SciShow Tangents - Food

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week as always is science expert,ari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi. First of all, I have to say congratulations to Sari for her recent engagement. She's going to get hitched. Yeah. Wife city, baby. So congratulations to you and Sylvia. i have a question for you to start out our episode i'm curious what is your like favorite bad food that you love because you all know about me and corn dogs right yeah is that still your brand like do you still like a corn oh my god yes like it's it's less a part of my brand now i just sort of like the inside jokes come in and out of style, but that was never a made up thing. I love corn dogs.

Starting point is 00:01:08 I've never had a corn dog I didn't like. Oh. It's hard to mess them up, honestly. Yeah. You dip them in batter and you fry them. Though I have had a corn dog where the outside was hot, but the inside was still like refrigerator temperature.

Starting point is 00:01:21 And I did like it. So I've still never had a corn dog I didn't like oh boy you're a sick man all right what's your trash Sam trash of choice I do think it's got to be taco john's cheesy potato burrito is that what it's called it's just a burrito with their sloppy wet liquid meat with the potato lays in it it and my mouth watering just thinking about it. The potato olays are like a spiced tater tot for those of you who have never been to a Taco John's. Yes, excuse me, sorry.

Starting point is 00:01:53 But the Taco John's near us closed. I know. No, I think we've talked about it on the podcast before. This is a big deal for me and Sam. You know, I've been thinking a lot about, and this is a completely different question, food that you've eaten that you know you'll never be able to eat again because the place went out of business. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:08 I think all the time about the first calzone I ever had, which was at a corner grocery store that doesn't, you know, corner grocery stores barely exist anymore anywhere, but in Orlando where they definitely don't exist anymore. And they had like a big deli, you know, and they made their own calzones. It was the first time I ever had a calzone and like the bread was like, had a ton of sugar in it. And then the, like the inside was like super, like Italian, it was like spiced meats. And I think about all the time and I'll never have a calzone like that again.

Starting point is 00:02:40 It was so good. I die. That's how I feel about Costco's mixed berry pie. Costco's around, they make so many different treats. But from my youth, we used to get mixed berry pie. I could eat one of those like large Costco pies almost by myself until my parents yelled at me to stop eating pieces of pie. Like I'd have to ration it out. And it was just so packed full of sugar it had big whole

Starting point is 00:03:06 strawberries in there it was delicious it was like perfect combination of berries do they still make them no i haven't seen one in over a decade now you got your eyes out yeah i i look every single time at i'm at costco and never they're just gone off the face of the planet. And I've had mixed berry pies elsewhere, but there is something about that perfect, like, crispy on top, slimy on the other side, sugary goo that they got perfect. That doesn't sound like a trash food, though. That's just a food you'll never have again. Do you have a trash food? Yeah. Also in the dessert vein, any Hostess cupcake or knockoff thereof. So any sort of like whipped cream pumped in a fake chocolate cake, I could have a million.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Yeah. Some cake that was made by a large machine. Yeah. Like there's nothing handmade or artisan about it. It's like this cake. You are the first person to have touched any of these things a fudge round is my my favorite little debbie i go into gas stations and i'm like oh they have fudge rounds and i grab them and i turn them over and i look at the calories and i put it back every time i can no longer eat 800 calories of a cookie like that how much they are really so much yeah it's an obscene amount yeah never look at the nutrition facts and they cost like 35 cents it's like per calorie the cheapest thing that exists is it even possible how is that possible how do they even get

Starting point is 00:04:37 it to the gas station that cheap the aliens have it and they've made us hooked on them and i love it i'll do it forget soylent feed me the calorie dense yeah little debbie snack cake the matrix and just give her a little debbie's and she'd be perfect that's right i'm just just like in that instead of the goo that kiana reuses and it's just it's just holosos and zebra cakes just a pile of them and you see my unconscious body just like eating them perfect there's a plug in the back of your head wriggling around in that wheat all right so every week here on tangents we try to get together to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic and failing. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I'll award as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always,

Starting point is 00:05:34 we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. What is food? Does it absolutely positively need to be chewed? What if it's just a real soft soup? A good soup served by a good soup troop. And afterward, you have a good soup poop. And if you're really excited, you let out a good soup poop whoop. And if you do it with your friends, then that's a group good soup poop whoop. I forgot where I was going.

