Something You Should Know - Should You Start Your Own Business? & The Dangers of Medical Myths & Health Misinformation

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

What color lipstick makes a woman most attractive? Do women prefer a beard on a man or not? What can anyone do to make themselves more attractive? We begin this episode by exploring this. (https://www.healthyway.com/content/ways-to-be-more-attractive-according-to-science/) Entrepreneurship is alive and well. So should you start a business? Maybe you already have. When you think about it, people who drive for Uber or rent out a room in their house on Airbnb are being entrepreneurial. So are people who simply decide to go freelance and do what they have always done – but do it as a consultant or contractor rather than as an employee. There are many ways to be an entrepreneur – but is it a smart thing for most people to do? Here to discuss that with me is Scott Shane. He is a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western University and author of the book, Is Entrepreneurship Dead? (https://amzn.to/2rouVd7) I hate waiting in line. I imagine most people do. It turns out there is a whole science and vocabulary about waiting in line. Listen and discover how to make waiting in line less annoying, if that is possible. (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a6164/how-to-choose-the-fastest-line/) Health fraud is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time. I am fascinated by so many of the false health claims that people believe even when there is no evidence to support them. Nina Shapiro, M.D., is also fascinated by this topic. She is the author of a new book called Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths Exaggerated Claims and Bad Advice (https://amzn.to/2wl2cvs). She joins me to discuss what health information is true and not true – and how dangerous it is not to know the difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know... What lipstick color do men find most attractive on women? That and other ways to increase your physical appeal. Plus, should you start your own business? There are a lot of things to consider. The job satisfaction people get from running their own businesses is about two and a half to three times as high as the satisfaction they get doing the same job working for somebody else. It makes people happy to run their own businesses.

Also, if, like me, you hate waiting in line, you'll want to hear what I have to tell you. And a look at the dangers of medical myths and misinformation. Most of the stuff that's being presented isn't necessarily harmful or dangerous, but oftentimes it's useless and a waste of money. And I think that people really get pulled into these health scams as substitutes for conventional medicine. All this today on 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.

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First up today, if you want to appear more attractive, here are some important things to consider from the world of science. Keep your chin up. Men who keep their chin up come off psychologically as more assertive and confident. If you're a woman, you should wear red lipstick. A study from Manchester University demonstrated that men stare at a woman's lips for seven seconds when she's wearing red lipstick, whereas they spent less than a second looking at her hair and eyes. Wear red clothes. Red is the most sexually powerful color. A woman who wears red will draw attention to herself because it is such a standout color and people will subconsciously be drawn to her. Get your adrenaline pumping. Do something daring or see a scary movie because adrenaline works as a natural aphrodisiac

and it may even help calm your nerves in some weird sort of way. Have white teeth. There's no question that a great smile is one of the keys to attractiveness. In fact, it's one of the first things people notice about each other, and in some cases can be a major turn-off, even when all the other elements of attraction are there. Ditch the beard. While some women may prefer a bearded man,

the majority of women do not, according to the Oxford Journal. And be part of a group. People are more likely to be perceived as attractive when they're part of a group. This is commonly known as the cheerleader effect. And that is something you should know. Who hasn't thought about starting their own business? I bet you have an idea or have had an idea for a business or a product or service, or you've thought about going freelance and working for yourself instead of working for someone else.

And today, if you want to drive for Uber or rent out a guest room in your house on Airbnb, that's a business. So should you start a business? Go out on your own? Well, if you ask me, I think anybody who has the entrepreneurial bug ought to at least explore it, because if you don't, you'll always wonder what if. But I'm a bit biased. I've had my own successful business for a long time,

several different ones, some of which were very successful and others that were not very successful. This podcast is an entrepreneurial venture I have with a partner and it's doing pretty well. I have another unrelated venture with my brother developing an idea in the golf equipment business, which we're kind of stuck right now. So if you're in the golf equipment business, I'd love to hear from you. But anyway, there are people who love being an entrepreneur, like me, and there are other people who say it's too risky.

