Something You Should Know - Fascinating Science of Food and Cooking & What May Be Wrong with Your Mouth and Teeth

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

When you have a meeting it is usually sitting down in an office at a table. That just may be one of the worst ways to conduct a meeting and maybe it is why nothing much gets accomplished. There is a better way and it is something Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and others do. I’ll explain what that is as we begin this episode. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/09/walking-meetings-at-linke_n_7035258.html?utm_hp_ref=business) If you cook, you are a scientist. Food science is fascinating and when you understand it you instantly become a better cook. Dr. Stuart Farrimond is author of the book, The Science of Cooking ((https://amzn.to/2KYJT2C) and he joins me to explain the science behind cooking the perfect cut of meat, how to best cook vegetables and how to choose the best pan to cook in. What are the ten most dangerous minutes to drive a car? That’s just one of the things you’ll learn when I explain how even good drivers can get better with a few simple techniques from the people at Popular Mechanics (http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a15465/driving-mistakes/)  Something is going on in the mouths of our children. It seems a lot more kids today need braces and other orthodontic work because their jaws are too small. That in turn can lead to other serious health problems according to Sandra Kahn, DDS, so author of the book Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic (https://amzn.to/2KZva7d). Listen as she explains the problem as well as the ramifications and what we can do about.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, there's a way to make meetings a lot more productive. Barack Obama does it, Mark Zuckerberg does it, and so can you. Then, understanding the science of cooking, from meat to vegetables. Contrary to what raw food advocates might say, not all vegetables are best eaten raw. So, yep, carrots you should cook them, spinach you should cook, asparagus needs to be cooked a bit. Plus, what are the 10 most dangerous minutes to drive a car? And did you know a lot of kids today have health problems because their teeth are too crowded and overlapping? The reason the teeth are overlapping each other is because the jaw is too small.

And it is too small because it hasn't developed to its full potential. And what happens is we've changed our diet, and we're not chewing really hard foods. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks.

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And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Say, how do you feel about going to meetings? I know a lot of people don't like them because they seem like a colossal waste of time. Nothing much gets done and nobody says anything very interesting. But when someone calls a meeting, maybe the problem is where and how you have it.

Because typically for a meeting, you go into a room and sit around a table. And that may just be a horrible idea. The new thing now is walking meetings. There's some solid research to support the idea that walking meetings are better. And there's some high-profile supporters like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey all like to have walking meetings. It seems that when we walk, we let our guard down, according to a paper written by Stanford researchers and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Walking releases your filter.

Ideas that you hold back in a conference room will likely come spilling out when you're walking. After comparing people who met in a room with those who walked and talked, they found that people who walked were able to come up with more unique ideas, both while they were walking and immediately after. And it didn't matter much if they walked on a treadmill or they walked outside. While creativity is well served by walking meetings, the Stanford researchers found that sitting is a better option when you have to solve a problem for which there is only one right answer.

And that is something you should know. Whether you're a gourmet cook or you just make the occasional sandwich in the kitchen, there is science behind what you're doing. It's food science. And when you understand how some of it works, it can help you make better, tastier food. Dr. Stuart Faramond knows about food science. He's written a beautiful book that I think every cook ought to have in their kitchen called

The Science of Cooking. Every question answered to perfect your cooking. Hey, Stuart, so explain, because it's an interesting story, explain how you got into the topic of food science. I have a very interesting and peppered history. I was originally a medical doctor, and about 10 years ago I was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which forced me to leave medicine.