Starting point is 00:06:05 What is food? Does it absolutely positively need to be chewed? If it's just something nutritious, that could be a Coke, a Coke that's delivered by a friendly Coke bloke, a guy who makes you laugh with his Coke bloke joke. And then you sputter as you laugh. It's a Coke bloke joke choke. And then you wheeze. Oh, it's a good one. And a coke bloke joke choke croak. I can't seem to stay focused. What is food? Does it absolutely positively need to be chewed? I just mean to ask if it comes in a glass, if it goes up a straw, does it count at all? If it can flow in a stream, is it still feed? If it's blended up, is that a food stuff? It seems like it's both a yes and a no i guess that's what sari's for i gotta go that was great yeah my cheeks hurt from smiling it was so good so the topic of the day is

Starting point is 00:06:57 food and sari i've already created a bunch of questions for you to answer what is food you know i think liquids count as food uh yeah i'm gonna say it doesn't need to be chewed to be food okay i think you have to get some nutritional value or it needs to help you with some vital process which is where like fiber fits in to like scrape the intestine. Right. What if it's salts? I need NaCl to survive, but it is a rock and it is not providing me energy. Is salt food? I think it's not. I don't think so either. Oh. Yeah, I guess it's food adjacent, but I think it is food-like enough that I would just call it food. I think it needs to have calories to be food. Like, I think a Coca-Cola classic is food and a Diet Coke is not food.

Starting point is 00:07:53 If it's just a liquid nutrition, because a smoothie is food. You don't have to convince me of that. You blend up a hamburger with milk, that's as much as a hamburger as it was before you blended it up with milk. Is that what you think a smoothie is? I've never had one. Is that not right? You know, like, for example. It's just like you go to Taco John's and you get the cheesy potato burrito and then you just- No, it's just milk. Blend it up.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Just do it with their cheese goo. But like, it does sort of stretch the definition to include a soda. But if you include pineapple juice or like a crushed up banana, I don't see why you wouldn't include soda. You don't need to have fiber. Is water food? Water is not food. Ah, water is food. It absolutely is. I'm all butt is legs and Sari's all water is food. Water is a food as defined by section 201F of the Federal Food and Drug and Cosmetic Act.

Starting point is 00:08:50 It is a normal constituent of many foods and an essential in the preparation and processing of most commercially prepared foods. So legally it's a food. Nutritionally, it's not a food. That's a drink. Couldn't be. So far you've defined food, food drink and rock are the three categories the three kinds of things yeah everything is either a food drink or a rock yeah this book rock rock probably yeah so i'm glad that the food and drug administration stepped in

Starting point is 00:09:20 to settle the debate but i still don't believe Yeah, I guess that makes me kind of a government shill, which I don't like either. Yes, that's a lot. Sari, do you know where the word food comes from? We've had it around for a while because we've eaten things for a while.

Starting point is 00:09:35 But as far as I can tell, it has just morphed in different forms. So Middle English, it was still like food or foda. Old English, foda for sure. Proto-Germanic, fodon. It eventually traces back to the statistically probable Proto-Indo-European root PA, which means to feed, which is also in like antipasto in Italian.

Starting point is 00:10:03 So like the food you eat before you feed or pantry or pasture or yeah uh panic grass specifically so like panic grass was named i think before panic as like fear came into existence and it was just like, ah, this is grass grass. This is food grass here. And so my sense is, and this is just deductive reasoning, not any solid linguist has talked to me about this, but it seems like we used it to refer to animal food. Like whatever we ate had more specific names,

Starting point is 00:10:44 like I'm eating this chicken or I'm eating this bread. But then feed in general was what you gave to the animals. And then we eventually generalized it to just like edible things as food for any organism. I love that. It makes sense that it would have, as an old, old word, it would have a lot of connections to things that aren't that related, like pastor, for example.

Starting point is 00:11:05 I don't really think of pastor and food as being related, but a pastor is someone who feeds and takes care of a flock of humans, I suppose. And that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, I have a new game for you. It's called Would I Lie to You? Not at all based on the British television panel show. This is an homage, you know? It's an homage to one of my favorite television programs, Would I Lie to You?

