Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How Your Brain Changes Who You Are & The Science Behind Beverages

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

Decent sunglasses are a must. Otherwise, you are asking for trouble. If you doubt that, just ask any eye doctor. We know that ultraviolet light is bad for your eyes – and sunglasses can be a big help but you have to get the right kind of sunglasses. This episode begins with a description of what makes for a decent pair. https://www.aao.org/eye-health/news/how-to-choose-best-sunglasses You are the person you have always been - right? Actually that’s only partly true. It may seem like you are the same person you were 5 or 10 years ago – but you really very different now. That’s according to David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who teaches at Stanford and is author of the book Livewired (https://amzn.to/2PH6eIX). David joins me to explain the things that make you who you are and how those things continually change. People talk a lot about the importance of eating the right food but what about drinking the right drinks? After all, drinks can have a big impact on health and well-being. The sugar in soda and juice, the alcohol in cocktails or the caffeine in coffee – they all impact your life. Alexis Willett, author of the book Drinkology: The Science of What We Drink and What It Does to Us, from Milks to Martinis (https://amzn.to/3gPZ7ck) has researched many of the common beverages we consume. She joins me to discuss some fascinating findings you really need to hear. How much money you spend in a restaurant can depend in part on the menu. Menus are often engineered to encourage you to spend more. Listen as I explain some of the things to watch out for. https://www.pmq.com/menus-that-sell/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Alma helps therapists work with major insurance companies to make therapy more accessible & affordable. Over 96% of therapists at Alma take insurance, so people can find in-network care & save an average of 77% on the cost of therapy! Alma has a diverse network of therapists to fit your unique needs in the easy-to-use directory, you can filter for gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. It’s easy to get started, so find a therapist with Alma today at https://helloalma.com Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, you should be wearing sunglasses, and they have to be the right kind. I'll explain that. Then, you think you're the same person you've always been, but you're very different and constantly changing. Actually, if your seven-year-old self walked into the room right now, you would have a lot more in common with a colleague of yours than you would with your seven-year-old self.

At the end of this podcast, you will be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning of the podcast. Also, how menus at restaurants can get you to spend more money if you're not careful. And all the drinks you drink have an effect on you. Some bad, some good, like coffee. There are plenty of compounds in coffee that may prove to be beneficial. One area where the evidence is really quite strong is around coffee reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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. 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, welcome. Another interesting episode of Something You Should Know is about to unfold. And I want to start today by talking about sunglasses.

Because now we're spending more and more time outdoors, the weather's warming up, the hot sun is shining in your eyes, and sunglasses are really, really important. And the most important thing when it comes to sunglasses is UV protection. Look for a tag or sticker that says that those sunglasses block 100% of UV rays. UV, or ultraviolet light, damages the cornea and the retina, and good sunglasses can eliminate UV rays completely. But if there isn't a tag that says so,

you're probably not getting that protection. And bigger is better. The more coverage from sunglasses, the less sun can get in and the less damage is inflicted on your eyes. But darker lenses don't protect you any better. Very dark lenses may look cool, but they don't block more UV rays. And color doesn't matter either.

Some sunglasses come with amber or green or gray lenses, but they don't block more or less sun. But they can increase contrast, which can be useful for athletes, for example, who are playing sports like golf or baseball. Polarized lenses are great in the sense that they cut glare off of pavement and water, but they don't improve the UV protection. And cost is not necessarily a factor. Sunglasses don't have to cost a lot of money to work well. Less expensive pairs marked as 100% UV blocking can be just as effective as pricier options. But you've got to find that sticker or tag that says 100% UV protection. Otherwise, you're probably not getting it. And that is something you should know.

There is this sense we all have, in fact it's really an illusion, that we are the same person as we were one or two or ten years ago. The fact is we are constantly changing, and we're changing so much that we really are much different than we were a while ago. Still, this sense that we remain the same persists. So let's take a look at why this really is an illusion in many ways, and how these changes make us so different. Here to discuss this is David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford, creator of the Emmy-nominated TV series on PBS called The Brain, and author of the book Live Wired. Hey, David. Great, thanks. Good to be here.

So why is this important, do you think? Why are we looking at how it is we change over time? You know, to me, this is the most gorgeous idea in biology is the way that our brains are constantly changing. So, you know, our brains are enormously complex. It totally bankrupts our language to even talk about this. We have 86 billion neurons. These are the cell types in the brain.

