keep your body

going. Like kids are growing constantly. And so they need that energy to like form their bodies that are growing and changing and like for their infinite running around that they never seem to get tired of. And it's just like a scientific fact, biologically known that your basal metabolic rate decreases almost linearly with age. And so just as you get older, you metabolize things more slowly. And so you don't need that much sugar or that big pretzel to fuel you. And so you feel kind of sick afterward because your body's like,

oh, I got to digest all this. And it's not just gone really fast. Is there a flavor piece of it too? Yeah, there's like a general, I categorized it as like a general cognitive or psychological bucket of explanations. So we know that candy could make us feel bad afterward. And so we have like some hesitation, some psychological hesitation to eating it.

Because it's like, oh, I'm thinking of the candy crash while I'm still eating the candy. I can't just enjoy the pure bliss of this moment. There's so much of life now where it's like, I have to think about what the pure bliss of this moment. There's so much of life now where it's like, I have to think about what the eventual impacts of this decision. Yeah, we can remember that tummy aches exist. But also in like the perception part of your brain, children may be less sensitive to certain tastes than adults. So like they need more sugar to get a level of sweetness.

Also like your tastes changes as you age because some flavors taste stronger to you as adults or more pungent as adults than when they're children. And some vice versa that are more pungent to you as children. And then as an adult, you're like, that's fine. And that's like the soda becoming too sweet explanation to me where it's like, oh, I used to chug this all the time, but now as an adult, it tastes sweeter for some reason to me. For the first time ever, I bought the tiny cans of soda and I felt like the oldest person in the universe because I just can't finish a whole can of soda anymore.

Oh, yeah, I can, though I do definitely have the this is too sweet, especially with like, I don't have that with Coke, but with Sprite, I'm like, no way would I just drink a Sprite. And I actually put seltzer water in my Sprite now, which is very old. Not cool. And then the third thing is also a physiological explanation more than psychological. And this is probably the most fuzzy of them, which is that hormones change as you grow up. And we know that hormones affect different cravings and tastes because they also there's a fibroblast growth factor called FGF21, where humans with higher levels of FGF21 are generally sweet disliking. And then variants on that gene and that growth factor

are associated with increased sweet consumption. So there could be hormones that probably are interrelated to metabolism and other things that we can look at and say, you have like a higher tolerance for sugar or you enjoy it more because hormones are so weird and so complete in how they affect our bodies. If you want to ask the Science Couch a question,

you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Kimmy Kimmy for, at FountainBevy, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Before we go, an exciting announcement. SciShowTangents has a Patreon. Head over to Patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to support us, and you can get some perks in the process. There are monthly bonus episodes, a newsletter, a printable Tangents fan club membership card, and more.

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for your support. And as always, there are also other ways to help out Tangents. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful. And it helps us know what you like about the show. You can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode, which I always love seeing those on Twitter. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Hirokamatsu Shima.

Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing.

If you've ever noticed that you've been farting loudly or getting bad diarrhea after eating low sugar candies, that is because of sugar alcohols like maltitol, lactitol or xylitol that are used as sugar alternatives. These sugar alcohols are difficult to digest, which keeps them from contributing to tooth decay or spiking your blood sugar. But if you eat too much, the undigested sugars can cause water to come into the stomach and intestines through osmosis. And that accumulated water gets cleared out through the colon, producing diarrhea and farts. That's another danger candy I've always been curious about because there's those gummy bears where on Amazon all the reviews are like this gave me the worst diarrhea of my life.

Whenever I read that I think I could I want I want to try. For some reason I want to I want to chew on nitroglycerin. I want to sit on the toilet have horrible

diarrhea while chewing on nitroglycerin and explode.