Something You Should Know - Amazing Things Your Smartphone Camera Can Do & Is Fasting Really Healthy?

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

We all want to be happy – but maybe not too happy. This episode begins by explaining how too much happiness can be a problem and how a little unhappiness can be a very good thing. https://www.businessinsider.com/on-a-scale-of-1-to-10-how-happy-should-you-aspire-to-be-2012-5 One of the most amazing things about your smartphone is the camera. And you likely haven’t taken the time to really understand all the amazing things it can do. Yes, it takes pictures and videos but it does so much more. Here to explain some of the things you never knew your smartphone camera can do is Scott Kelby. Scott is a is a photographer, photography teacher and author of The iPhone Photography Book (https://amzn.to/3vkgs3l). If you own a smartphone – iPhone or otherwise, you will really enjoy hearing what Scott has to say. Fasting has gotten a lot of attention lately. It has been touted as a treatment for many illnesses and ailments as well as a great way to lose weight. But is it all it is cracked up to be? After all, humans need to eat. So what is the science behind this idea of withholding food for long periods of time? Is it safe? Does it really have medical benefits? Joining me with a look at what fasting does and doesn’t do is journalist Steve Hendricks author of the book The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting (https://amzn.to/3I38287). Hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t enjoy listening to music. Good thing too, because listening to music may help prevent a cold or the flu or other illnesses. Listen as I explain how this works. https://www.zmescience.com/science/does-listening-to-music-boost-your-immune-system/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls & emails with Online Privacy Protection from Discover? - And it's FREE! Just activate it in the Discover App. See terms & learn more at https://Discover.com/Online Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know... Everyone wants to be happy, but being too happy could be a real problem. Then, your smartphone camera. There are a lot of cool tricks and features you don't know or never tried. Like Cinema Mode. Cinema Mode is a video mode. This makes it look like you're using a cinema camera and it really has a really neat effect.

It's better than you think. It sounds like, ah, Cinema Mode, but try it once and you're like, I love this. Also, can listening to music really boost your immune system? And fasting, how not eating could be really good for your health. It's extremely difficult for people to wrap their heads around, but increasingly over the last decade or two, we've gotten very good science in that shows that fasting can, in fact, do a better job than pills or traditional procedures.

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You see, in this one study, people who rated themselves as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, meaning they were as happy as they could possibly be, actually made considerably less money and were not considered as successful as people who rated themselves a 7 or an 8 on that happiness scale. Why? Well, apparently when you're as happy as you can possibly be, you lose the motivation to improve in certain areas of life. If you're as happy as you can possibly be, you lose the motivation to improve in certain areas of life. If you're completely happy, why change? But where it can become a problem is that extremely happy people are so optimistic that they are slow to react to trouble. For example, they don't take illness symptoms seriously. They're slow to seek treatment and less likely to follow doctor's orders

because they believe everything will be just fine. In short, this study found that happiness is a great goal to have, but too much of it could be counterproductive. A little unhappiness keeps you motivated. And that is something you should know. How many times have you heard someone say how amazing the camera in their smartphone is and how gorgeous the pictures are that come out of it? Especially in the last few versions of the iPhone and the Samsung phones and other phones, I imagine, the pictures that these cameras take are awesome.

Still, there's a pretty good chance you're not getting all out of that camera you could. It could likely do much more than you realize. That's where Scott Kelby can help. Scott is a photographer and a photography teacher, and he is author of the iPhone Photography Book. And even if you have a phone that is not Apple, you'll still get a lot out of this conversation. Hi, Scott. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi. Thanks. Thanks very much, Mike. Glad to be here. Well, it seems like when iPhones first came out, it was kind of like, you know, a Swiss Army knife. It was a phone. It had a calculator. It had a camera. It wasn't a great camera, but it had all these things. But now the camera in smartphones is terrific. So what happened? Why did it get so good? You know, it's weird. Here's why they're so good now, Mike. The number one reason people upgrade their phone is to get a better camera.

That's how important these camera phones have become to us. We're documenting the history of our lives. It's the visual history and it matters. And the phones have gotten so darn good that people that never considered themselves photographers now consider themselves iPhoneographers. And so it's driving phone sales. And that's a pretty good reason right there to make sure the cameras keep getting better and better and better. Well, and it's not necessarily just iPhones because my son switched from iPhone to a specific Android phone because of the camera in it. It's probably that darn Samsung S22.