I then went into teaching, and then went into teaching and then went into freelance science communication. And from there, I sort of fell into food science and now do food science research and have written this book, The Science of Cooking. So, yes. Yeah, it's quite a book and that's quite a story. So I think that people have their ideas, their theories, their techniques about cooking, and some of them may be right and some of them may be wrong, that people make when it comes to food preparation, cooking, all that. What are the big headline things that are like fingernails on a blackboard to you? One of my pet hates is when people talk about sealing meat. Many chefs say, get your pan really hot, get your steak, whatever it is, and seal it on both sides. And sometimes people will say that sealing it stops the moisture from leaving,

which isn't true at all. When you're sealing it, you're actually just searing it. You're getting a brown coat on the outside. You're not retaining moisture. But what's going on is there's a reaction going on between the the proteins and the sugars within the muscle uh muscle cells which is forming these wonderful brown flavorful compounds substances that that give it that cooked meaty flavor it's the same uh reaction that goes on on the outside of bread uh which has that lovely just baked bread smell. And that is the key to why so many things taste so good

when you fry them and cook them over a high heat. So you're not sealing it, you're searing it to get these wonderful flavours on the outside. And you should do that. Oh, absolutely, you should do that, yeah. And you can obviously do steak rare, medium rare, as long as you sear the outside so that any germs, any bugs that might be on the outside, they're killed off. And the inside will be quite safe to eat, providing you've not left it for ages and it's gone moldy and all the rest of it. So, yes, you should do that. And it's, yeah, generally speaking, it's the same thing why fish skin.

It goes all crispy and it gets really tasty or bacon. You get those kind of brown and becomes irresistible. Let's talk about the microwave oven, because I think there's a lot of, you know, there are restaurants that tout the fact that they don't have a microwave, that we cook the real old fashioned way. And people have microwaves to heat up coffee, but oftentimes when you cook in them, it's a bit disappointing. What's going on in there that either works or doesn't work? It's a fantastic piece of equipment, and it's extremely energy efficient. One thing that sometimes people say is that it cooks food from the inside out uh now i don't

know about you but if you ever tried cooking anything of a reasonable size or defrosting something in the microwave it doesn't it's still cold in the middle if you take it out early and it it does that the the microwave radiation penetrates in about one cent about half an inch or so into the surface and it cooks up to that level but it so so in a sense it's cooking from the inside but only a very uh superficial only not very deep inside um and the reason why we don't uh get really nice flavorful food from a microwave is because it's not getting hot enough. Microwaves heat up water molecules and also to a lesser extent fat molecules. And so it heats them up. But when it's dried out, it doesn't really cook it anymore.

So if you can imagine you've put in, let's say you've got some chicken and you've put it into the microwave and you're cooking the chicken. The outside layers, they warm up and then the water warms up and then it will dry and dehydrate as the water evaporates away. And then it will stop heating it up, essentially. So it won't go much hotter than 100 degrees C. And for this fantastic Maillard reaction to take place, it's got to get at least up to 140. So unless you have a very hot pan or you're cooking with oil, you're never going to get this to happen, which is why if you were to get some meat and you put it into a pot to, say, boil it, for example, you'll never get the brown coat on the outside because you can't get the water hotter than 100 degrees C, which is the boiling point of water.

So does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So knowing that, what is good and what is not so good to cook in the microwave? One thing that it is very good for is with roasting nuts. So it is possible to get a bit of browning if you have nuts, for example, and you coat them in oil and you put them in fairly short bursts in the microwave. You could put them on a plate, a microwave friendly plate. I'd say do 15, 30 second blasts. Give it a shake. Keep checking it because you don't want it to burn. That can be a very good thing to do in the microwave and also for veggies, vegetables

it can be a very good way of retaining nutrients. So put them in a microwave friendly bowl, a little bit of water in the bottom, your vegetables in there and it will steam as the water in the bottom of that bowl heats up, turns to steam as the as the water in the bottom of that bowl uh heats up

turns to steam the steam gets caught uh because you've got a lid on the top uh steam gets caught and it will steam and steaming um is a very good way of retaining nutrients and keeping your vegetables with a little bit of bite and speaking of vegetables i think there is a belief among many people that it's better to eat vegetables raw than it is to cook them because cooking them somehow destroys many of the nutrients. But what does the science say? Contrary to what raw food advocates might say, not all vegetables are best eaten raw some of them are onions garlic or if you can handle them they are better eaten raw and things that have lots of vitamin c in so bell peppers for example they have more nutrition in them if they're eaten raw whereas other vegetables like carrots for example and spinach um vegetables that have lots of um carotene in them they need to be cooked to release those

antioxidants those beneficial healthful um substances the nutrients that are in there they need to be cooked to release those so So, yep, carrots, you should cook them. Spinach, you should cook. Asparagus also needs to be cooked a bit. I've got the cabbage. That's another one that should be cooked. In the book, I've got a list of ones that are best raw and best cooked. I'm speaking with Stuart Faramond. He is joining us on Skype all the way from the UK.

