Something You Should Know - Interesting Ways Lifestyle Affects Your Health & A Better Way to Understand Numbers

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

If you haven’t got a New Year’s resolution to work on yet - I’ve got one for you - it’s tackling clutter! This episode begins with some thoughts about what clutter does to your mental health and how you can fix it. http://www.timetoorganize.com/wp-content/uploads/realsimple-article.pdf There is something called “lifestyle medicine.” It is the idea that what you eat, how you exercise and generally how you live your life will affect your health - for better or worse. That likely comes as no surprise to you, but you probably think the effects are minimal. And you would be wrong. For decades Dr. Dean Ornish has been researching lifestyle medicine and found that small changes in how you live ( actually just 4 changes) can have a huge impact on your health and longevity and even reverse chronic illness. The research is impressive, and the results are compelling. Listen as he discusses how you can make these changes and quickly see real improvement. Dr. Ornish is author of the book UnDo It! : How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases (https://amzn.to/3qYaSB7). Here is the link to his website for more info on his program: https://www.ornish.com/undo-it/ Numbers are sometimes hard to grasp. For instance, 1 million seconds equals 12 days. So how long is 1 billion seconds? You will have to listen to this episode to find out but I bet your guess is way off! Since we use numbers every single day, it just might help to find ways to better understand and explain them as well as make them memorable. Joining me with some great insight into this is Chip Heath. Chip teaches at Stanford, has authored several books and his latest is Making Numbers Count (https://amzn.to/3t3AMpG). Listen as Chip makes numbers come alive! Just about every food has an expiration date or “sell by” date or “best if used by” date on it. But in some cases they can be very misleading. A lot of foods will last a long time past the “sell by” date. You may be throwing away food that is perfectly fine. Listen and I will give you foods you can likely hang on to a little longer. https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/do-food-expiration-dates-matter#1 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Check out Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, go to https://squarespace.com/SOMETHING to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Get a $75 CREDIT at https://Indeed.com/Something To see the all new Lexus NX and to discover everything it was designed to do for you, visit https://Lexus.com/NX Discover matches all the cash back you’ve earned at the end of your first year! Learn more at https://discover.com/match Find out how Justworks can help your business by going to https://Justworks.com https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug. The play is pretend. The skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. Today on Something You Should Know,

what clutter is doing to your mental health. Then some rather amazing intel on how changes to your lifestyle create big benefits to your health. For the last 40 some odd years, I've conducted research showing what a powerful difference changes in diet and lifestyle can make.

And so to reduce these lifestyle changes to their essence, it's eat well, move more, stress less, love more. That's it. And the more diseases we study, the more evidence we have to show how powerful these changes can make. Also, some foods in your kitchen that will last a lot longer than you think. And how to make numbers come alive, because the human brain doesn't grasp them very well.

Our brains are wired so that we can only hold about seven pieces of information, and there's a reason that phone numbers were seven digits. It was a very conscious decision, because if there had been one more, we would have been in lots of trouble. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey.

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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 there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. If you're still looking for a New Year's resolution to set and to keep, I have a good suggestion, and that is to tackle the clutter.

This is something I can attest to personally. Clutter causes stress, and sometimes people don't realize it until after they clean up the clutter, and then they feel this sense of calm and tranquility. Clutter bombards the brain, and it makes it more difficult to relax or to focus on anything else. Even people who claim not to be bothered by clutter and disorganization actually are. This is according to the National Association of Professional Organizers. If you get rid of clutter, and here is one of the real, real benefits of this, if you get rid of clutter, you can reduce housework by up to 40%. Also be aware that it's clutter, not the lack of space, that is the cause for most disorganization. Research proves that

profits and productivity in a business decline as the clutter in the business increases. And the number one clutter problem is paper. Clutter takes a long time to build up, so it will likely take a long time to clear out. But the benefits are great if you take the time to do it. And that is something you should know. When it comes to your health, you know what to do. You're supposed to eat right, exercise more, get enough sleep. You know the things that you're supposed to do to be healthy. But what isn't so clear is how much of it do you have to do to really make a difference? How healthy do you have to be

to have a significant impact? Can changing your lifestyle actually fight or even reverse illness and disease? Or does it just keep it from getting worse? This is something Dean Ornish has been researching and working with real patients for a long time on. Dean Ornish is highly regarded as the father of lifestyle medicine, and he has shown that making lifestyle changes can actually reverse illness and make you healthier. He has a book out called Undo It! How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases. Hi, Dean. Welcome. Hey, Michael. It's good to be here. So this idea that we can undo damage, we can undo disease and illness that we already have by making changes in lifestyle,