It is. The camera in that thing is amazing. And you know what it is? It's everyone's realized that because, you know, Mike, think about it. When was the last time you were on your phone and you said, man, if my phone would only, right? Your phone does everything, but what's the one thing that can keep getting better? The camera. So much so that your son switched brands just to get a better camera. So it's really, really important to people that that camera matters. and cinema and photo and video. And what are all those things, if you can explain it briefly, and what can we ignore and what should we pay attention to? So the regular photo, which just says photo, just takes a standard regular photo, which is great.

The video, it takes video. The slow-mo is really interesting because it gives you that, you know, Olympic-style super slow-mo is really interesting because it gives you that Olympic-style super slow-mo. But what's interesting about it, when you choose it, it starts shooting regular video at regular speed, and then it stops and does the slow-mo. The first time I heard about it, I thought, well, that's kind of awkward until you see it. It is so, so slick. I never thought that I would be a person that would shoot slow-mo video. And I do them all the time now because it's just, it's so captivating. Just because you think you're watching a regular video,

someone's walking down the street and all of a sudden they go to jump over a puddle and it goes to slow-mo and it's just so dramatic. So that's one of the ones that's really important. But in the context of photography, there's a particular one that I think is phenomenal and it's called Portrait Mode. Now it is on the iPhone and it's called Portrait. It's also on other, you know, phones as well. It's not unique to the iPhone, but what it does is it blurs the background behind your subject, but it does it in a very convincing way. It makes it look like you're using an expensive DSLR or mirrorless camera with a big lens and an expensive lens, but it's actually doing it in camera. And it does a wonderful job

of separating your subject from the background. And that's something that makes portraits look more professional. When you have that separation and the background's blurred, it looks like you shot it with a high-end camera. So that's the one in particular that I would tell folks. If you want to do something really neat and you really want to make your portraits of people look better, don't shoot them in photo mode. I shoot all my portraits in portrait mode. What is the cinema mode? Cinema mode is a video mode, and it's one that my wife really, really likes. This makes it look like you're using a cinema camera, and it really has a really, really neat effect.

The stuff looks like movies, and it will also change the focus from one person to the next. So if you're aiming directly at your subject and then you lean towards the person they're talking to, it'll automatically refocus on that other person and make the other blurry background the same stuff that you'd see in a real movie. So it kind of brings you that cinematic feel, but you're shooting it with an iPhone. And your iPhone has image stabilization in it for video that works surprisingly well. So it's better than you think. It's kind of like the slow-mo. It sounds like cinema mode, but try it once and you're like, I love this. So even with all the bells and whistles on this camera that's in my phone, still, when people take pictures at a party or whatever they do,

they still kind of look like they've always looked. They often, you know, somebody's eyes are closed, somebody, you know. So what are we doing wrong? What are like some of the big don'ts of taking pictures at a party or an event or with your friends or whatever? What are we doing wrong that makes them so kind of amateur-y looking? All right. Well, the first one is this, and this is a big one, is you got to turn off your camera's flash. The flash that's built into whether it's an iPhone or a Samsung or whatever, the flash in those cameras is horrendous. If I had to point to one thing that makes things look amateurish, it's that flash. I cannot think of a single instance that it should ever be on in any situation ever unless you were literally, it's the middle of the night. There's no one around and you need to take a picture.

But the low light mode in these cameras, if there's any light, if there's moonlight, it'll do a great job. But the flash is the thing that makes it look really, really bad. I don't turn my flash on and keep it off at all times. And if I need to shoot low light, I'm going to rely on the amazing low light mode. So that's number one. The second thing that makes them look bad at parties is not shooting in portrait mode. At a party, I would absolutely turn on that portrait mode, whether you're on an iPhone or a Samsung or whatever, turn on the portrait mode so the background looks out of focus. So now your flash is off and you're in portrait mode. It's going to

look a whole lot better. And I got one more tip at a party that will help you. One of the biggest mistakes people make when they're photographing people is they very often leave way too much space above the person's head. So you have someone and they're holding up a wine glass and they're like, cheers. Then there's like six inches of space above their head in the picture. So the person's eyes in a photograph and a professional looking portrait are supposed to be in the top third of the frame. So the top third. And what people do is they always stick people in the middle and it looks odd. It looks very amateurish. So if you're shooting your friends at a party or at dinner and you want to get a shot that looks