And he is the author of the book, The Science of Cooking, Every Question Answered to Perfect Your Cooking. Are you on LinkedIn? Seems like most professionals and people focused on their careers are. And LinkedIn has something really exciting called LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. It's the perfect way to market your We'll be right back. while they're in a professional mindset on LinkedIn. That results in higher quality leads, more website traffic, and higher brand awareness. When it comes to marketing your business, it's all about reaching the right audience at the right time. I've certainly learned that as we've marketed this podcast to build our audience. And if you want to target your customers where they're engaging every day and when they're ready to make a decision, LinkedIn can really help. I've got a great offer here to redeem a free $100

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wherever podcasts are available. So, Stuart, something I've always wondered about is why is it that it seems some foods just go together so well with other foods? Coffee and chocolate, peanut butter and chocolate. There are some foods that just naturally seem to taste better together. It's weird, isn't it? It's very strange. Why on earth does cheese and tomato

and basil, why on earth do they go together? You can't really imagine having a pizza without those things with it because they're completely different things. You know, tomatoes are fruits and cheese is this fermented milk thing. And then you've got basil, which is a leaf. those things uh with it because they're completely different things you know tomatoes are fruits and cheese is this fermented milk thing and then you've got basil which is a leaf and there is a an area of science uh food pairing science where researchers have tried to work out what on earth is it that links these things together and it seems to be that they share similar flavors. These substances in food that are generally called flavor compounds, when two foods share a certain number of these flavor compounds, then they go together.

So when you've got your cheese and you've got your tomato, they will have some flavor compounds that are identical. So even though their overall flavour is quite different, the fact that there is a bit of overlap, there are some hints and some notes of flavour in there that are identical, they will go together. So there's other interesting things like, what have we got, kind of like caviar and steak and oyster and steak and things like this that go together surprisingly well. So from this research, from this area, you can actually predict some rather strange combinations that you would never have thought of. So one example is beetroot and bacon. And I didn't believe that to begin with, but you try it and it works surprisingly well

and parsley uh flat um flat leaf parsley and strawberries again they go together quite well so that is your um that's the reason behind it and generally things that are very complex flavored like uh chocolates um and coffee and roasted beef They've got lots of these, lots of flavor compounds. A lot of it's due to the roasting and this Maillard reaction that's been going on. It means that there are lots and lots and lots of things that will pair with them. I have noticed, or I think I have noticed, that recently in the store, meat looks redder than it used to. Maybe it's the lighting.

Maybe a red meat's supposed to be more appealing but comments well the first uh misconception that we should do away with is the idea that bright red is best uh because what what food manufacturers and meat packages will do is that they will prepare the meat within a within the little plastic wrapper and they will control the gas in there. And sometimes they put in carbon monoxide to make it artificially bright and red. And anybody who's medical will know that if you're suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, you get very red, cherry pink lips. And in the same way, it forces this artificial reddening of the meat. So don't necessarily go off how bright red it is, because also if you have well-aged meat, it will be quite brown um so yeah dry aged meat which you maybe go to your butchers and um he'll there'll be some i don't know some some slightly brown um let's say it's fillet or something and it's been it's been aged and he can tell you he or she can tell you that that's been

dry aged and you'll actually have a lot of flavor in that so don't be deceived by whether it's red or whether it's brown although if your meat is sticky or smelly then that's an indicator that it's uh that it's possibly gone off you should trust your senses when it comes to meat and when you cook, whether it's in the kitchen or maybe on the grill, what should you do to it before you cook it? Some people salt it, some people pat it dry. I mean, what's the science say? The science says that generally it's a good idea to salt and to season, but don't leave it too long because what will happen is that the outside of the meat will go kind of mealy, slightly mushy. You would be curing it.