And you have about 200 trillion connections between these. So there's no way to even think about systems this large. But the key thing is that every second of your life, this is changing. Everything that you learn, everything you do, this is a system that is alive. So I call this live wired. The technical term is brain plasticity. But the reason I don't love that term anymore is because I think plasticity is too weak a term for what's really going on. It was introduced 100 years ago because plastic is the material we can mold into shape and it holds that shape. And so people were impressed that you can learn my name is David and then your brain holds on to that. But what's happening is actually much more complex than that. So this has been, you know, I've been in neuroscience a long time now. And this has been my book that I've been writing for 10 years to summarize the amazing nature of our lives and our brains and how we change all the time and how at the end of this podcast, you'll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning of the podcast. All this change and this idea that I'll be slightly

different at the end of this, it doesn't feel that way. That's not my experience. It's your explanation. And I get it that you're a scientist, but I don't feel like I'm changing. Yeah, absolutely. We have this illusion of consistency and it's because somehow, you know, we have the same name and you live in the same address and you have your life story that you tell to people. And so we think we're the same people, but actually if your seven-year-old self walked into the room right now, you would have a lot more in common with a colleague of yours than you would with your seven-year-old self. But because of this illusion that we don't change, we don't recognize it. It's like if you watch an hour hand of a clock, you don't see the change. And yet, half an hour later, it's in a completely

different place. And so what? I mean, that's really interesting. But so now put that into like real life for me. Well, there's many ways where this cashes out. So one place is, you know, I've spun off a company from my lab because what I realized is that given these principles of brain plasticity, we can actually build things that are the next generation of technology. So right now, so I live in Silicon Valley and everything here is about software and hardware. But when we take seriously this idea about the brain and live where we can build all kinds of new things. So in my lab, we built a vest covered in vibratory motors. And for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, we can capture sound and turn sound into patterns of vibration on the skin, different

spatial locations on the skin. And people can come to understand the auditory world this way, fed in through their skin rather than through their ears. And this is because the brain doesn't know where the information comes from. All it cares about is, oh, I'm getting a data stream along some cable and I can make correlations with it. I can look at what's happening in the world. I can look at the dog's mouth moving and I can feel a barking. It doesn't matter how it gets there. The key thing is that the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the skull. And all it ever sees are these electrical spikes and it can put things together. And so what we have been doing is building devices, building wearable devices by which you can feed in different kinds of information. So we've revolutionized what's happening with deafness.

We're doing this now with balance, with prosthetic legs, with blindness, by feeding information in through other senses. In this case, you know, through the skin, expanding the realm of perception of humans now. So you say that as far as the brain is concerned, something like drug withdrawal is very similar to the feelings of a broken heart. So explain that and explain why it's important that we talk about that. What happens is the brain is always adjusting to what it expects. Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine. It's trying to adjust itself to make good predictions of what's going to happen in the world. So when people are addicted to a particular kind of drug, or I should say, when they take a drug regularly, what happens is the receptors in their brain actually change to expect that drug.

This is why people can use a small dose at first and they need larger and larger doses because their brain is adjusting to expecting the presence of that drug in the world. And this is the basis of the withdrawal effects, of course. When the drug is suddenly no longer there, then their brain needs that because it has all this expectation that it will be there in the world. This is actually exactly the same thing that happens with people that we love. You build up so much circuitry in your brain expecting the presence of that person, expecting that person to be there.

And when somebody leaves you or dies, it's exactly like a drug withdrawal effect. Your brain has the expectation that the person will be there and then that's suddenly taken away from it. So what else, what is some of the other things that the brain does to kind of help us navigate through the day in our lives that maybe we don't even realize it's doing? Almost everything. So almost everything that you do and how you act and how you decide and what you believe in and so on, these are all generated by parts of your brain that you have no access to and no awareness of. This is what we summarize as the unconscious brain. So the conscious part of you, which is the part that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning, that's actually the smallest bit of what's happening

in your brain. That's the broom closet in the mansion of the brain. And this is a very interesting thing to come to understand as we think about who we are and why we believe the things we believe and so on, it's that we don't even have access to most of this. For example, you're more likely to marry somebody whose first name begins with the same letter as your first name. So Joe and Jenny or Alex and Amy or Donald and Daisy. It's statistically true. And if you ask any of these Joe and Jennys why they married this other person, they'll have a whole conscious narrative to tell you. But there's this unconscious drive for things. This happens to be called implicit egotism. We like things that remind us of ourselves. And so it turns out that the person