Starting point is 00:11:31 So in my hand, metaphorically, I have questions about food. And before we sat down to record this episode, I sent some of these questions to Sam and the others to Sari, and they replied with an answer to the question, except they might be lying. So today, Sam and Sari are both going to decide whether or not they think the other person is lying to them. And I'm going to be revealing the questions they each got as well as their answers. So I will be telling you the question sent to the other as well as the answer that they provided.

Starting point is 00:12:02 And you will have to guess whether that answer is true or whether it is instead a bunch of lies. And if you correctly identify the truth or the lie, you will get a point. If not, then the other person will get the point. If this sounds overly complicated to you, look, we're trying out something new and you'll figure it out.

Starting point is 00:12:18 Yeah. So Sam, we asked Sari the following question. Scientists used to think that the ability to chew food was primarily a mammalian trait and that other animals use their jaws or beaks to grab food, maybe tear it into chunks, and then rely on other musculature to break it down. The list of non-mammalian chewers has, however, slowly been increasing. And in 2016, scientists got video of this surprising animal chewing food. What animal

Starting point is 00:12:47 is it? It is stingrays, which have little mouths on the bottom of their bodies that they use to chomp shellfish from the ocean floor. Would I lie to you? Crunch, crunch, crunch. Oh. They do have little mouths. This seems likely.

Starting point is 00:13:03 Gosh, I don't know what their skeletons look like at all. I think you are lying to me. Sam thinks that Sari is lying, and Sam is incorrect. Oh, okay. It's true. Scientists used to think that freshwater stingrays eat by swallowing their prey whole, but researchers observed oscillate river stingrays hunting insects, and they wanted to understand how stingrays could get past the insect's exoskeletons.

Starting point is 00:13:27 So they used high-speed videography and glass-bottom tanks to figure it out. And they found that the stingray uses its fins to create a suction that binds its prey to its mouth, where it then uses a simple set of teeth to chew its food. All right, Sarah, we asked Sam the following question. This popular condiment got its start as fermented fish sauce used in China. The sauce made its way to the West when British sailors realized it would help them liven up their meals. And over time, the sauce evolved into what we know today. What is this condiment, Sam? This condiment is Worcestershire sauce.

Starting point is 00:14:01 Worcestershire sauce. Would I lie to you? Do I have to say that every time? I'm going to. Worcestershire sauce does taste fishy-ish. It has an umami taste to it. And it is a very European thing to take something that was across the world and put their own name on it. And just name it after a city in the UK. But I think that's a lie because I think it's ketchup. Wow. Sari Riley, the answer is ketchup. Sam is a liar.

Starting point is 00:14:32 You did that on the get go, didn't you? I did. Well, I think I had heard it before. I'm half Chinese. And so I try and learn some things about Chinese history. What a trick. Wow. This is wild. I did not know this. The fermented fish sauce used by Chinese and Indonesian trader was called, I don't know, ketchup or ketchup. After British sailors began to use the sauce,

Starting point is 00:14:54 they altered the recipe and used it to add some flavor to their meals. And while there were a few British recipes that included tomato, it really took off as a ketchup ingredient in the U.S. And American mass production of ketchup began around the end of the 19th century. And over time, the sauce became sweeter as producers added more sugar to balance out the vinegar in order to satisfy my palate,

Starting point is 00:15:17 which just wants everything to taste like ice cream. Thank you. Very cool. Very interesting. And I would really like to taste that old- timey ketchup to see what it's like. So, Sam, we asked Sari the following question. If you have had a picnic at the beach, you've likely had to fend off seagulls that want to steal your food. In 2019, scientists decided to test out a strategy that they thought could help deter these avian thieves from absconding with your food.

Starting point is 00:15:42 What was the strategy, Sari? It was wearing super reflective or light emitting accessories because they get confused by the glare. Would I lie to you? This game stresses me out. Look at her little devious look on her face. That was devious. I don't think that's practical enough for it to even be suggested. I think that's a lie.