rather than just going to the doctor and getting a pill. Explain this concept and what you've been doing in the field of lifestyle medicine. Well, it's a good question. For the last 40 some odd years, I've conducted research, randomized trials and others showing what a powerful difference changes in diet and lifestyle can make. You know, I think one of the biggest obstacles I find is people think, oh, diet and lifestyle, that's kind of boring. You know, how powerful could that be? And I think our unique contribution has been to use these very high tech, expensive,

state-of-the-art scientific measures to prove what a powerful difference these simple changes in diet and lifestyle can make, not only in preventing disease, but actually reversing or undoing it, and much more quickly than when we had once realized. These biological mechanisms are so much more dynamic. You can get better quickly and worse quickly, even a single meal in some cases. And over time, we were able to show for the first time that, for example, even severe heart disease could be reversed. Well, I think that's surprising to a lot of people, that lifestyle changes can reverse heart disease. It seems like once you have heart disease,

you have heart disease. At the time we began doing these studies, it was thought that once you had heart disease, it could only get worse. Maybe you could slow down the rate at which it got worse, but that was about the best you can hope for. We were able to show for the first time that you could actually get better and better. Within a month, the blood flow to the heart improved. The chest pain went away in most people. The ability of the heart to pump blood increased. After a year, even severely blocked coronary arteries became less clogged. After five years, even severely blocked coronary arteries became less clogged. After five years, even more improvement than after one year. We then found these same

lifestyle changes could reverse a wide variety of the most common and costly chronic diseases. We found we could reverse high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes in many cases. You know, when people are diagnosed with these conditions and they say, doctor, how long do I have to take these drugs that you put me on to keep my blood pressure and my cholesterol and my blood sugar down? The doctor usually says forever. You know, it's kind of like if you can imagine doctors busily mopping up the floor around the sink that's overflowing, but no one's turning off the faucet. How long do I have to mop up the floor? Like forever. Well, why don't we just turn off the faucet? And the faucet or the cause are really these lifestyle

changes that we make. And so when you talk about lifestyle changes, I mean, that's a fairly generic-y term. Give me, for example, by doing things like what? Well, the program that we've developed and studied over the last four decades has four main components. It's a whole foods, plant-based diet that's mostly fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products as close as possible as do they occur in nature that are naturally low in both fat and sugar and refined carbs. Moderate exercise, some kind of aerobic exercise. Generally, if you like it, you'll do it. So pick something you like along with a little bit of strength training and stretching, meditation and other stress management techniques to control

stress and social support, the time we spend with our friends and family. And so to reduce these lifestyle changes to their essence, it's eat well, move more, stress less, love more. That's it. And the more diseases we study, the more evidence we have to show how powerful these changes can make. In addition to reversing heart disease and diabetes and prostate study with Craig Venter, who was the first to decode the human genome, and found that when you change your lifestyle, it changes your genes. Over 500 genes, in effect, turning on the good genes to keep us healthy, turning off the bad genes that cause us to get sick. And we're now in the middle of the first randomized trial to see if we can

stop or reverse the progression of men and women who have early stage Alzheimer's disease. Well, I find it's interesting when you look at the diseases you're talking about, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, they all have very specific and very different medical treatments once you get them. But what you're saying is that on a lifestyle level, you treat them all the same with with the same lifestyle changes so it radically simplifies what we tell people it's not like there's one diet for you know this disease and this one for another it's

really the same for all of them and so it just radically simplifies and makes it easy for people to understand and it also helps to explain why you often find the same person will have you know what are called comorbidities. They'll have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, be overweight, have heart disease and so on. Because it's really the same disease just manifesting in all these different ways. So one of the concerns I think people have is when you talk about simple lifestyle changes, it's that word simple. Because, you know, I've known you for decades. And, you know, I've tried your diet.