professional, get their eyes in the top third. There should not be a big gap of nothingness above their head. But I see it so often at dinner parties and just parties in general and stuff. You take those three things, you just change just those, turn off your flash, turn on portrait mode, don't leave too much space above their head. And all of a sudden those party pictures look great. And people would be like, wow, you got a really nice camera. So I often hear people say, if you're going to take like a group shot of everybody, shoot from high up. Is that good advice? It's great advice for not just for groups, but for everybody. People look better if they're

slightly looking up towards the camera. It pulls your jawline. It stretches your skin a little bit. I mean, think about it. Every time you see a teen taking a selfie, right? Where are they holding their photos? They're holding the camera up above their head, aiming down. Why? Because it makes people look better. It's like the oldest trick in the book. So yeah, and I have another great group shot trick. You mentioned how people have their eyes closed and all that stuff.

So that is one of the most common problems you're going to have. So what I tell people when I'm going to shoot a group is I'm going to tell everybody, okay, everybody close your eyes. I'm going to count to three. When I say three, open them. And so everybody closes their eyes. I go, one, two, three. They open their eyes and I take the picture on four and nobody's eyes are closed. If their eyes are closed, there's another problem. But it's a simple math problem at that point. But eyes closed, one, two, three, click.

Every single eye will be open. My guest is Scott Kelby. He is a photographer, a teacher of photography, and he's author of a book called The iPhone Photography Book. nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

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Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Scott, is the problem of pictures being overexposed or underexposed, has that problem more or less gone away because the cameras are so smart they compensate for it? It's gotten better, but it has not gone away. But I have a wonderful tip for you how to fix that. Now, the tip I'm going to give you is iPhone specific, but I know that other phones do it as well. So if you take a picture and you look at it, or you're about to take the picture, and it looks either too bright or too dark, you know how you tap on the screen to set the focus, right? So you tap on the screen to focus on this person or focus on their eyes.

And with people portraits, we always focus on the eyes. That's the thing that has to be important. Excuse me, in focus. So here's what you do. Tap on the screen to set the focus and hold your finger there for a few seconds. A little slider will appear on screen with a sun icon. All you have to do is drag your finger up to make the photo brighter or drag your finger down on screen to make it darker. It's called exposure compensation on a

fancy camera. On an iPhone, it's just brighter or darker. So take the original picture. If it looks too dark, tap your finger on screen and drag up. If it needs to be darker, tap and drag down. It works like a charm. And you'll know you're doing it right because you'll see the little slider on screen with a little sunlight appearing on it. You say not to pinch to zoom. Well, explain what that is and then what's wrong with it. When you're shooting, you have what's called an optical lens, right? That's the actual glass lens that's in your camera.

And your photographs look best at those optical things. So, like, let's say you have an iPhone Pro. You've got super wide, which is like 0.5. Then you have 1X, and then you have 2X. And if you have the latest iPhone, you have 3X. If you shoot at any one of those, your camera is going to look the best. If you tap and you pinch to zoom, it's no longer using the actual glass. It is now creating digital pixels and it doesn't look good. It looks really bad. The pinching to zoom, anytime you're pinching to zoom,

just say in your head, this is getting me closer, but the photo is going to look worse. It's just creating pixels that aren't really there. So as long as you shoot at one of those numbers that you can tap on on screen, 0.5, 1x, 2x, 3x, you're going to get a great, sharp, crisp picture. If you pinch to zoom, now it's kind of making up pixels and it's not going to look good and you're going to be disappointed with the results. So give me another really simple but obvious if I want great pictures out of my camera tip that I might not have thought of. If you want sharper photos, just clean those lenses. You know, you throw this thing in your pocket or you throw it in your purse and they get dirty as anything. They get super dirty.