So I would say more than an hour, hour and a half, two hours. And there's lots of salt on there. The outside will start to go a bit mushy and not very nice. Ideally, you want the salt to enhance the flavor and in a similar way if you're making a marinade well it's often said in recipe books that leave it 24 48 hours three days to let the meat absorb in but in reality the flavors will only get in a very short distance maybe at tops you're, maybe half an inch. No more than that because meat is full of moisture.

It's full of water. And so it literally can't get much more in there than what is already there. So all the flavors sit on the outside. The liquid sits on the outside. So leave it for a bit and some of the flavor will go in, but there's nothing to be gained from leaving it for days and days because the salt and any acids that you've got, like lemon juice or vinegar that you've got in your marinade, they will actually make the outside turn a bit mushy and will spoil some of the texture. Well, I imagine an important part of the science of how you cook is what you cook things in, the pots and the pans and all that. So talk about that for a bit. The most important thing when buying a pan is the thickness of the base. There are lots of different metals that you can get. Generally speaking, the thickness is better, especially for skillets or frying pans if you can have copper

but if it's not thick enough then it won't spread the heat around the reason why people buy copper is because it's very good at transferring heat so the heat from from your hob uh from the flame will spread out evenly over the base of the pan and so your your food will cook evenly and you won't have hot spots and cold spots but when you do the do the physics and you look at what actually happens if you've got a thick uh pan then it really doesn't matter so much the metal that you have if you have some of the best ones are ones that a combination of aluminium and aluminium and steel and you can have the best of both worlds aluminium transfers heat very quickly but it but it corrodes very easily so if you have ones that are that are a combination of stainless steel on the outside and aluminium in the middle then you will it spreads the heat

out very quickly you have a very hard wearing pan and look for the thickness rather than the the metal itself that would be my trick and cast iron is fantastic and actually when you've been using it for a while it's got a natural non-stick surface on it that's very good, but it takes a long time to heat up. But the benefit of using iron is that it retains heat for a very long time. So if you're making steak, you're searing your steak, this is something that chefs will do, is that they know that the iron will hold its heat for a very long time. And so you can leave food in there and it'll stay warm whilst you get the rest of your bits all finished off. So lastly, give me one little piece of food science

that I probably don't know that might be useful. Here's a great thing for having perfect poached eggs without the stringy bits. You think that there are two parts to an egg, a yolk and a white, but that's not true. There's a yolk and there's two whites. There's a thick white and there's a thin white. If you crack your egg and you put it into a sieve or a little tea strainer, and all the watery white will drain off and you're left with the thick, gloopy white. Now,

when you put that into simmering water you won't get any of those horrible stringy bits it should all stay together this nice perfect ball and the fresher the egg the more of this thick white that you have so go for fresh eggs uh when you're doing poached eggs and my little trick is to get rid of that thin white which is just going to go all stringy in the pan anyway by putting it through a sieve first well that's good to know i don't make poached eggs very often because that's exactly why i don't make them because i don't like all the the stringy stuff so i'll have to try that dr stewart faramond has been my guest

his book is called the science of cooking, Every Question Answered to Perfect Your Cooking. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Stuart. A pleasure, Mike. Pleasure. No one likes to think about it, but disasters do happen, and the first 72 hours after disaster strikes are the most important. Uncharted Supply Company has created this amazing thing called the 72 Survival System. It contains quality tools and instructions you need to survive in a hurricane, earthquake, or any emergency situation. And what I really like about this is that each of the 35 tools in this kit have been vetted by experts, including military, first responders, mountain guides, doctors, and more. And it's all organized by need.

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Angelo is just one of a whole bunch of kids over the past few decades who have had this problem. But think about it. Why should that be? Other parts of our body more or less fit where they're supposed to go. Why do so many kids have jaws and mouths that cannot accommodate their own teeth. Well, it turns out that the implications for them and everyone else, even if you don't have kids, is rather startling. It can aggravate allergies. It can cause sleep disorders. Anyway, Sandra Kahn is a dentist who has been part of the craniofacial anomalies team at Stanford University and at the University of California, San Francisco. This is her area of specialty, and she's written a new book called Jaws, The Story of a Hidden Epidemic.