I cook many things out of your first book. But your diet is not simple. If you're a pretty standard meat-eating kind of American, switching to your diet is not simple. It takes a lot of effort. And so I think people think, oh, this would be easy, and it's not, and then they give up. You know, it's ounce of prevention, pound of cure. If you're trying to reverse a life-threatening condition, it takes big changes. They're not easy, but they're worth doing. And if you're otherwise healthy, if you're just trying to lose a few pounds or feel

better or get your cholesterol or blood pressure or blood sugar down a few points, you know, what matters most is your overall way of eating. If you indulge yourself one day, you're healthier the next. If you don't have time to exercise one day, do a little more the next. You don't have time to meditate for an hour, do it for a minute, whatever you do. In all of our studies, we found the more you change your lifestyle, the more you improve at any age, which is a very empowering realization. But if you're trying to reverse a life-threatening condition, that's why we were the first to prove in all these conditions that it could actually be reversed when people thought it was impossible, because it's hard. It's hard to make big changes

in lifestyle. I would acknowledge that. But in some ways, paradoxically, it can be easier to make big changes in small ones. Medicare created a new benefit category to cover my program 11 years ago. And we've trained through with working with a company called Sharecare. We've been training hospitals and clinics and physician groups around the country. And they're not just in big cities like Los Angeles. They're in, you know, Saline, Arkansas or, you know, South Bend, Indiana or West Virginia or places that are, you know, very different ways of eating and living. And yet 96% of the people who enroll complete all of the 72 hours. Just a month or so ago, Medicare agreed to cover my program when it's offered virtually.

So now you don't have to live near a hospital or clinic that we've trained. You can live anywhere in the country, in rural areas or anywhere. I mean, to put it in context, 96% of the people finish all 72 hours of our program. Half of the people prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins stopped taking them after just four months, and that's just taking a pill once a day. And they're a proven benefit, and usually someone else pays for them. So why are we getting such better adherence to a much harder program than just taking a pill once a day? And the reason is, I've learned over time what really enables people to make sustainable changes. And it's not fear of dying, it's joy of living. And when you take a cholesterol-alloying pill, it doesn't make you

feel better. It's like, take this pill, it won't make you feel better, hopefully it won't make you feel worse to prevent something really bad from happening years down the road, like a heart attack or stroke that you don't want to think about, so people generally stop taking it. But when you change your lifestyle, most people find they feel so much better so quickly. If you change a lot of things at the same time, you know, eat well, move more, stress less, love more, and to a large degree, most people, for example, who have angina or chest pain due to heart disease, their chest pain goes away. And so for someone who can't, you know, walk across the street without getting chest pain or make love with their spouse or play with their kids or go back to work without getting chest pain, and within a few weeks they're essentially pain-free, it changes the whole equation from

preventing something bad from happening to, oh, what I gain is so much more than what I give up. It seems, though, that you really have to separate the two groups of people. There are people who are seriously ill, I mean, life-threateningly ill, that if they don't make some changes, they could die, which, you know, that's a pretty good motivator to make change, versus people who think, well, you know, it'd be nice to drop 10, 20 pounds and live healthier and all that. That's different. And when you're facing a life-threatening illness, that fear, I think, is a really strong motivator to make really big changes. Well, there's some truth to that, but, you know, fear is only a sustainable

motivator for about a month or two. I used to get into friendly discussions with Al Gore when An Inconvenient Truth came out, that if you try to scare people, if you tell them the whole world's going to melt down in 10 years, it's just so for a month or so, they'll, you know, start driving smaller cars or get fluorescent lights or whatever, or LEDs, but it's hard to sustain fear because we all know we're going to die. It's just a question of when, you know, the mortality rate is still, you know, a hundred percent. It's one per person, but we don't think about it most of the time because it's too scary. And so I've just found that, you know, when someone has a heart attack, that denial breaks down, but it comes back after a month or two. So fear is not really a sustainable motivator.

What really is sustainable is joy and pleasure and love and feeling good. And so when people go through my reversing heart disease program that, you know, not only Medicare is covering now, but most of the other major insurance companies is we kind of take you by the hand. You know, we give you the food that you need in the first few weeks to be able to make that transition. And because, again, these biological mechanisms are so dynamic, if you make these changes even for a few weeks, you begin to really notice from your own experience how much better you feel. And then the equation shifts from how can I keep something bad from happening years down the road that I don't want to think about, to, wow, when I do this, I feel good. When I do that, I don't feel so good.

So let me do more of this and less of that. We're talking about lifestyle medicine, the idea that how you live and what you eat can not only keep you healthy, but even fight disease. And my guest is Dr. Dean Ornish. He's author of the book, Undo It, How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so.

Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Dean, what do you say to someone listening who would like to put their toe in the water here? Like, don't necessarily want to dive deep into your program. I don't have any big chronic illness.

But the idea of feeling better, living better is a good idea. Where do you start? By doing things like what? Even more than being healthy, people want to feel free and in control. You know, as soon as I tell somebody, you know, eat this and don't eat that and do this and don't do that, they immediately want to do the opposite. Now, this goes back to the first dietary intervention when God said, don't eat the apple, and that didn't go so well. And so rather than saying that here's a diet, you can do this and don't eat this, don't eat that, do this, don't do that. You know, if you're trying to reverse disease, sometimes you have to say that

because it is prescriptive, but for everyone else, you know, what matters most is your overall way of eating and living. So instead of calling some foods good and some foods bad, once you call some foods bad, it's a very small step to saying, oh, I'm a bad person because I eat bad food. You know, the whole language behavioral change has this kind of, you know, nurse ratchet from one flew over the cuckoo's nest and, you know, what kind of a fascist quality to it. Like, you know, patient compliance is kind of such a creepy word, like, you know, manipulating people or I cheated on my diet. You know, I'm a bad person because I had bad food, you know, that just get rid of all that and just say, look, what matters most is my overall way of eating and living. So to the

degree I can move towards the plant-based end of the spectrum, eat more fruits and vegetables, less, you know, the usual suspects, less red meat, less fried foods, less, a lot of sugar and things like that, a lot of fat and eat more healthily. If you can overall move in that direction, if you indulge yourself one day, don't think of it. I'm not, it's not like you're cheated or you're bad or you fail, just eat healthier than next. Allow yourself some indulgences. Let me try to exercise. Maybe I'm not going to run a marathon. Maybe I'm just going to walk, take the stairs a couple of flights instead of the elevator, kind of incorporate that into my life. I used to get frustrated when I couldn't find a parking space near the gym. I thought, well, that's ridiculous.

Let me just deliberately park farther away and I'll get a little extra exercise and not have to be stressed out because I can find a place to park easier. Just little things like that can make a big difference. Can you talk about little things like that in all four categories? Yeah. Well, like I say, we talked about diet and exercise, whatever you do. If you like it, you'll do it. So just focus on things you enjoy doing. You know, I grew up in Texas where exercise was always punishment, you know, go take a lap or give me 50 pushups or whatever. So, but I found that I love to swim because swimming was always fun. You know, I associate it with good, happy memories. So I swim, you know, most mornings instead of doing things that I don't like. With meditation, you know, find something that you

enjoy. It can be religious, it can be secular, it doesn't matter. Just focus on, you know, find something that you enjoy. It can be religious, it can be secular, it doesn't matter. Just focus on, you know, even if you get up five minutes later, it can make a difference. You know, even one minute of meditation carries with you throughout the day. It's kind of like if you hear a song on the radio and you find yourself humming it later in the day, just spend one minute meditating. It's like, you know, if I have to tell myself I don't have time to meditate for a minute, I have to admit my life is so out of balance. I'd rather just do the minute. But that minute actually can have a benefit.

You know, if you're caught in traffic, you know, just take a minute or if you're on an airplane or whatever. It just people say things like, you know, I used to have a short fuse and I'd explode easily. Now my fuse is longer. In other words, things just don't bother you as much when you do that on a regular basis. And the love more is people say, well, I get the exercise and diet and even the meditation, but love more, that's so touchy feely. And what's that about? And study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a sense of love and connection and community that spend time with their friends and family and loved ones. And I

don't know anything in medicine that has that powerful an impact. You know, one study that was done dripped coronavirus into, this is a less harmful version of coronavirus. I don't know, they got this through the Human Studies Committee. And another study they did, rhinovirus, it causes a common cold, into healthy volunteers. 100% of them got infected, but not everyone who got infected got sick. And they found that those that had six or more visits or phone calls from a friend over a two-week period compared to those who had two or fewer were four times less likely to develop

the signs and symptoms of a cold, even though they were all infected. There was a study that just came out last month. We looked at 3,000 frontline healthcare workers in six countries that had extensive exposure to COVID-19 because they were taking care of people who had COVID-19. These are healthcare workers. And those following a healthy plant-based diet, like I recommend, were 73% less likely to develop moderate to severe illness, whereas those following a low carb, high animal protein, Atkins-type diet were nearly four times more likely to develop moderate to severe illness. And likewise, there's 600,000 participants from a Harvard study, King's College study