And if at any time you feel like, man, my photos used to look sharper, just clean them. Clean them with a cloth. Clean them with some, I mean, your phone came with a cleaning cloth, right? It came with a little black rectangular cleaning cloth. That is perfect for cleaning your lenses. So, if you clean your lenses with those, you will be stunned how much junk and fingerprints are on there. But think about it, Mike, when was the last time you cleaned your lens on your phone? Yeah, nobody really thinks about it. You just think, oh, it'll always be fine. But if you go look at yours right now, Mike, there's probably a big fingerprint, some dust and all of them. Clean it and all of a sudden

your photos look brighter, sharper, and crisper. What's your tip? This is one that really applies to me because I can't tell you how many times I wanted to get to my camera quick and then it was too late. So you have a tip for getting to your camera quick. What is it? I do. Actually, Mike, I have two. The second one is the super secret mega tip. The first one is the most handy because you just said it. There's something neat happening. You reach in your pocket or you reach in your purse. You pull out your phone. You have to wait

a second for it to do face ID or you have to type in your number. By the time you get it all done, you've missed the shot. But what you can do instead is this. Don't wake up your phone. All right. This is it. Don't wake it. Just pick it up and swipe left. And as soon as you do, the camera app appears and you're ready to take the photo. So click it and swipe it left. That's it. That's the whole process. Don't wake it up.

You don't have to type in your, none of that stuff. Just pick up your phone, swipe left. You're ready to shoot. And the other tip? This is the super secret one no one knows about. left, you're ready to shoot. And the other tip? This is the super secret one no one knows about. Well, they're about to. If you go under your system preferences and scroll down to accessibility, once you're in the accessibility window,

there's a thing under physical and motor called touch. So you're going to tap on touch. And down towards the bottom, there's a thing called back tap. It's off by default. So you're going to tap on touch and down towards the bottom, there's a thing called back tap. It's off by default. So you're going to turn it on. You're going to tap it to on. And then it says for double tap. What do you want to happen when you double tap the Apple logo? You're going to choose under system, choose camera. That's it. Now you can just go back to using your regular phone. And anytime you want to bring up the camera, you're going to tap your finger twice on the Apple logo on the back of your camera,

and it immediately brings up the camera app and you're ready to shoot. That's the super secret way. When you take pictures, given your expertise, when you take pictures with the phone, is that it? Or do you take pictures and then you go to work on the picture and do something to it afterwards? Oh, I always edit my photos. Always, always, always. And you can use Apple's camera app.

Of course, you can use your Android camera app as well. They're the photos app for editing. But I like to use a third-party app from Adobe called Lightroom. You can get it from the App Store, and it is the same math and the same tools the pros use to edit on their computer. You can do the same thing on your phone, and it is a miracle tool for making your photos look amazing. So it's called Lightroom, and it's from Adobe,

and you can find it in the app store. And you can get a free version or you can pay for the subscription version. But it's an awesome, awesome app. And it's kind of what the pros use to edit their phone photos. But you can use it as well, of course. And when you say I edit my photos, that means you do what to them? Well, I make sure that the exposure is right, that it's not too dark or not too bright. I sharpen every photo. I add sharpness to every photo because I want my photos to look nice and crisp. I usually add contrast to my photos as well.

If the subject is backlit, like the sun's behind them, there's a slider called shadows that just literally opens up the shadows like you had a flash, but it doesn't look nasty like you used a flash. It's, you know, basic kind of stuff like that. There's a slider called Texture that lets you bring out texture. So if you're shooting a travel photo and you're like in a downtown little village, it makes the cobblestones look nice and the walls have texture. It's really a very, it's a wonderful slider that just adds texture and adds depth and dimension. So those

are the typical things that I would do. I sharpen every photo. I add contrast to most every photo. There's white balance control. So if the photo looks too blue, because you know, if you photograph somebody in the shade, they generally look a little bluish, right? Or if they're under an awning or something. If you're in a restaurant, everybody looks too yellow. So that's the typical thing I would go and fix. So you can go under temperature. And if they look too yellow, you just slide the slider towards blue and they look natural again. So that's another thing that I do quite a bit. Lightroom does it. Apple's photo app does it as well. So talk me through a couple of the other features that you use that people may not have even heard of.

Here's an interesting one. You know, when you take a photo on your iPhone, have you ever noticed that when you go to look at it, there's a black bar on the left and a big black bar on the right. Like it doesn't fill the screen, right? There's just like, you know how movies, you know, you'll watch a cinematic movie and if it's an anamorphic widescreen, you have a black bar at the top and a black bar at the bottom. The iPhone does it on the sides. Well, here's how to take a wider photo. If you switch to video mode and you start a video, so you're shooting video, you know what's wild? A little shutter button appears on screen. And if you take a picture when you're in video mode, it fills the screen. It's crazy.