Starting point is 00:16:06 You are correct. Sari would lie to you and leave you vulnerable to the theft and harassment by seagulls. If you want to keep seagulls away from your food, you should stare at them. At least that's what scientists found works on herring gulls in the United Kingdom. They used- Are you embarrassed or what? They used weighted bags of potatoes to lure in gulls if someone was watching the gulls they would take on average 21 seconds longer to touch the food versus when they were not being watched and a few gulls

Starting point is 00:16:37 wouldn't touch them at all look if i'm being stared at by something like 85 times my size i am eating a potato more slowly definitely yeah do you say weighted bag of potatoes i did say weighted bag of fried potatoes i guess it's just so they couldn't take the whole thing away yeah that just feels like a challenge to me i go get my friends all right this is the last question that we have. It's for Sari. Sam was asked this question. At the 2020 London Marathon, runners were handed edible drink pods designed to help them cut down on the amount of cups that would get thrown during the race.

Starting point is 00:17:15 These pods contained a sports drink held in an edible casing. What was this casing made of, Sam? The casing was made of sodium alginate isolated from seaweed. Would I lie to you? I mean, that sounds very real. That sounds really sciencey and real. I feel like you're telling the truth. Seaweed is goopy. We've isolated other things from seaweed and used it. So I'm going to say you're telling the truth. And he is. Sam Schultz was telling the truth at the 2020 London

Starting point is 00:17:43 Marathon. Volunteers handed out edible drink pods encased in seaweed. They were made by a London company called Notpla. I guess that's from not plastic to cut down on plastic use to make the pods Notpla. Does it sound better in British? Notpla. Yeah, it does. Yeah. Dips a frozen version of Notpla, America.

Starting point is 00:18:03 dips a frozen version of the, not pla, America, a frozen version of their sports drink into calcium chloride solution and then a solution of sodium alginate, an extract of seaweed. The calcium ions and alginate link up to make a waterproof membrane, creating a casein that you could eat if you wanted to. So that means that Sari got three because she did get you to guess one of her lies and you, Sam, got one. I know that you got a little bit of a hole to dig out of and we're going to take a short break

Starting point is 00:18:31 and we'll see if you can do it in the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. It's three to one with Sari in the lead, and it's time for the fact. Our panelists have brought some science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented all their facts, I will judge and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit, by which I mean which fact blows my mind. And after they have presented all their facts, I will judge and award Hank Buck's Any Way I See Fit,

Starting point is 00:19:05 by which I mean which fact blows my mind the most and which one is easiest to turn into a TikTok that will promote this podcast. But to decide who gets to go first, I have a trivia question. Apples have an average of 116.8 grams per kilogram of sugar in them, but their sweet taste is associated with many other factors like volatile compounds, texture, and sugar alcohols.

Starting point is 00:19:29 What percent of perceived apple sweetness is associated with sugars? How are you measuring the percentages of perceived apple sweetness? With science, my dude! Oh, wow. I don't know. We definitely have a measure of sweetness because we use them for like artificial sweeteners and stuff. Gosh. I have no clue.

Starting point is 00:19:54 It's between 1 and 100. Thank you. Great, great. No negative percentiles here. I'm going to guess that it's low for some reason. Like that's the surprise. That's the twist. So 15%.

Starting point is 00:20:08 Okay. I was going to say 25% and I'm going to just stick with it. All right. Both of you work in the right path, but despite the fact that neither of you got it correct and the answer was between your answers, Sari is the winner because you were closer.

Starting point is 00:20:24 What's the answer? Oh, sorry. It's 17. You don't care about the actual answer. Isn't that interesting, though? This is why apples are so good. Just crunch on them and you get way more sweetness than you get sugar. That's why they keep the doctor away. Sari, who's going to go first?

Starting point is 00:20:39 Oh, I'll go first. In the early 1900s, many scientists were researching food and the different chemicals that our bodies get from what we eat. And in a 1912 article, the biochemist Casimir Funk wrote about four so-called essential substances that people needed to get from their food or else they would get sick with things like scurvy or beriberi, which are in fact related to vitamin C and vitamin B1 deficiencies. As a general term, he called them vitamins because they were vital and, by his best guess, probably nitrogen-containing amines.