that also came out a few weeks ago, that those eating a healthful plant-based diet had a 41% decreased risk of moderate to severe disease. So the advice is basically to do more of these four things that you talk about. And the more you do, the better. And the less you do, the worse. Yeah, the more you do, the more you improve at any age. That's, I mean, I thought incorrectly, as it turned out, that the younger people who had less severe disease,

whatever disease we're looking at, would do better when they changed their lifestyle. But I was wrong. It wasn't how old they were. It wasn't how sick they were. The more they changed their diet and lifestyle, the more they improved, both in how they felt and in every way we could measure. And that's a really empowering realization because, you know, you can do something about that. Even you can change your genes. So people often say, oh, I've just got bad genes. You know, what can I do? You know, even though when President Clinton has been on this program for many years, he's talked about this publicly, I wouldn't mention it. But 12 years ago, when his bypass was clogged up, one of his cardiologists held a press conference on CNN and said, oh, it was all in his genes.

His diet and lifestyle had nothing to do with it. And having been working with him since 1993, I knew it had everything to do with it. So I sent him a note saying, look, your genes are not your fate. Your genes are just a predisposition. And in fact, we've done studies now with Craig Venture, who was the first to decode the human genome, that over 500 genes were changed in just three months, you know, turning on the good genes to keep us healthy, turning off the ones that cause these biological mechanisms that lead to all these different conditions, not only heart disease, but other things. And he's been doing it now for 12 years. He looks great. He's talked about how his heart disease is getting better and so on. It's like whatever your politics, when a former US president

and certainly one known for eating unhealthily was able to make these changes, I think that sets a good message for everyone. But the real issue, and the reason that I'm so passionate about this after 40 years or so of doing this work, is that it really empowers people. You know, we're now, as I mentioned, in the middle of doing the first study to see if we can reverse early stage Alzheimer's. I think there's a good chance we might be able to slow or stop or reverse it. You know, there are no drugs that can even stop it from getting worse. My mom died of Alzheimer's. I have one of the genes for it. So I'm at risk for it. And when

you lose your memories, you lose everything. And so if we can show, and it's still a big if, but if we can show that these same lifestyle changes may stop or reverse the progression of early stage Alzheimer's, that'll give millions of people new hope and new choices. What could be better than that? So I love doing this work for anyone listening to this. You don't have to take my word for it because these mechanisms are so dynamic. If you just try it for a few days and you really do the full version of this, you're likely, whether you're sick or not, to feel so much better. Then it comes out of your own experience and it takes you out of the diet wars. And like this guy says that, and this woman says that,

and who am I to believe to say oh I can believe my own experience and then you really know that oh when I do this I feel good when I do that I don't feel so good so let me I'll do more of this and less of that and then what I gain is so much more than what I give up that's really what makes it sustainable so it basically boils down to eat well move more stress less love more Do those things and do as much of those things as you can and you'll feel better and hopefully live a good long time. Dr. Dean Ornish has been my guest, often referred to as the father of lifestyle medicine. His latest book is called Undo It, How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases. There's a link

to that book and also a link to his website if you're interested in his program. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Thanks, Dean. Well, thanks so much. I'm really grateful to you. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy.

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Every day, you and I deal with numbers. When we shop, when we drive, when we do almost anything, numbers are involved somehow. Yet numbers are sometimes hard to grasp. They're hard to relate to. They're hard to get a handle on. As an example, if I told you that 1 million seconds is equal to 12 days, how long is 1 billion seconds? Take a guess. The answer is 32 years. And unless you knew that answer ahead of time, I suspect that answer surprises you. And if you did take a guess, your guess was probably nowhere near that. Because numbers

are just kind of hard to get your head around. This is something Chip Heath has explored. Chip is a teacher at Stanford and co-author of a new book on how we relate to numbers called Making Numbers Count. Because numbers are part of our life and part of our experience, and we have to make them understandable. Hey, Chip, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