It makes you wonder, why doesn't Apple do that all the time? I know. I can't explain it, but it's what they do. Where's the shutter button? I just did it, but I don't see it, but it's what they do. Where's the shutter button? I just did it, but I don't see a shutter button. Did you start taking video? So you have to switch to video mode and then start shooting video. And a white button shows up right on screen.

Right, right. And there it is. That's the one. Well, now I'm hitting the button to take the picture and nothing's happening. It's taking them though. Go look in your photo roll. All right. Yeah, it doesn't make a sound or anything.

It just does it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because I just got like 35 photos in your photo roll now. 4,000 pictures of the microphone in front of my face. Do you crop your pictures? I try to get it right in the camera. I like to not have to go and crop it.

But if I realize that, oh, you know, a typical mistake that people make that I would crop for is they crop it in an unfortunate place on a portrait. Like you're not supposed to chop off people's hands. You don't ever want to like take a portrait where you're chopping off their hands or right at their elbow or right at their knees. And if I realize that I've done that, I took a quick picture and I go, oh, I cut them off at the knees. I'll go in and crop it up to where it's halfway up their leg. And it looks so much better. It looks so much more comfortable. When you crop people at one of those joints, it looks uncomfortable.

And it's an unconscious uncomfortableness. Like people look at it and they don't go, oh, you cropped it at the wrong place. They just don't like the photo and they don't know why. So if you crop it in a comfortable place, halfway up their knee, halfway up their arm, but not at the joints, don't crop at any joints. And try not to crop anything off. Don't crop fingers off. Don't crop an elbow off. Don't crop an elbow off. You know, don't crop any body parts. People don't like it when you crop off their body parts. Well, sir, you are a wealth of knowledge and I've seen your book and we have we've barely

scratched the surface of everything a smartphone camera can do. I've been talking with Scott Kelby. Scott is a photographer. He teaches photography, and his book is The iPhone Photography Book. You can find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Scott. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever takes on current events.

Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You know what fasting is, right? It's basically when you don't eat for an extended length of time. And people fast and have fasted for all kinds of reasons. There are religious reasons.

And certainly people do it to lose weight and for other of reasons. There are religious reasons. And certainly people do it to lose weight and for other health reasons. In fact, there does seem to be some evidence that restricting your calories, eating less, can help you live longer. But just how effective is fasting? This is the time of year when a lot of people create resolutions to lose weight and get healthier.

Is fasting a good way to do that, or has fasting been overhyped a bit? Here to discuss this is journalist Steve Hendricks, who has researched and written about fasting, and he's author of a book called The Oldest Cure in the World, Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting. Hi Steve, welcome to Something You Should Know. It's fantastic to be with you, Mike. So if you can, just give me a brief history of fasting. When did this idea first come to light? So fasting as healing has existed as long as we have.

The repair mechanisms that our cells initiate when we go long enough without food have existed for at least a billion years. But it wasn't until much, much more recently that humans started to figure it out. You could probably date the first real experiments with fasting for health to the ancient Greeks. So that would have been about 2,500 years ago with the rise of Hippocrates and the Hippocratic school of thought. But really, back then, they didn't know what fasting could do. They had some ideas, they had some clues, and they would sort of stumble and fumble around the way they did with virtually all aspects of medicine. So, the real answer to your question is that it didn't really get off the ground fasting as a tool for healing

until about two centuries ago. At the start of the 19th century, there were doctors in America and doctors in Europe who began to notice that when they had patients who were sick and the patients stopped eating, those patients often did better, sometimes spectacularly better than their other patients. And this in the age of reason when they had a scientific method to think about things a little more scientifically eventually led to the blossoming of fasting that we've really seen over the last century and now especially in the last 20-30 years. So fasting, well, let's define fast. Is fasting just not eating? So there are many ways of defining fasting. It's a great question. Yes, in its purest form,