Most new businesses fail. You're better off working for someone else. So rather than just talk about opinions, let's look at the facts of starting and running a new business. Scott Shane is a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western University, and he's authored a couple of books on entrepreneurship. His latest, which is just out, is called Is Entrepreneurship Dead? Hi, Scott, welcome. Well, thanks for having me. So what is the state of affairs of entrepreneurship today? I mean, maybe pick a fact or a data point that just paints a picture of where things are. The Internal Revenue Service data on the fraction of Americans' income that comes from different sources,

the fraction that comes from Americans' entrepreneurial activity, running a business of some kind, is up threefold since the early 1980s. That's impressive. It is absolutely impressive. It's that there's been a big shift in the way people make money in America towards making money by running your own kinds of companies versus taking a salary from somebody else or earning interest on a bank account. And there are specific examples of kinds of things that we see that are that. If you go back to the early 1980s,

it was kind of hard to make money running a vacation property that you rented out to other people. Now with HomeAway and Airbnb, people do that. That changes where their income is coming from because a bigger portion of their income is coming from being an entrepreneur than maybe the wage that they take from their day job. That is such a great example. I love that example because, and most people probably wouldn't consider renting out a room or renting out a vacation home as a business, but on your tax return, it's reported as business income. So it is a business. It really is a business. And you're so right that before those services were available, renting out a house or renting out a room in your house was really hard, and now it's just so easy.

And the other part is, well, a lot of people might think that the person who runs one of those on their own isn't really being an entrepreneur. It's like a gateway to being this activity. So a person rents a spare bedroom, right, in their house. And then they're like, wow, this is good. I'm good at this. This is successful. Let me get a whole house and rent it out. Let me get a second apartment to rent that out short term.

The next thing you know, they need to hire some people to clean them for them because it's too much work to do it themselves. They need to set up more complex administrative structures for the business and do all of that. And the next thing you know, they're a small-scale real estate operation that's going renting out short-term rentals. And you see this all the time when you see the statistics that some of these platforms like Homeway and Airbnb and so forth are producing about who is renting on their platform. But when people are talking about, gee, I think I want to start my own business, or I'm tired of working for the man, I want to be independent. In that conversation, there have always been things thrown around like, yeah, well, most new businesses fail, that chances are you won't make any more than you did at your old job,

but you've got all this responsibility. Are all those things, well, I don't know if they were ever true, but I suspect they were, and are they still true? Yeah, they're still true, right? That on average, people are not going to do fabulously well financially running their own business, right? On average, put it all together, people are pretty much where they would have been working for somebody else. So why do it? Well, there are two reasons to do it. One is, if you're good at it, you'll make more money. If you're bad at it, you'll make less money. If people have confidence in themselves and they know what they're doing, they will do

better, and so they'll select into doing that. The second thing is that people might want to do that. That is, if I could earn the same amount of money running my own business, but I'm happier running my own business, then I would rather make the same amount of money in a way that makes me happy than make the same amount of money in a way that makes me unhappy. And one of the statistics that we've had for many years across many, many surveys is that the job satisfaction people get from running

their own businesses is about two and a half to three times as high as the satisfaction they get doing the same job working for somebody else. It makes people happy to run their own businesses. I agree with that. I mean, that has probably been one of my primary motivations to being an entrepreneur is I'm much happier making decisions myself and living or dying by those decisions than working for somebody else. It just, that sense of control and being in charge of my own destiny just makes me happier. I think it's also this problem-solving piece of it.

It's that I would rather that I made a customer happy for myself than I made a customer happy for somebody else. Even if the amount of money I'm taking home is the same, so I'm no richer, I get a sense of accomplishment that I did it for myself. I'm speaking with Scott Shane. He is a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western University, and the name of his book is, Is Entrepreneurship Dead?

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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

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new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about Thank you. 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. So Scott, when people say they want to start a business, and they do, what are the mistakes they make? And are any of them new? Or are they the same old mistakes that entrepreneurs have been stumbling over forever? I think they're the same mistakes that people have been stumbling over forever. And I would put those into two categories. The first is that people make mistakes because they think they have an idea that's better than it really is.

That means they think it's unique and it really isn't. Other people are doing it. They've got a lot of competition. Or they think it's going to make more money. Its margins are going to be better. It's going to be more profitable than it actually turns out to be. So they start with an idea that isn't quite as good as they really thought, and that's a mistake. What they would have been better off probably doing is testing out some of those ideas ahead of time and not committing to the first one that comes to mind, but looking for the best one they can do.