we marry, the kind of job that we take, there's data that people who are named Dennis or Denise are more likely to become dentists, for example, for the same reason. Or the kind of things that we believe in any moment. These are all generated by parts of your brain that you have no conscious access to. Just as an example, if you're holding a warm cup of coffee, you'll describe your relationship with your mother as closer than if you're holding an iced coffee. Something as fundamental as your relationship with your mother is influenced by what you happen to be holding and the signals of warmth that are coming up your arm. And so, yeah, as I said, who we are and what we're made of. I think we're in this golden era of studying the brain now and trying to get a deeper understanding of that rather than believing,

okay, well, this is just, you know, everything I believe is just true. And, and other people who have different opinions are, you know, either obstructive or insane or whatever. It gives us an opportunity to try to understand why we believe the things we believe. What does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the earth? So here's the thing. The brain doesn't want any part of its territory to go unused. So for example, if somebody is born blind, that area gets taken over by hearing and by touch. The part we would have called the visual part of the brain gets taken over. So it turns out that you don't have to be born blind. If you go blind later, that same thing happens. But what was recently discovered

is that if you're blindfolded and then put in a brain scanner, within about an hour, hearing and touch start invading the visual system. And so what my student and I realized is that when the planet rotates into darkness, vision is the only thing that's disadvantaged. You can still hear and taste and touch in the dark just fine. But historically, evolutionarily, you know, your visual system was no longer working. And so what we realized was the system needed a way to defend itself against takeover. And that is what dreams are about. Very briefly, you know, if you look at the circuitry underlying dreaming, it's very specific circuitry that just slams activity into the visual part of the brain every 90 minutes. And it appears to just be there to keep it going, to keep it alive,

to keep it defended against its neighbors. So this is now called the defensive activation theory. And this appears to be what dreaming is about. Isn't that interesting. and when you describe it it makes perfect sense because i've always wondered about you know i think people give a lot more importance to dreams than maybe they ought to that that really it probably had some other function other than to you know predict the future or help you solve your problems it has to be something else and your explanation sounds right on the money. Yeah. And one of the things we did, thank you, is we studied 25 different species of primates. And we compared these. It turns out that there's different amounts of plasticity. So we,

Homo sapiens, have an enormous amount of plasticity in our brains, meaning our brains are very flexible. They're adjusting all the time. But all the way down to, you know, primate species that aren't particularly flexible. And so we measured how plastic or flexible their brains are. And then we compared that to how much dream sleep they get every night. And it lines up perfectly, which is to say the more flexible your brain is, the more dream sleep is required to keep your visual system defended. As opposed to if you're a gray mouse lemur, which has a pretty locked down visual system, you just don't need that much streaming because rotating into the dark doesn't put you at that much risk

of getting it taken over. We're talking about, well, we're talking about a couple of things. We're talking about who you are, who you think you are, who you really are, and a few other things along those lines. And David Eagleman is my guest.

He is a neuroscientist. He teaches at Stanford, and he is author of the book Live Wired. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome?

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Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. So, David, knowing what you know, are there things we can do to make our brains better? Or this is just interesting stuff that's going on, and as you say, we have no access to it, so, you know, it's interesting to look at, but there it is. Oh, no say, we have no access to it. So, you know, it's interesting to look at, but there it is. Oh, no, there's plenty of stuff to make our brains better. I mean, the main thing, the main lesson, I would say that emerges in neuroscience is the importance of always seeking novelty and seeking challenge. And this becomes especially important, actually, as people, you know, get near retirement age. You know, if people have

parents or grandparents at that age, anything like that, the most important thing for them to do is stay active. What happens often is that people, they retire and their lives shrink and they end up sitting on the couch and watching television. And that's the absolute worst thing you can do for the brain because it is a system that's always trying to readjust itself. And it only does so when it's challenged. And so the important thing is to seek things that are in between frustrating but achievable. And if you know anybody who's retired, get them to do things that are challenging. And if they want to do crossword puzzles or something, that's fine.