So in the past, you have written with your brother Dan, and you've spoken about making ideas sticky, and I always think of you as kind of an idea guy. So why tackle numbers this time? I teach MBA students and engineering students in my class at Stanford, and my advice to them about numbers was to stay away from them as much as possible, to simplify as much as possible, because numbers are hard to get across to people in a way that makes them stick. And eventually one student, one year, raised his hand and said, look, I'm an investment banker. All I deal with is numbers. And so you can't help me with numbers. You can't help me with my work. And so I took that

seriously as a challenge and started to talk about numbers and focus on numbers. And that day became bigger and bigger as a part of the course, because we found more and more about what to do to make numbers stick. So explain, and maybe using an example would be very helpful here, how you make numbers stick. So one of the issues about the way that we interact with the environment is how much fresh water is there? And it turns out there's some numbers associated with that. 97.5% of the water in the world is salinated. Of the 2.5% that's fresh, 99% is actually tied up in ice caps or in frozen tundra. And the remaining 0.0025% is what we can consume as long as we don't pollute

it somehow. Now, that's a set of numbers that's kind of difficult to wrap your mind around. And your brain may be struggling right now to remember what was the 97.5% versus the 99%. Here's an analogy that a teacher used with my co-author Carla back when she was in junior high. She said, imagine a gallon jug filled with salt water, and at the top of the gallon jug, there are three ice cubes floating, and there are some drops of water falling off those ice cubes. That's essentially the ratio of fresh water that we have in the world. The salinated water in the gallon jug is the oceans, and ice cubes represent the frozen tundra. And those tiny few drops of water that are falling off the ice cubes

represent the fresh water that's available to us. Now, that's a much better way of getting a number across. And in fact, turned Carla into a rock star on the family cocktail party circuit because she felt like she had something to contribute to conversations as a seventh grader and what was brilliant about that teacher is he figured out a way to convey an idea that was true and useful but in such a concrete way that a seventh grader could pick it up and understand it you're right as soon as you said that i i my reaction was i was amazed to hear that so little water was available fresh water but then i remember what was I was amazed to hear that so little water was available, fresh water. But then I, what was it again?

But that visual example of the gallon jug makes it crystal clear, and I'll never forget it. Yeah, I think the wonderful thing is that the world offers us lots of ways of doing that. And the people that run the Ming search engine looked into this at one point, and they started serving people not just the facts that they'd asked for. So somebody might Google, what's the size of Pakistan? And it turns out it's 340,000 square miles. But the Bing people would add a simple perspective phrase. That's about the size of two Californias.

Or the CDC recommends that protein consumption in a meal is three to four ounces. That's about the size of a deck of cards. But that perspective phrase helps translate things into the language that we understand. We understand more about Californias if we grew up in the States than we do about Pakistan. And so that one bit of redirection helps incredibly. A numbers purist might say that this isn't very precise, though, that when you're talking about numbers, numbers have a tendency to be viewed as very precise, and calling something about two Californias or that those ice cubes represent the glacier, water-trapped glaciers in the world,

yes, sort of, in the ballpark of, but it's not very precise, that you're dumbing down the numbers. Yeah, and I think that's a concern that people have. But the fact is, research has been done on numbers that if you overvalue precision, you end up hurting yourself in terms of the amount that people remember and the amount that they can use.

People that work with numbers a lot do more rounding than the rest of us. So engineers talk about ballpark calculations or back of the envelope calculations. Physicists talk about that. Doctors, a lot of medicine is about getting ballpark estimates for a process that you're trying to enhance with a drug intervention. And then you can do the calculation, the precise calculations later. But what's most useful to people online is a number that they can deal with and our brains are wired so that we can only hold about seven or so pieces of information at one point in time and a single complicated number, like 623,297, that sucks up so many resources in our brain that it's almost like we can't do anything else other than remember that one number.

There's a reason that phone numbers were seven digits past the area code. Because if there had been one more, we would have been in lots of trouble. Really? That was deliberate? Yeah. It was a very conscious decision because if you've got the area code, and most people know the area codes in their local area, there was a limit to how much people could effectively remember in dialing the number. And so most people in the world can deal with about seven. So talk about some of the other principles that you write about that help people explain and help people understand numbers. Well, one principle is that our brains aren't very good at dealing with fractions or percentages.

And there's a funny example. The CEO of NW Restaurants at one point was trying to fight McDonald's quarter pounder that was becoming a popular menu item in the fast food industry. And they said, we're going to do better. We're going to get a third pounder burger at the same price as McDonald's quarter pounder. Did consumers rejoice at getting a third pound of beef at the same price as a quarter pound McDonald's quarter pound. Did consumers rejoice at getting a third of pound of beef at the same price as a quarter pound at McDonald's? No, they complained that they'd been ripped off because three is smaller than four. And so a third pound burger has to be less valuable than a quarter pound burger. That's an extreme example, but all of us run into this when we hear statistics like about 40% of Americans would admit pre-COVID that they sometimes didn't wash their hands after using the bathroom.