fasting is simply not eating and drinking water. In religious fasting, quite often people take some calories. They will have, you know, a small amount of bread or something. They will have a small amount of bread or something. They will have a light meal, something like that. But when speaking of fasting for health, what we're really talking about is getting into a metabolism that is noticeably and importantly, healingly different from your ordinary fed metabolism. And to do that, you need to either eat absolutely nothing or a very small number of pretty specific calories. So there are fasting clinics, for instance, in Germany, where you go there and you don't live on just water, you live on about 250 calories a day of vegetable broths, which they have found, and science bears out, is not so many calories that will bump you out of

your fasting healing metabolism. At some point, somebody must have figured it out that, okay, so people are getting better, but how did they connect it to the fact that people weren't eating? Because it seems like an odd thing to connect it to. Well, you know, quite often when our bodies get sick, we instinctively refuse food. You'll see this in animals all the time. So they had a large population out there to look at among their patients of these ones who were eating and other people who weren't eating. And it was simply a matter of, you know, comparing those two and finding if you have, let's say, typhoid is epidemic in your particular district, and you're the doctor for that district. And people who eat are taking, you know, two weeks or three weeks or four weeks to get well and people who don't eat are getting well in five days, seven days, people who eat are dying

more often than people who don't eat. It led them to, you know, the hypothesis, which they couldn't prove. They didn't have the science to prove it 200 years ago. But it led them to the hypothesis that, hey, maybe we ought to look more into this idea of taking away the food and seeing what happens. And so they would eventually do that and find that with other illnesses as well, those illnesses improved with fasting too. Eventually, we had to have some actual science in the lab to show us what was going on. But at the time, you know, starting about 200 years ago, that's pretty much the way they did it. Just simple empirical observation.

Just because it'll help with some diseases doesn't mean it helps with all diseases. And certainly fasting has come under some scrutiny too that, you know, people are making claims about fasting that it couldn't possibly be true. And so how do you separate fact from fiction here? You're absolutely right. Fasting is not a cure-all. It's not going to cure every disease. It can reverse or help with a very wide range of diseases because the repairs that are going on when we fast

are occurring in cells all over the body. And that very systemic basic level of cure allows for it to help with many disease conditions. But it's simply not going to reverse all diseases. Cancers, for example, we have a pretty good idea that fasting can reverse one form of cancer, follicular lymphoma, but that's it. We don't have any other human data to say it's going to reverse cancers. So the only real way to answer your question is to run trials and see if fasting can work for this disease or that disease.

Otherwise, you're just relying on anecdotes, which are, you know, an important basis for the science, but it's not enough in and of itself. The trouble is, is that it's very hard to make money from fasting. Telling people just not to eat doesn't bring you as much money as selling people a pill or two pills or 10 pills for every day of the rest of their lives. So there's not much, you know, there's no big pharma out there who's going to invest in these studies. So it's a very difficult and delicate thing. We obviously have some studies that show us that fasting works for some conditions, but in the conditions that we don't have that research, you know, it's to a large extent, fasting doctors are fumbling in the dark

and doing their best to go by what they observe when they fast a patient with X or Y condition. There's fasting doctors? Indeed. There aren't a lot of them, but there are fasting clinics. They're more prominent in Europe than they are in the United States. So, for example, the think, about 400,000 patients of whom 250,000 have fasted and the rest have gone to eat a healthier diet. But the point is they are fasting thousands of people each year. They have a staff of doctors that must be, I don't know, a dozen or so. And I don't know how many scores of nurses and massage therapists and so on and so forth. But yes, it's a real discipline. And there are additionally, and perhaps even more importantly,

fasting scientists who focus on the research into how the mechanisms of fasting actually heal people. So I think one of the concerns that some people have is, you know, if you're a fasting doctor, it's kind of like, you know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. And a doctor whose specialty is the cure is going to see the cure working in places maybe where it doesn't. I think that's certainly true. I think the fasting doctor's critique of other doctors would be the exact same. They see someone walk in the door with high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, and they want to give them a pill or they want to give them insulin or there's some other condition and they want to do surgery. And the fasting doctor would say, hey, wait a minute, we have a much less invasive procedure here. It's simply coming and resting in a clinic and not

eating. Why don't we try that first? All you guys have your hammers and you want to hammer, you know, you see everything as the nail. So, you know, it's a critique that can go both ways. And the only way to be, to sort of guard yourself against that is to be, I think, broad minded and look at the science behind whichever condition it is you're trying to treat. Is there actually some science, some hint, some indication that shows that fasting might work? And in many diseases, increasingly over the last decade or two, we've gotten very good science in that shows that fasting can, in fact, do a better job than pills or traditional