Starting point is 00:21:12 The second guess turned out to be wrong, but the name was catchy, so people just dropped the E and called them vitamins. Ha! Isn't it ridiculous? That is so weird. Uh-huh. It's just a catchy name, a vitamin. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:27 So between around 1913 and 1948, the global scientific community underwent a fun and chaotic and sometimes scandalous venture to identify all the vitamins we recognize today. But at the same time, advertisers heard about these so-called vitamins and adopted them as a new science-y marketing term for food. Vitamins were perceived as healthy, so products that were chock full of vitamins were great. Oranges, cereal, you name it. Vitamins were even used to market food that was absolutely unappetizing, like small bricks of pasty yeast wrapped in foil. In the 1920s, yeast wasn't a hot ticket item at the grocery store because people were buying things like bread instead of making it themselves, and prohibition didn't help either.

Starting point is 00:22:12 The people in the yeast business, like Charles and Max Fleischman of Fleischman's Yeast Company, didn't like that, so they decided yeast needed a rebrand. Brewer's Yeast already had some press in the medical community as being rich in vitamins because of a 1916 article trying to find cheap supplements. And it's true that it has riboflavin and thiamin inside. But Fleischmann Yeast Company hired a professor of physiological chemistry to do more research, and they started the, quote, yeast for health campaign with an ad agency to really lean into the vitamins angle,

Starting point is 00:22:46 even though all they were selling was a pasty living brick of fungus. I mean, that sounds fine to me. That's not all. That's amazing. I can get a very small brick of fungus. All right. Would you make some of that or just eat it? So, yeah, according to one article, they advertise things like mixing the yeast cakes into water, milk, or tomato juice, or eating one before every meal.

Starting point is 00:23:09 And like many a health fad, this sketchy ad copy worked. Yeast sales tripled in the United States between 1917 and 1924. Wow. In the 1930s, the Fleischmann Yeast Company started making some yeast cakes that were fortified with extra vitamins. In the 1930s, the Fleischmann Yeast Company started making some yeast cakes that were fortified with extra vitamins, but the ads started getting overblown, like claiming eating yeast cakes was better than eating your fruits and vegetables. So the FDA started to step in to rein in big yeast. It seems like, from my research, the tail end of yeast cakes were in the 40s and 50s when active dry yeast hit stores with a longer shelf life than these cakes. This is the stuff that you see in little pouches today. And nutritional yeast kind of carries the healthy yeast fad to modern days. Yeah, because we still hear about this yeast.

Starting point is 00:23:54 This yeast is still up there. We're still putting it on our pocket. Yeah, well, people are. And then I'm like, why did you do that? It tastes kind of good. I don like it well yeah so some people like it some people don't um unlike yeast cakes it's not active or alive yeast it's a bunch of the same species s cerevisiae that has been heated up a lot and then dried out the flakes are basically broken down proteins and junk and a major product of those broken down proteins is the amino acid glutamate which gives that umami flavor it's the same stuff in monosodium glutamate, which gives that umami flavor. It's the same stuff in monosodium glutamate, MSG, but branded as a health food. And it does have some B vitamins and some types are fortified with others, but it's not a miracle worker either.

Starting point is 00:24:38 And the conclusion of the story is food advertisers across the decades really aren't all that different and yeast will persist in some fad diet for the rest of eternity, probably. We'll always have yeast. In the future, that's all we'll eat. Yeah, just yeast. Yeah. All right. Sam, what do you have for us?

Starting point is 00:24:57 Just this last week, Americans probably ate more pumpkin in pie form than they do over the course of the whole rest of the year. Wow. Complete conjecture. I have no idea. That seems right to me. Don't say wow. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:09 And pumpkins and gourds in general are pretty great. They have protective shells. They have sweet guts and even seeds you can roast up to snack on. But as is the case with many foods

Starting point is 00:25:19 or like plants that we use as crops now, it was not always thus, especially in the Pleistocene era. So aside from the hard shells on gourds that make them a big pain in the ass for little animals to eat, which were probably even harder back then,

Starting point is 00:25:32 the earliest wild gourds were not only super bitter, but they were bitter because they contained cucurbitacin, named after the cucurbita family that contains pumpkins and squash, which is toxic. So most animals didn't want to and couldn't eat them anyway.