The second thing is what I call unforced errors, that there are a lot of things that people do that simply are a set of problems that could have been avoided. They don't legally set up the business in the right way. They don't keep adequate records. They don't hire well. They don't pitch customers effectively. They do all these things that you could easily learn how to do, and they just don't do that. And it's an unforced error, because if there are ways to sell well, and you choose not to do that, if there are ways to set up a business well, and you don't do that, it's an unforced error. One of the things that I've noticed about entrepreneurs who stumble and perhaps fail is that they're very good at doing something. They're a very good writer. They're a very good whatever it is. But that

doesn't necessarily mean they'd be very good at running a business that provides that service, that they, in fact, are good at doing the job but not running the business. That's right. So if you think about this, think about a person who paints houses, right? I can work for somebody else painting houses for a living. I could start my own business painting houses. Now, I might be great at painting houses, right? And if I'm working for somebody else, man, my work is fantastic. I really paint those houses well.

And I'm a star employee and people want to hire me to do that. But I'm not so good at selling. I can't keep good financial records. I don't get invoices out on time. And I'm not good at those things. So I'm not good at the running a business thing. I'm good at the thing the business is doing. That's not enough to just be good at the thing that the business is doing.

You need to be good at running a company to be successful as an entrepreneur. It also seems, and I can think of an example in my own neighborhood of lack of promotion, lack of getting the word out, because there was a sandwich shop that opened up not far, I didn't even know about it, and then like the week before they closed

I actually went and got a sandwich. It wasn't bad, it was pretty good. But I'm four blocks away, I never even heard of it. And I'm thinking, how is that possible? If you want your business to perform, you would think the neighborhood would be a good place to promote it. You know, it takes money to advertise and promote a business. And so if you don't invest in that at all, you're not going to get the benefits of that advertising and promotion. People think, oh, well, I can't afford to do it.

Sometimes that's a faulty logic, because you can't afford not to market and promote your business. Well, I know one of the mistakes that I've made, and I know other entrepreneurs have made this mistake, too, that we like to think that our idea is so spectacular that the world will beat a path to our door, that this is the greatest thing in the world and everyone will come running. One of the things about entrepreneurship that for years and years of research we've really kind of figured out and understood is that entrepreneurs have to be over-optimistic,

and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing about being over-optimistic is if you didn't think you were better than other people, you wouldn't start a business from scratch to compete with somebody who's an incumbent who's already in place, right? It doesn't make sense to do that unless you really believe somehow that you're better. The problem with that and the Achilles heel in thinking that you're better and being over-optimistic about your chances is that it sometimes leads you to make choices to think, oh, my product's so great it will sell itself.

Oh, I'm so good I don't need sales training. Oh, I can just, you know, do the books in an hour, once a month, no problem, right? And you get this overconfidence, this over-optimism about what you're doing turns out to be simultaneously the motivator to do it and causes you harm by making you underestimate what you need to do. Has anyone looked at whether or not people who start a business on their own versus with somebody else, with help, whether it's a partner or they hire the right help or whatever, that you're more likely to succeed or not succeed if you don't try to go it alone and do everything yourself.

Yeah, there's a lot of evidence that doing it in a team up to about four or so people is a much better avenue. Now, there's probably three reasons for that. The first is the amount of work it takes becomes overwhelming and you can't do everything at once and if you have a team you can spread the work across the team. The second thing is that it's easier to avoid the over-optimism when you have somebody else who might challenge your statement on something. Everybody on the team might be over-optimistic, but they're not going to all be that way about the same things at the same time.

So it's kind of a check on what needs to be done. The third thing is that better businesses tend to be more complicated to put in place. That is that if I want to come up with something that's really going to have a competitive advantage, it's got to be something that's hard to do. If everybody can just copy it and do it, I'm not going to have a competitive advantage. Those things take more effort and are hard to do alone. So what happens is people actually pick better businesses when they have a team than when they're going out on their own. Lastly, when you read about entrepreneurship or you get interested in it, one of the things you hear about are venture capitalists and angel investors and raising lots of money and all that, but

isn't it true that that's a very small percentage of new businesses that start with that kind of money? Most of them are much more bootstrappy, yes? Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest source of money for businesses to get started are the savings of the founders themselves by a huge order of magnitude. So probably about 60% to 70% of the financing of all businesses comes just from the founders themselves, from their own savings.