procedures. For what illnesses? So, it's a rather long list, but we have very credible reports from fasting doctors and their patients going back more than 100 years showing that fasting can reverse cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. These are some of our leading killers and other conditions that are becoming endemic like leaky gut syndrome or irritable bowel syndrome. Fasting turns out to be especially good for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis and ulcerative colitis. We're not sure why, how the body is calming down when it attacks on itself when people fast, but it does. It's a long list of diseases. We do not have a long list of scientific studies to back up all those claims. But most of the times when science

does go and investigate some of these claims, they find that they are actually not just credible, but entirely correct. So for example, take high blood pressure, which is a leading manifestation of cardiovascular disease. It's going to contribute to the deaths of half a million Americans this year. Half of all American adults have it. Three quarters of us will have it by the time we're in our 70s and leading organizations like the American Heart Association will tell you there's no cure. There's certainly no conventional cure. However, we have scientific studies, peer-reviewed and peer-reviewed journals going back 20 years showing reversal, and in many cases, complete cure of hypertension through an average of 10 days of fasting.

In fact, in the scientific literature, the greatest drop that has ever been reported for any therapy for high blood pressure comes not from a pill, not from a traditional procedure, but from fasting for an average of 10 days on water only at a fasting clinic under supervision. And in that case, in this one leading study, the average drop in high blood pressure was 37 over 13 points. That's two or three times what the best blood pressure, the top number, the systolic pressure, the top number in a blood pressure reading of 60 points, six zero, there's nothing in conventional medicine that can do that. This is a just a phenomenal result. And if a pill had achieved it, we would all know about the pill and the manufacturer of the pill would be, you know, they would be billionaires and so on. But because it's fasting, it is so counterintuitive, It is so hard for us to wrap our heads around this idea

that not eating can not only make us a little healthier, but can reverse disease. I mean, come on, is that for real? And so it's very, very difficult for doctors to accept. And almost no one knows about this fantastic result. When you Google fasting and quackery, you get a lot of very credible reports from Harvard, University of California, San Francisco, ABC News, who say it's all a bunch of baloney. Well, those are large institutions. And I could point you to scientists at Harvard and University of California, San Francisco, who would say just the opposite, that fasting is not baloney, and that in fact, your mother has advanced dementia, why don't we put her on a fast, we don't have any evidence whatsoever, that that is going to help your mother. So there are instances of quackery out there for sure. But to say that, you know, well, for example, we have no cure for rheumatoid arthritis, none, we have a drug. It's a crippling, debilitating disease

in which the body attacks the linings of its own joints. And we have a drug that can slightly slow the conditions, the symptoms, excuse me, but with some pretty terrible side effects. We have a study that was published more than 30 years ago based on several smaller studies, and then there was a larger, bigger study, a randomized controlled trial that showed that fasting for an average of seven days followed by a plant-based diet reversed a great many of the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. No drug can do this. People woke up in the morning, their grip strength was better, they were in less pain, their joints were less better. They were in less pain. Their joints were less inflamed. They were less tender. This study wasn't published in some newsletter of some

fasting clinic. It was published in The Lancet, which is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, peer-reviewed, randomized, controlled trial. There's no doubt about its efficacy. And yet, true, there are other conditions for which people are promoting fasting as a cure that are probably quackery. So what is intermittent fasting? I think of that as something people use primarily for weight loss. So there are many forms of intermittent fasting, and yes, most people get into it for weight loss. Intermittent fasting means limiting the amount of time that you are eating each day and fasting longer overnight. We all fast. We're fasting every single night. And the interesting question that scientists have asked in the last just 5-10 years

is, would we be healthier if we fast for a longer time each night? And the answer turns out to be yes. It turns out that, you know, as I think I mentioned, our bodies are these marvelous self-healing machines. They are making repairs all the time that keep us from developing disease. The problem is that most of the time, these repairs only go on at a very low rate. However, and that's because they are so busy with all the very important things that make up our lives. And one of those biggest things is the digesting of our food every day, the processing of the nutrients from that food, and the putting the nutrients to work in cells in every single part of our body. But when we give our bodies a break from processing the nutrients,

our cells accelerate the repairs. And they're really impressive. They're things like fixing damaged or miscopied DNA. DNA is the set of instructions that tell everything in our body what to do. It's increasing the recycling of all these worn out little organelles inside our cells that just get totally broken down from overuse. And if those aren't recycled or repaired, then they can also cause disease. So these sorts of things are what's going on. The catch is we don't stop eating each night and the fasting mechanism and repair mechanism immediately turn on. There's a metabolic cost for the body to making the switch from its normal fed metabolism to its fasting and repair mode.