Starting point is 00:25:47 So who was eating them? In a study published in 2015, researchers reported finding ancient gourd seeds in mammoth dung, suggesting that, much like avocado, these were fruits meant for megafauna. So massagons, giant sloths, and the like were big enough to eat the gourds, like chomp them, and also big enough to not get killed by the toxins. And if animals today are anything to go off of, bigger animals have less bitter, sensitive taste buds than small ones. I assume because, at least partially because little guys need to worry about how much toxin they're eating much more than big guys do. So megafauna can mow down on old-y pumpkins, not taste how nasty they were and absorb all

Starting point is 00:26:27 the toxin into their body and be fine and then poop the seeds out wherever else they walked as you do. So sometime around the Pleistocene era, humans made their debut and humans love to carry stuff around like water and berries and stuff. And fortunately for them, there were these weird hard fruits everywhere that tasted like shit and they would make you puke. But hollowed them out they made for excellent bowls and bottles and stuff like that and sometime around then coincidentally megafauna were in the process of going extinct just who knows why yeah so we were eating all of them basically uh and this

Starting point is 00:27:00 would have meant big trouble for gourds but but humans needed them for human type activities. So they adopted the gourd as their own. And as we cultivated them, researchers think that there were probably humans who thought, hey, these seeds and this bowl fruit look pretty good. Started developing ways of preparing them that made them less bitter. Then we started selecting for less bitter seeds. And eventually we started selecting for sweeter guts. And so we have these big, sweet gourds that we enjoy today. And DNA testing on seeds from various archaeological samples and wild plants confirm that like almost every lineage of gourd that humans domesticated in the early days are completely extinct in the wild now. So that is how the death of all megafauna and humans need for water bottles conspired to bring us pumpkin.

Starting point is 00:27:42 Wow. That's very cool cool that's very good when i put pumpkins out on my doorstep they get eaten um they get eaten by squirrels and they get eaten by deers but it never occurred to me that like the deer probably aren't ingesting a lot of the seeds because like why would you unless unless you were going to get the nutrition from them in which case you're destroying their ability to fertilize anything. So if you crunch them up. And they're all in a weird hollow part in the middle, too.

Starting point is 00:28:10 You get to there, and then you're like, eh, I'm done. Yeah. So it never occurred to me that how would pumpkins distribute, what would the point of the pumpkin or the gourd be if all the seeds are getting mashed up by deer teeth slash not getting eaten at all because they're not the part that the deer like yeah but if you have a giant sloth that can just eat a whole gotta get eaten by big guys man they've only been extinct for like 10 000 years like we basically live in their world still and we have all these things that are designed to be in their world

Starting point is 00:28:41 or evolved to be in their world well That's definitely going to be the one. That's definitely the winner. The question is, is it a winner that tops out over Sari's current lead, Sam? All right. So for a combination of timeliness and extinct megafauna, I'm going to give Sam the two points that makes it a tie. Here's how we're going to break the tie. Is a pumpkin a fruit?

Starting point is 00:29:06 Yes. But is it a berry or a peepo? Oh. Oh, shit. Three, two, one. Peepo. Sari's the winner of the episode. It's a peepo.

Starting point is 00:29:23 My favorite kind of fruit. Because I It's a peepo. My favorite kind of fruit. Cause I get to say peepo. Oh no, peepos are a kind of berry. Oh, you fool. Well, maybe we can just both win. I think you both got it right happy thanksgiving everybody wins all right and that means it's time to ask the science couch we've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds it's from at scribe of stories

Starting point is 00:29:56 who asks who has the most efficient digestive system hanks pulling it out of his butt answer is a reptile. This is a subjective question. There is not an objective, most efficient answer. I have collated all of the information on the internet that I could within a couple hours and narrowed it down to three creatures that are efficient in different ways okay um crocodiles ah that makes sense yeah so they eat a lot of body weight at once um in the lab juveniles have been observed eating up to 23 percent of their body weight in one sitting that's a juvenile for you yeah which they say are impractical to study in the lab, may eat more.