Now, that's kind of disturbing. 40% sounds like a big number, but it's not something that would shock us. And yet, one of my graduate students in an exercise said, what that really means is that two of the last five people you shook hands with didn't wash their hands after using the bathroom. And all of a sudden, that two out of five creates a picture in our mind. It's very tangible, and it kind of causes us to reach for the hand sanitizer. Well, it seems that people have always been somewhat numb to statistics. You know, when we hear that 80% of people do this or 20% of people don't do that, they're numbers, but they're not really people. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not,

it's not real. It's all very abstract. It's percentages. And it's, it's hard to, I don't know, it just, it's hard to take it seriously. And, and it's hard to, I don't know, it's hard to take it seriously. And it's a problem when you're trying to make change in the world. So Kaiser Permanente came up with a new procedure for handling sepsis. It saves about 55% of the people that go through it. And it turns out, if every U.S. hospital did this, we would save 149,000 lives a year. The question is, is that big? Is that small? Well, it's essentially the equivalent of saving every woman that's diagnosed with breast cancer and every man that's diagnosed with prostate cancer every year. And so those comparisons that I just brought in all of a sudden put you in a frame of mind

that this is an important problem. And the 149,000 probably left you mildly interested, but not committed to tackling the problem in the way that the comparisons allow you to do. One of the things you recommend when you're explaining something with numbers is to add an encore. So explain what you mean by that. There's a psychological principle called psychological numbing that says that as numbers get bigger, we're having harder and harder time understanding the increments in the numbers. And so, for example, the difference between 10 and 20 seems big, but the difference between 20 and 30 seems smaller, and 70 and 80 seems smaller still, and 120 to 130 doesn't seem

like a big deal at all. And so what creating an encore does is it kind of forces you to think about the different parts of the number in a way that gets emotion from those numbers. So for example, people that are interested in nutrition, I think it's funny that we go into a 7-Eleven and reach past the cola to get a nice fruit juice, thinking that we've made a good nutritional choice. A lot of fruit juices have more sugar than the colas that

we're reaching past. So a 12-ounce ocean spray cran apple juice has 44 grams of sugar. That's 11 teaspoons of sugar. Those 11 teaspoons of sugar, it sounds like a big, big number, and it's kind of disgusting. But if you break that down into concrete ways of thinking, 11 teaspoons of sugar is the same sugar that's in three Krispy Kreme glazed donuts, except that you've got three additional sugar cubes that you want to add to those glazed donuts. And what I just did by adding that sugar cubes is an encore. And if we want people to feel our numbers, that's a good principle, is to use an encore. See, that is such a great way to explain something, that encore idea,

to say that this drink has the same amount of sugar as three Krispy Kreme donuts plus three sugar cubes. How do you ever forget that? I mean, that's a great hook to get you to remember the number. Yeah, and that's the trouble with numbers in general is that it's hard to find hooks to integrate them into with what other things that we know. Like, you may have heard that hummingbirds have a higher metabolism than we do. And it turns out that they have 50 times the metabolism that we have. And so if you take a 198 pound male, which is the typical size of men in the United States, what would that male have to consume to have the same ratio of calories to the hummingbird? The answer is 150,000 calories. Now, that number is not going to stick with you,

but go a little further and make it concrete. Say, what that would mean is that the male would be drinking a Coke every minute of the day. That's a stickier notion of how much the hummingbird is burning up by acrobatics it is doing. Since you've really looked deeply into this, what are some of the numbers or some of the ways of explaining numbers that you discovered in your research that really floored you or that really shocked you, if any? For example, there's a term in manufacturing called Six Sigma. And if you reach Six Sigma quality,

you've only got 3.4 defects for every million products you make. And if you think about converting that into process, what does that mean practically? Well, suppose that you're talking about baking cookies, and you bake two dozen cookies a night, chocolate chip cookies, and they all turn out to be perfect. They're soft in the middle. They caramelized crunchy on the outside exactly the right number of chocolate chips for cookie what six sigma quality means is that there would be 37 years of baking two batches of cookies a night before you bake a single batch single cookie it's raw or burned or has too few chips and and once you start unpacking it that way, and you're thinking about the implications for this broader process, it's way more impressive to understand what the manufacturing people have

accomplished. That's a useful strategy in terms of getting people to engage with numbers, is you've got a promise of understanding things that you couldn't have seen before. Well, one of the things you hear about numbers and statistics is that you can get them to say anything you want. You can stack the deck, so to speak, to make them support your argument. And so, you know, numbers sound precise on one hand, but on another level, they're very manipulatable, right? Yeah, definitely. I think what's useful is if you're able to put things into context, you're going to be in a much better position to work with them. So, for example, one of my friends in college was tuning into a debate that people were having at the time about the