Hi, Sandra. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you. Thank you for your invitation. So as far back as I can remember, you know, there were always a couple of kids in school that had braces to correct some problem that they had with their teeth. But you're saying this is becoming much more pervasive, that there are a lot more kids, like my son Angelo, who just have not enough room in their mouth to house their teeth. So what's going on? We all know that a lot of children and even adults need braces today. So we know that teeth are getting crowded. And it's hard to really see the big picture, because we might think that it's the technology that's available now that allows

people to have braces. And this is why we see the increase in people having orthodontics. But really, 50 years ago, when I was a kid, there were a few kids that needed braces. It was very rare. So we know that this is a problem that's increasing. And we think about it as that we just have a little bit of treatment and we straighten our teeth and everything is fine. But little by little, we're observing that there's other problems that are associated with the crowding because the crowding happens because the jaws don't have enough room.

And the jaws not having enough room to house all the teeth does impact the health, the overall health. So this crowding is because... Explain that again, because what is happening now that didn't happen 50 years ago? Yeah, so the jaw is, you know, the part of your face that houses the teeth. And if it's big enough, then all the teeth will grow in when you're a child, and you will not have crowding. Crowding is when the teeth, you know, they're overlapping and they end up pointing

all weird directions. And the reason that the teeth are overlapping each other is because the base where they sit, which is the jaw, is too small. And it is too small because it hasn't developed to its full potential. Does that make sense? Yeah. So what changed? What happened? See, a good example I like to give is if you take a child and you don't let that child walk or run or exercise its legs, then the bones of the legs are not going to grow. And what happens is we've changed our diet. We've changed a lot of our habits.

And we're not chewing really high fibrous, hard foods. So we're not exercising the face muscles like we used to when we were hunter-gatherers. When we were hunter-gatherers, we were breastfed for a longer period, like three or four years. And breastfeeding takes a lot of work from the baby. If you breastfeed, you're forcing the muscles to work. If you're receiving, you know, passive milk from a bottle, then your muscles are not working. And after that, we are weaned into very soft foods. Hunter-gatherers would just give hard foods to the babies and the babies would just figure out how to negotiate and chew and extract the nutrients out of very consistent foods. Okay, I mean, I understand that there's

a big difference between the diet of hunter-gatherers many, many years ago and today, but you said that this change has happened over the last 50 years, and it's hard to imagine that in just a couple of generations that we would have evolved into having smaller jaws. It just seems like it's happened too fast. And absolutely, we don't have evolutionary time to have change our genes. So these changes are not genetic. They are absolutely environmental. And like I said, if a child doesn't walk, the legs will not develop.

And that's absolutely environmental. If you have a child that was not allowed to walk, and the bones don't develop properly, it's not a genetic change. It's an environmental change. And that's what we're seeing with this epidemic, that we've changed the environment. So when you say it's environmental, you mean that a child who maybe needs braces because his teeth are too crowded now, if that one child had started chewing and doing the things you're talking about early on, that child might have avoided that diagnosis.

Yes. And this is very easy to corroborate because we do have communities that live almost like hunter-gatherers and when we go and look at them we see that they don't have crowding, they don't have cavities either, and they don't have gum disease. And these are the same humans that we have living in cities. The only difference is that they are living in more primitive environments. And we have looked at, you know, children that moved from those primitive environments to industrialized, you know, reservations or areas where they start eating processed foods. And we see a very rapid change in the size of their jaws. So I have an 8-year-old who is looking at some serious dental work

because he has exactly what you're talking about. Are you saying that if he had started chewing earlier, or maybe if he starts chewing more now and doing the things you're talking about, we might avoid that? Look, prevention is a very, very difficult topic because you have to start very early. Eight years old is almost the limit where you can actually reverse the environment, what's going on with your child. I like to use the analogy of baking a cake. If you want to bake a round cake and you pour the batter in a square mold and you put it