Now what's interesting is that after that, the next most common source is actually banks lending money. And it's very rare. It is a very small amount of the total where the businesses are getting funded by some kind of external equity investment, like a venture capitalist or a business angel. It gets a lot of attention because the size that those companies can grow to and the frequency with which some of them will grow large is so high that it captures the media attention. But what really, if you wanted to just say, I'm going to find 10 entrepreneurs and you want me to kind of identify how did they finance their business, my best bet is to tell you they used their own savings,

and I'll be right most of the time. What's the future look like? How does the environment look today for entrepreneurs versus in the past? Is it roses and sunshine, or is it doom and gloom, or what? It is not doom and gloom. It is that we are getting more entrepreneurial activity. What seems to have been the big change in the economy is that entrepreneurs are less likely to employ other people than they used to. That's a big change. That may not necessarily be a bad thing,

because if what entrepreneurs are doing is making money by having contract workers or doing things themselves, taking advantage of technology, but they are making more money and are more likely to engage in this activity, so it's good that they're doing it without employees, right, or doing it with employees less often. Well, as I said in the beginning, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, have been for a long, long time. I love listening to stories of entrepreneurs. There's something about an entrepreneur or would-be entrepreneur with an idea and to hear them tell their story that they're so excited about. Those are my favorite conversations. And it idea and to hear them tell their story that they're so excited about.

Those are my favorite conversations. And it's good to hear that the future is bright and entrepreneurship is alive and well. Scott Shane has been my guest. He's a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western University. And he's the author of a couple of books on entrepreneurship that I recommend. His latest, which is just out, is Is Entrepreneurship Dead? And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Scott. All right, sure, no problem. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. If you don't know much about life insurance or you don't have it,

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There is a lot of health information available today, and that's great, but frankly, a lot of it is baloney. It's fake health. This is a subject I know something about, and the theory is basically this. If somebody makes a claim about something, for example, take this supplement and it will cure your cancer, or eat this diet and it will cure every disease known to man, well, there needs to be some pretty strong evidence that that is true.

But so often there isn't. The support or the argument for this is either just made up or often it's anecdotal. Somebody claims they took something and it cured their cancer or it helped them lose weight or it made their skin softer or whatever. But that's not evidence. It's just a story that may or may not be true. I've been interested in this topic for a long time, how people make health claims they can't support with real evidence, so they just make it up. And what's really interesting is a lot of these claims have become conventional wisdom. I know a lot of people who will load up on vitamin C when they get a cold, but the evidence just isn't there.

Anyway, Dr. Nina Shapiro is here. She is an MD and a professor of head and neck surgery at UCLA, and she's author of a book called Hype, a doctor's guide to medical myths, exaggerated claims, and bad advice. Hi, doctor. Thanks for coming on. Hi, Mike. Thanks for coming on. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So why tackle the subject of health fraud the way you have here? What are your reasons? One is obviously because I am a doctor and I take care of patients,

and patients always have great questions and great stories that they bring to me. And some of these questions have raised questions for me where, you know, where are they getting this information? How are they getting this information? You know, we are exposed to so much health, whether it's nonsense or not. So I felt that it was really important to really set the record straight and get some information out to people so they can have more power as to how they really understand how to make health decisions for themselves. Do you think, is it your experience, that much of this phony health stuff that's out there

is deliberate and people trying to scam people, or is it just misinformation? What's your sense of the nature of it, generally? Well, the nature of it is, you know, one of the reasons why I call the book hype is that what hype is, is an exaggeration. It's not necessarily false, but there's some extreme information that's being provided. I think many people who do provide this information do believe their own hokum, as I call it, and it's not necessarily out to get people or out to harm people. I think people really do believe what they're trying to express or trying to sell. The concern is that because it's presented in such an extreme fashion that people really buy into this nonsense.