And it doesn't want to make that switch if it thinks two hours later, we're just going to stuff more Pringles or whatever into our mouth. So when we finish our last food of the day, our body waits six hours until it's sure we're done eating and it steps up our repairs. But it doesn't step them up really fully until about 12 hours after our last calories of the day, whether we eat them or drink them. So this is why people are doing these eating plans that give them more than 12 hours a day of fasting, I should say, each night. So these, for instance, 16-8 intermittent fasting that you hear about where people are eating in an eight-hour window and they're fasting for the other 16 hours of the day, they're doing that because once you

cross 12 hours of fasting, you're getting some really impressive repairs. So assuming what you're saying is true, that there are some real benefits, health benefits to fasting, there are also some real health benefits to eating, you know, nutrition and things like that. And yeah, the body, I mean, I don't know how long people can fast, but you can't go, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks and not eat because you need to eat food. Oh, but it can. I mean, the longest fast on record is 382 days. So the body, it's extraordinarily counterintuitive, isn't it? I mean, what you're saying makes perfect sense.

We know from our own experience that we feel better when we eat, we feel stronger, we feel healthier. We go without food, we get cranky, we get weak. What in the world? People are saying that this is healing, but in fact, that is the case. And the reason is that evolution has endowed us with these healing mechanisms. The reason is probably, now we don't know for sure, but the reason is probably that we had to be this way, like just about every other species, in order to survive. Food was not a constant before agriculture, before we learned to hunt well. We were, you know, mostly these very weather and climate dependent creatures who would go periods without eating. And if we were not able

to survive that, then we wouldn't be here today. We are in fact, the human species is a race of fasters. And the reason is probably that when the food ran out, you needed to be able to move around efficiently. You needed to be able to heighten your senses in order to, I don't know, find the trail of the animal that would be your next meal or find the sprig of carrot hidden among the leaves or something. So the fact that fasting has these benefits makes relatively good evolutionary sense. But whatever that story is, what is certain is that we, like virtually every other species on the planet, has this mechanism that when we stop eating for long enough, our body didn't just say, okay, we're going to do nothing now. The body says, oh, we have been freed up to do some of the repair work that we haven't been doing for the last however long, days, weeks, months, years. It's like, you know, an owner who, a homeowner who gets a vacation or something and finally, you know, patches the faulty roof people to wrap their heads around. But in fact, going without food for long periods of time or even just each day, narrowing your eating window and having a longer overnight fast does bring out these very counterintuitive, very surprising, very odd.

That can't be true, but is repair mechanisms. Well, I've tried fasting, and particularly intermittent fasting, and it certainly was effective for me in terms of losing weight. The thing with fasting is it's just really hard to do. I mean, you've really got to commit to this because going for extended periods of time and not eating when you're used to eating is really, really hard to do. And with a lot of temptation around, it's easy to give in.

But it is an interesting topic that seems to be showing a lot of promise. My guest has been Steve Hendricks. He is a journalist, and the name of his book is The Oldest Cure in the World, Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for explaining all this. Well, I appreciate it, Mike. Thank you for the challenging questions. Did you know that listening to music can boost your immune system? It's not anything magical exactly. It's all about stress.

Listening to music relaxes people, and that reduces stress and anxiety. Over the years, multiple studies have shown that stress is a silent killer. People who are constantly stressed are at a higher risk of developing cold sores, catching colds and the flu, having high blood pressure, and frequent stomach aches. The relaxation that listening to music brings can counteract all of that. Does it matter what type of music? Not really. If you like the music and it relaxes you, it works. But obviously, the more relaxing the music is, the more likely it is to lower your stress. And that is something you should know. If I could just ask you to help us out and help us grow our audience,

all it takes is for you to share this podcast with one or two other people and tell them to give it a listen and see what they think. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show,

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