in the oven, if you realize your mistake right away and get it out and change mold, you can have a beautiful round cake. But if a few minutes pass and your cake starts baking and then you realize your mistake and you try to fix it, you're never going to end up with a perfect round cake. Right. And... For me, my cutout is the first decade of life. After 10, you can start to mitigate some of the damages, but you really can't correct the problem. Before that, it really depends on each individual. But if you get your child chewing very hard foods and breathing exclusively through the nose and choosing the therapies or the activities that will foster more strength in his muscles, then he will definitely get

better, whatever problem he has. Okay, so I think I have a pretty good understanding of what the problem is with the jaw and the teeth, but you had said earlier that this has other implications to overall health. So make that connection for me, because it seems like, well, the teeth are crowded, so you build up the jaw so there's room for the teeth, and that's the end of the story. So what are the other health problems? The first thing that you can look at in children, and if you go to a daycare or if you go to, you know, a park or, you know, a place where kids are waiting in the sidelines

and observe children, you will see that a big percentage, if not all the children, just sit at rest with their mouth open. They hang their mouth open. And this could be just, you know, environmental where they actually have an allergy or it could have started just by not having the strength to hold their jaw closed. Or maybe the parents are not teaching their children to close their mouth. But this is where it starts. We have to have our mouth closed. We have to have strong muscles. But like I said, it's an epidemic because now we're seeing that the crooked teeth are not the end of the problem. They're just a symptom. And the biggest problem we're starting to see is sleep apnea. That's, you know, like extreme snoring.

When you start snoring and then you stop your breathing at night. And this is extremely stressful, especially for a growing child. It's a very scary thing, and it's hard to cure. So you have to do prevention and start doing things before this occurs. Once this is diagnosed, it's very hard to go back. So explain the connection here, because, well, I know what you're talking about. I see kids all the time with their mouth hanging open. That seems like I've always seen that. But explain the connection between having your mouth open and chewing and

breathing through your nose and crowded jaws. Tie this all together for me. We can go back to a book that was written in 1850, which is almost 200 years ago. And this book was written by George Catlin. And the book, he named the book, Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. He was commissioned to live with the Native Americans because they had very low child mortality.

And he went out and lived with them, and he realized that they had practices that were different than the whites. And the Indians, the Native Americans, they used to nickname not only pale faces to the whites, but they also called them black mouths. So they would observe their mouth was open. And the Native Americans, they all had their mouth closed. And this is 200 years ago.

So we know that, you know, it was so important to George Catlin that he named his book, after decades of research, he named his book, Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. So when kids have their, when I see kids with their mouth open all the time, or they eat with their mouth open, it's just a learned behavior or it's a defect? There's a chicken and egg issue here. The allergy comes first, or the mouth breathing came first. Because there's been research done at Stanford, and they've looked at inflamed adenoids and tonsils.

When the adenoids get big and the tonsils get big, sometimes children have to have them taken out. But the research has shown that that is a problem where they're mouth breathing, for whatever reason, and the tonsils have to start getting bigger because they have to do the filtering. When we, you know, make an effort to breathe through our nose, we are filtering whatever, you know, things are in the air, especially if we live indoors. There's a lot more particles indoors.

So the nose will filter them. The nose will clean that air, moisturize it, warm it, and it will also add certain things like nitrous oxide, which is an antiseptic, a natural antiseptic. So there's a circle here. And, you know, some kids may have blockages that are, you know, for whatever reason, it may be a defect. But most kids just, you know, they develop the habit because they are not strong enough. They're not strong enough because they were not breastfed long enough, and they were not winning to hard, chewy foods. I can imagine a lot of people who have kids or who look back on their own childhood

relate to what you're saying. But what's the solution? I mean, is this just an observation that maybe we need to help future kids, or is there a solution to this now? You know, what Paul Ehrlich says, which I like, he says this is one of those human predicament problems that you can personally do something about it. And if you do it early, if you take a baby, even if somebody cannot breastfeed, if you start showing them how to close their mouth, if you start, you know, sitting them at the table and, you know, requiring that they close their mouth when they're at rest,

you can change that habit. The older the child gets, the more difficult it is. And reminding is not enough. You know what's interesting about this to me is that you call this an epidemic. It's on the cover of your book that you're calling this a hidden epidemic. And I haven't really heard about this before. I mean, I've heard about individual cases. I have one in my own family right now.