And again, most of the stuff that's being presented isn't necessarily harmful or dangerous, but oftentimes it's useless and a waste of money and a waste of time. And I think that people really get pulled into these health scams as substitutes for conventional medicine. I believe, and you can disagree with me if you like, but I believe members of your profession are part of this problem because there is so much contradictory information when it comes to what works and what doesn't work, what's good for you, what's not good for you. There's flip-flopping on things all the time. And I think people throw their hands up.

And if we're supposed to believe one day coffee is good for you and the next day coffee is bad for you, well, maybe we ought to believe this other guy because he says coffee will cure cancer. Well, you know, that's a very interesting point. I think that doctors are always looking for something new. And, you know, for instance, the cardiologist just recently flip-flopped on the recommendations about coconut oil being good for you or bad for you. So, you know, there is flip-flopping in medicine. And if it's presented

appropriately, then people can understand that medicine does evolve. And what we thought 10 years ago is different in some areas from what we think today. And it's going to change again 10 years from now, just because we keep studying things. I think the way, the concern is that when things are presented, for instance, in a headline, things are so dramatically exaggerated that people feel like all of a sudden they need to change their health habits or be worried about something that they weren't worried about two days prior. You know, for instance, CT scans cause cancer or, you know, vitamin C is going to cure colds. You know, these extreme recommendations or presentations are very misleading.

Well, and the vitamin C thing is a perfect example. I know a lot of people who take vitamin C when they catch a cold and who swear that it does something for their cold. It improves their symptoms or whatever it is they do. They swear it works, and I imagine that an awful lot of vitamin C gets sold for that reason. It is the most common supplement sold. Yeah, and there is no evidence that it does anything. Zero. Zero evidence. And there we have a perfect example of placebo effect, and a perfect example of something that is harmless, even if it's taken in high dose, it's for the most part harmless.

It's useless and it's expensive. But if you think that your cold is either going to be prevented or curtailed by taking vitamin C, it may because the placebo effect is so strong. And again, there's no reason to necessarily stop it, even if you know that it's a placebo effect, some people feel that it helps them. But, you know, again, it's a complete waste of time and money. So after vitamin C, then came zinc and all these other, you know, echinacea and all these other things that, hey, this is going to cut your cold in half. What's the evidence for those things? Nothing. There's no evidence. And it's the same effect. It's the placebo effect. And, you know, the only concern is that some of them have demonstrated some evidence of harm.

For instance, zinc, you know, the zinc supplements from about 10 years ago started to cause permanent anosmia, meaning loss of sense of smell. And this is where people get into that pseudo health, oh, well, it's holistic or homeopathic or whatever term you want to use or natural, but that doesn't necessarily equal safe or helpful or harmless. So, you know, some of these supplements that are over-the-counter, which have no FDA regulation, can actually do some damage. Most of them are useless, but some of them can actually do some harm.

What of the, if there are any, of the claims that people make out there does have merit? Anything that comes to mind that, you know, there actually is something here, but you might think this was baloney but there actually is something? I think that many of the complementary medical practices for instance meditation, mindfulness, relaxation, even acupuncture or massage therapy can have benefit when you and real benefit when used in addition to conventional therapy. So for instance if you have cancer when you, and real benefit, when used in addition to conventional therapy. So, for instance, if you have cancer and you're undergoing chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and you use these additional methods that are complementary, there is evidence that your outcomes will be better. So we can't just discount alternative therapy and say that it's useless.

But when it's used in addition to conventional therapy, there is an actual benefit to outcomes. One of the criticisms of doctors and practitioners of conventional medicine is that whenever these new ideas about health and nutrition come out, that you're very negative about them. Oh, there's no evidence. This stuff doesn't work. It's never been proven. And sometimes it does turn out to be true, and sometimes, many times, it does not turn out to be true,

but that you're all very negative. There's no, like, here's what you should do. It's just don't do that. So what should people do to stay healthy? I think we need to go back a little bit to eating food, chewing food. You get fiber with that. Most of the benefit of fruits and vegetables is from the fiber, a little bit from the vitamins. But just really going back to basic food, and don't worry too much about organic, inorganic, farm-raised.