National Endowment for the Arts had funded some artists that were doing provocative things that not everybody was in love with. And my friend James would listen to the debate for a while and say, you know, you're right. You shouldn't have to fund NEA for doing these things that you were morally opposed to. So let me personally refund your money for the NEA for doing these things that you were morally opposed to. So let me personally refund your money for the NEA. And he would hand them a quarter. And it turned out he had done the calculation as an engineering student that if you take the average taxpayer burden in the United States, the typical taxpayer is paying about a quarter for the National Endowment for the Arts and all the work they do to bring art to society. And somehow putting that in context clarifies the debate a little bit. We can still disagree about

what the NEA is funding, but is this a major issue facing society when we're talking about a quarter per taxpayer? And I think that's the use of numbers, is if you put things in perspective, you're going to make better decisions and have better conversations. Sometimes I think numbers are difficult to understand because of the units they're explained in. Because, for example, I don't have a lot of experience with light years or, you know, milliseconds. They're not part of my experience, so I don't relate to them. So when you explain things in those terms, they're hard to hold on to. So I think it's often hard to think about the numbers that we have in society and what those numbers mean. So, for example, milliseconds.

What is a millisecond? So you take a second and divide it into a thousand pieces and that's kind of hard to process for our brains. But then when we hear that a batter has about 250 milliseconds to react to a pitch and then has to execute the swing in another 200 milliseconds or so, that sounds fast but we have no clue what it means. So imagine tapping and try to tap four times a second. That's about the rate of four times a second. What that statistic about milliseconds is saying is that a batter, in order to make a swing, has to take a look at the pitch and has about one of those claps to make a decision about whether to swing, has less than one of those claps to react and actually swing,

and then the play is over. That's how fast the experience is. And suddenly, by doing the clapping, translating the 1,000 milliseconds into 250 milliseconds for four claps, we start to get a sense of how how amazing hitting a baseball really is when you're in that banner box in a professional level and i think that's a that's a strategy that we ought to be taking for more of the numbers in our lives and so we can we can make them concrete well I also mentioned a few minutes ago about light years.

You sometimes hear people explain things in light years, and that's one of those numbers that I just, it means nothing to me. I don't even know what it is. Is a light year, are you trying to express time or distance or both? So that's a number that really, I think, falls flat because it's so it's that's a number that that really i think falls flat because it's it's so out of my experience so you may have heard that that the nearest solar system is four and a half light years away here's a mapping that somebody came up with picture a quarter imagine that you had a solar system on that quarter and put the quarter down on a at one goal of a soccer field and then start walking and walk all the way down to the other end of the soccer field and put down another quarter on the goal of that soccer field those two quarters represent the distance of four and a half light years and

everything else is empty space and so if you want a picture of how big is space that's the nearest solar system it just blows my mind to think about the quarter sitting on one goal and quarter sitting on the other goal and all the emptiness that's in between those things. It makes the challenge of space travel much more compelling, much more daunting. Well, I think it's safe to say that, at least for me anyway, you have breathed life into numbers. That, you know, numbers are not my favorite thing, but I like the way that you explain them because then they do come alive. They are more real, and it's fun to listen to.

Chip Heath has been my guest. He is a teacher at Stanford, and he is co-author of a new book about numbers called Making Numbers Count, and you'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Chip. Appreciate you being here. You know, some foods will last a lot longer than you probably think.

The use-by and sell-by dates can actually be misleading. For example, peanut butter will last six months once it's been opened and kept in the refrigerator. Yogurt is still good 10 days after the sell-by date. Eggs last 3 to 5 weeks past the sell-by date. For cottage cheese, you can keep it 1 to 2 weeks past the sell-by date. And breakfast cereals are fine for 2 to 3 months after they've been opened. Now, supposedly honey will last forever.

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