But I would think that dentists would be seeing this more and more, and there would be some sort of outcry, some sort of movement to help correct this problem. Yes, my goal for this book is really to have mothers request better treatment for their children, to take their four-year-olds and take them to a clinician that understands prevention. And not to say, let's wait until the teeth are all crowded and we'll just straighten them, but actually grow their jaws when they're young. Help them develop to their full potential. Because it can be done.

I dream to have an office full of four-year-olds. Well, and I'm thinking too that as those children who have this problem get older, that causes problems in adulthood. I mean, if you're a mouth breather, if your mouth is always open, that can't be good. Yes, and parents know, for example, you know when you have your mouth open, if you have a cold, your mouth dries up, and you don't feel very well because your mouth is dried up. So the saliva really has a job, and the job is to protect the teeth and to keep them clean and to keep them healthy.

So if you have your mouth closed, your saliva is going to flow nicely and you're going to feel better. And a child that just has his mouth open at night, it dries up and we will have more cavities, we'll have gum disease, our mouth will smell, we'll have bad breath. So closing the mouth has a lot of extremely good effects. Well, but that open mouth thing can be caused by other problems like allergies and other things, right? It isn't always because your teeth are crowded. Well, like I said, it's a chicken and egg conundrum.

We don't know if your mouth is too small because you were not strong enough to keep your mouth closed. And so you're hanging your mouth open, and that made your nose non-functional. In anatomy, we say, use it or lose it. My example of a kid that doesn't walk, if your muscles are not strong enough, you hang your mouth open, you start breathing through your nose, and then your nose becomes useless. And of course, we might have allergies. There's an increase in allergens.

But sometimes it's not really the allergy, but it's the fact that the nose is not filtering. So you're ingesting all those particles in the air, which increasingly we have more and more toxins in the air. So if you're not filtering through your nose, you're eating them through your mouth, and that's going to cause more allergies. So one problem feeds the other.

Well, this is something I think parents really need to know about. I haven't heard much about this before, again, as I said, except anecdotally, people have this problem. But what's interesting to me, too, is on your book jacket is all these heavyweights in dentistry who are in support of what you're talking about. So this really is important, and I think you're on to something. My guest has been Sandra Kahn. She is a dentist, and she wrote a book with Paul Ehrlich that is out now called

Jaws, The Story of a Hidden Epidemic. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Thank you, Sandra. I appreciate your invitation. Thank you very much. I'm sure that you're a good driver. Well, no, actually, I'm not sure. I see a lot of bad drivers, but I'm sure you're not one of them.

But even the best of drivers could use a few tricks to become an even better driver, and here are a few from Popular Mechanics. Know that drizzle is deadly. The first 10 minutes of rain are when roadways are the most dangerous because the precipitation causes the oil that has built up on the roads to become very slick. So slow down when it starts to rain. If you want the best fuel economy, drive like you have an egg under your foot. That will make you accelerate more smoothly. And the more smoothly you accelerate and brake, the further your gas will go. Everyone has switched on their turn signal only to find out that the exit they think they're getting off is the wrong exit.

It's really the next one that you want. But what you should do is really get off at that exit. Because the person behind you may not be paying attention, figuring you're already turning, and suddenly you're back on the road, and that causes a lot of accidents. Here's a really important one. Practice parallel parking. You don't do it very often, but when you do parallel park, you're sticking out in the road causing others to wait. Parallel parking is not intuitive at all. So practice getting good at it when people aren't honking at you and waiting for you to get into your parking spot.

And yes, you know it's good for gas mileage to keep your tires properly inflated. But if they're not, it's also harder to maneuver the car in emergency situations, especially when you have to make a quick turn. That can be very dangerous. And that is something you should know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring

Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today.

Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.