Starting point is 00:30:46 And I thought that was very funny. Adult crocodiles are impractical to study in the lab. I agree with you. And so they actually have a weird anatomy in that they have an extra valve in their heart. They have a second aorta, which means it can control where blood flows around its body. So that's how when submerged, oxygen-rich blood is pumped to the brain and vital organs, but it doesn't flow to the lungs. So they don't have the breathing instinct. And so they can shuttle blood in different ways throughout their body is the main point of that. And after a meal,

Starting point is 00:31:29 the heart pumps deoxygenated blood, which is really, has a lot of carbon dioxide, which is acidic towards the stomach, which makes their stomach juices extra acidic. So they eat a huge meal, then their blood pumps acid, acidic compounds toward their stomach to make their stomach acid even more acidic to break things down fast and efficiently and well, which is very weird. Yeah. acid production. Then another one that is big bites, good acid are sharks. So sharks, they

Starting point is 00:32:12 got big old chunks. They also just like rip pieces of their prey and completely break it down, most of it, into semi-liquid chyme, I think it's called. And so they also have quite strong stomach acid to make that possible. And their cool adaptation that helps with efficiency is their expanding stomach shape. So they have really big, according to the one paper, J-shaped stomachs that can expand considerably so they don't leave food floating around. They just can suck it all in and digest it all inside them rather than leaving it to be eaten by other

Starting point is 00:32:50 scavengers in the ocean. And their intestines are really short and compact. And the surface area can increase once they eat and when they're ready to digest. Their intestines kind of balloon outward to increase the surface area so they can absorb nutrients more efficiently and just be like, cool, I ate, I digested, I'm done, poop, go, and move on. And then my intestines will shrink back down and I won't need to take care of them. Yeah. Wild. The last animal that made my short list are turkey vultures, which is just like ridiculously low pH so that they don't get like efficient in a way of seafood will eat. Seabones will eat. in the way that it digests it,

Starting point is 00:33:45 where every bit of nutrient is going to be extracted from there, whereas sharks have to vomit stuff up that they can't finish, or many animals either poop out or puke out things that they can't consume. But the fact that the pH is so low that it can dissolve metal, it can dissolve toxins that would otherwise kill other organisms, Toxins that would otherwise kill other organisms. Like it can deactivate botulism toxin or anthrax or rabies. And it's just like, no disease is going to stop me. My stomach is so efficient. And they like co-opt bacteria on their skin and faces and in their intestines to help them digest too.

Starting point is 00:34:21 So not only can they defeat the stuff that would cause disease they're like some of you get in here help me digest this stuff which i think is funny i have been staring at the circulatory diagram of a crocodile this whole time um and i still don't understand i need i need an entire sidesShow on crocodile hearts. That is wild. Just circulatory systems in general and the fact that they're all different from each other is very weird. But it is especially weird to me that something that I think of

Starting point is 00:34:53 as significantly less developed has, in effect, a more complex circulatory system than mammals. They've been at it for a long time. It's true. It's true. Anyway, if you want to ask your questions

Starting point is 00:35:06 to the Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week or you can join

Starting point is 00:35:11 the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at xadrian at shirtlesy and everybody else who asked us

Starting point is 00:35:20 your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash sideshow tangents where you can become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes

Starting point is 00:35:32 like our most recent bonus episode which was called Thanks Pooping and you can get access. We recorded it today. It was just a gob of fun. If you don't want to hear a lot about poop, it's not actually all about poop. It's not all about poop. This is just to satisfy me and Sari and our desire to put the word poop into things. And to make me mad.

Starting point is 00:35:51 Yeah, maybe it's mostly that. We have over 500 patrons now. Thank you to all of you. It's so deeply appreciated because we love to make this show. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. And it helps other people know what you like about the show. And it helps other people know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

Starting point is 00:36:10 Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. 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 Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Debuki Chakravarti, Emma

Starting point is 00:36:25 Douster, and Alex Billow. 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. Many people freeze their meat to keep it from growing microbes and deteriorating. But the freezing process can change meat quality by forming ice crystals between the muscle fibers, leading to fractures and gaps.

Starting point is 00:37:06 So a study published in the journal Meat Science investigated how the freeze-thaw cycle affects beef. Meat science! It's a serious science, Hank. We gotta know about our meat. That's good notes, yeah. While the beef loin became more tender after a freeze-thaw cycle the round or the cow butt remained firm Must be all those squats. Oh She thick

SciShow Tangents - Food

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