You know, really just eat some healthy food, be balanced, and you'll be getting enough vitamins, you'll be getting enough fiber. I think people are really digging in a little too deep in trying to figure out what's the right, what's the secret answer to the best diet and what type of diet and how many milligrams of each vitamin they need. I think it's just we have to step back a little bit and just eat a well-balanced diet. I can imagine people listening to you say that. In fact, I can predict the emails I will get, because I know I will, from people who are very into their form of what is good nutrition. And they're thinking, wait a minute, she's an MD, doctors get maybe an afternoon's worth of nutrition training in medical school, doctors are all about treating

disease, they're not about prevention and good health, and that you don't know what you're talking about. You know, I think that if you want to choose a certain diet, for instance, vegan or paleo or low-carb or high-carb, you know, that's fine too. It doesn't mean that you necessarily have a better background in nutrition or that doctors don't really know about nutrition. I think that nutrition is pretty basic. We have a gastrointestinal tract that digests and some of the food is absorbed and some goes through as waste. And I think that people often think that if you eat certain foods or certain supplements or, you know, vitamins or vitamin-containing foods, that it all goes to the right place. But I think what people are missing is that most of it just goes to waste, literally. So, you know, again, you know, certainly if you have reasons, whether it's religious or environmental, not to eat meat, you know,

I absolutely think that that's great. But the supplement idea and the processing, and people think of, you know, we think of processed foods, we think of packaged foods. But when you are creating a juice product or, you know, blending something, you're actually processing food that your stomach should be doing. You have a digestive tract to make it into a juice. You have teeth to bring it down. So, you know, I think my concern is that people are blending things too much

and then adding these powders and supplements, and it's really just a complete waste when you can just eat some food. What's interesting to me is that in our culture, if you need legal advice, you want a really good lawyer. If you're going to build a house, you want to get a really good builder. If you're going to buy a car, you want a car built by people who know how to build cars. But for health advice, people listen to anybody. Anybody can claim to be a health expert, and people will believe them. If you're a movie star, you are giving health advice.

Or a retired athlete, and granted, athletes know a little bit more about health than movie stars, but they have no medical or health or science background. But they're movie stars. We have to listen to our movie stars. You know, look how pretty they are. Well, exactly. I mean, they're not asking doctors for fashion advice. Well, thank God for that. Thank goodness for that. But by the same token, we shouldn't be asking

movie stars about information about vaccines. You know, if somebody has a platform, they feel that they, you know, if they are expert in one area, for instance, acting and performing, they feel that they have license to use their platform to talk about anything, including health and medicine, which is, you know, very enticing, especially if, you know, you look at this person and you say, wow, look how beautiful and healthy they look. I want to look like that. I'll listen to their advice. They sound really knowledgeable and they're well-spoken. But don't you think, because I believe there is something to the notion that if you really want good nutrition advice, that maybe your general practitioner is not the best person, but maybe a registered dietitian or somebody who's a little more into that. Because as a doctor, you've got to cover a lot of bases and your focus is more on, you know, sick people and that kind of thing.

And you may not be up on the latest stuff, and a dietician might have some better advice. Absolutely. I think a dietician is a great resource for, you know, for diet and to make sure that you're getting a balanced diet. And, you know, especially if you have any sort of propensity to a diet-related illness, such as diabetes or obesity or hypertension, I think it is really important to have a registered dietitian or nutritionist involved in your choices, you know, certainly better than an advertisement or a movie star or the latest and greatest diet that you've heard about.

I think they are excellent. And yes, they do know much more about nutrition and vitamins and protein and a balanced diet than many physicians do. A couple of quick more questions, because it's become very popular, and I've done it too, these genetic tests where you spit in a tube and they send it away and you get back all this stuff. What's your feeling on that? So, you know, I think that as a population, this widespread genetic testing is very interesting. And there is, you know, just so we understand this, for the majority of them, your data is becoming part of a large database.

It is not really private. But that will be beneficial because we will be able to understand, you know, the genetic nature of some of the much more common diseases, especially Alzheimer's and breast cancer. But, you know, genetic testing is a very slippery slope when there's no genetic counseling included with that. People often think, oh, well, I carry this gene, so I should have intervention because I may get this X, Y, or Z disorder.

Or, you know, conversely, I don't carry a certain gene, so I have no risk of X, Y, or Z disorder, and neither are the case. And I think that, you know, for instance, when we check children for hearing loss, we have a gene that can test for that, but we still include genetic counseling so the family understands the implications. I think the concern about these home genetic tests is that people really are not provided with the implications of the results and what to do with that information. There is so much of this. I mean, you wrote a whole book about it. There's a lot of health fraud out there, a lot of misinformation. But of all of them, what are your favorite scams? What are the things that really drive you nuts? I think some of the antioxidant shakes where that's going to treat or prevent cancer drives me crazy

because I think that people really misunderstand what that means. I think the vaccine issue where people think that vaccines are harmful and that they need to create their own quote-unquote gentle schedule. There is no such thing as a gentle schedule for vaccine. That's complete nonsense, And it drives me crazy. I think that people certainly, you know, in many populations have never heard of or seen the diseases that these vaccines are preventing. And they're more afraid of the vaccines than they're afraid of these diseases. Until these diseases start cropping up more, I think people are going to

have this false notion that the vaccines are dangerous and they need to create their own schedule. And that's complete hooey. Well, I know that after people hear this, I'm going to get emails from people saying that, you know, you're an idiot. You don't know what you're talking about. That a gluten-free diet saved my life. You know, it's going to be, because this information is really entrenched with a lot of people, and you've got a tough war to fight here.

I know, I do, and I hear it every day. And again, for most of this stuff, you know what, if you feel better not eating gluten, don't eat gluten. That's fine. If you feel that something makes you feel better, then it probably, then it's fine to continue that. If you feel that you feel better without gluten, then don't eat gluten. But you have to understand that you don't have celiac disease or you don't have a real

gluten allergy. You know, if you feel better, if you feel that you stop getting colds when you don't have dairy, then don't have dairy. So a lot of it is very personal, and every body is different, but you have to understand that for the most part, there's really no science behind it. That's Dr. Nina Shapiro. She is an M.D. and professor of head and neck surgery at UCLA, and her book is Hype, A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Thanks, Nina. Appreciate it. Thank you. Good to talk to you. Take care. I hate waiting in line. I particularly hate waiting in line when the people who run the

business where I am waiting in line don't seem to care that I'm waiting in line. And I imagine pretty much no one likes to wait in line, but according to research, it's not the waiting so much as feeling as if you're being treated fairly. Because when you feel that other people are getting preferential treatment or that your line isn't moving very fast, that's when people get upset. There's a whole science to this waiting in line thing.

In fact, there are some terms used to discuss it. Jockeying is the act of switching from one parallel line to another, like in the supermarket, because you think your line's not moving fast enough. Faffing. Faffing is the time delay when a person gathers their things after paying at the checkout and finally gets out of the way so the next person can come up. That's faffing. Renegging is when a customer actually leaves a line because he or she has spent too much time waiting and they don't want to wait anymore. Now here are some basics for anyone who runs a business where you make people wait in line. People don't like parallel lines, like in the supermarket, because they're always certain

that the other line is moving faster. People prefer lines like in a bank or in a hotel lobby where it's one line and you go to the next available person. They can't do that in a supermarket because there's no place to put one big long line of people with shopping carts. Distractions are good. If you have TVs or something to distract people while they're in line, it shortens their perception of time. You ought to consider putting in a sign that shows how long the wait is, because without signs displaying a wait time, people overestimate how long they wait by 23%. When a person sees a lot of people in line behind them, they are less likely to jump

out of that line, even if they think the line is moving too slow. People in lines that are surrounded by the scent of lavender tend to get less annoyed than people in lines that are not surrounded by lavender. And serpentine lines, like the ones in a bank or in a hotel lobby like I mentioned before, they may look longer, but people actually feel they are more fair and are more willing to wait in those lines even if they are longer. And that is something you should know. That's it for this episode.

In case you didn't know, we publish two episodes a week. We publish on Mondays and Thursdays. It's actually at 12.04 a.m. on Monday morning at 12.04 a.m. on Monday morning and 12.04 a.m. on Thursday morning. And so look for the next episode on Thursday. I'm Micah Ruthers. 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 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 Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.