But as soon as they get good at it, they should throw that out and take on something new that they're not good at. And, you know, one of the most challenging things to brains generally is other people, is social life. So that's one of the really key things to do. Talk a bit about how neuroscience works within the world of politics. So we have a very strong drive for us versus them. And we've done experiments in my lab where we put people into the scanner and we show them, for example, six different hands on the screen, and then the computer randomly picks one of the hands, and you see it get stabbed with a syringe needle. And that activates parts of your brain

that are involved in empathy. In other words, you're essentially simulating the pain, even though it's not your hand, you're just watching someone else's hand, that's the neural basis of empathy. What we do then is we label each hand with a one-word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Scientologist, Hindu. And then the computer goes around and picks a hand. You see the hand gets stabbed. And the question is, does your brain care as much if it's a member of your out-group than if it's a member of your in-group?

And that is indeed what happens. Your brain simply doesn't care as much if it's a member of your out group. What we then did is we gave people a single sentence where we said, the year is now 2025, and these three religions have teamed up against these three. And it's arbitrarily chosen. But the point is that now the two teams that are your ally, sorry, the two religions that have now become your allies, you suddenly care more about them when they get stabbed than you did just a minute ago. And then we did a third study where we brought people into the lab and we said, hey, toss this coin. If it's heads, you're a Justinian. If it's tails, you're an Augustinian. And they tossed the coin. Of course, these are totally arbitrary, made-up words.

And they find themselves on one team or the other. Then they get in the scanner, and they watch hands get stabbed that are either Justinian or Augustinian. And it turns out whatever team you just arbitrarily got assigned to, you care more about that team than you care about the others. So this isn't an indictment about religion. And in fact, just as a side note, the atheists showed this effect just as large, which is that they care about other atheists getting stabbed, but they don't care as much about other religious groups getting stabbed. So it's not even about religion.

It's just about basic us versus them stuff. One of the things that's always fascinated me about the human brain is how it adjusts. I mean, we as humans, we travel around, we go to different places, we find ourselves in different situations, engaging in different kinds of activities. And the brain is always adjusting to those things, allowing us to do these things and in some ways protecting us. I mean, one of the really cool things also is that your brain is always adjusting to drive your body. And one of the things I've been fascinated by is the way that when you drive a bicycle or a skateboard or a pogo stick or anything like that, your brain is actually adjusting itself to drive that. And what this means is that we could take on very different kinds of bodies. And we see this

when somebody loses an arm. And what we're seeing now is when somebody takes this on in terms of being able to control, for example, a robotic arm with their brain, it's that your body is not sort of genetically pre-specified in terms of your brain driving it. It's that your body can be anything and your brain can figure out how to use it. Yeah, that's really amazing when you think about it. And I know you've been looking at the brain and the legal system. And so talk about that. The way we do it now is we treat incarceration

as a one-size-fits-all solution. But in truth, there are many more sophisticated things we could be doing in terms of routing people through the legal system so that they actually get help in rehabilitation so that it doesn't become a revolving door. And this doesn't let anybody off the hook, but by understanding better what the differences are

between people's brains, we can actually help people. So, for example, with things like drug addiction, we know a lot about the brain at this point and how we can help people. And when it comes to things like mental illnesses, we know a lot about this and how we can help people. So there's no point in throwing everybody into prison and assuming that is the right solution. Well, you know, what you said at the very beginning of our conversation, that you have more in common with a colleague of yours today than you would if seven-year-old you walked in the door, is so interesting because of that continuity that we have, that we think we're who we are, we think we are who we used to be, and that very little affects who we are. And you've really basically blown the lid off of that. David Eagleman has been my guest. He's a neuroscientist

who teaches at Stanford, and the name of his book is Live Wired. And there is a link to that book at Amazon if you'd like to get it in the show notes for this episode. Thanks, David. Great. Thanks. Talk soon. 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,

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It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. It's probably safe to say that we are a diet-obsessed culture. We spend a lot of time worrying about what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, the health consequences if we shouldn't eat, the health consequences if we don't eat right. Interestingly, though, we don't talk so much or worry so much about what we drink. Or people lump beverages into the topic of diet.

But really, what you drink is a completely different subject and an important one, and one that has been researched by Alexis Willett. She's a science communicator who has a PhD in biomedical science from the University of Cambridge, and she's author of the book, Drinkology, the science of what we drink and what it does to us, from milks to martinis. Hi, Alexis. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So it is interesting that when we talk about food and what we consume, we often leave out beverages, what we drink. But when you think about it, beverages affect our mental health, as in the case of alcohol, our physical health, in the case of soda with all the sugar it has. I mean, this really

is an important topic. Well, I think you've really hit the nail on the head just straight away there. I was really thinking about how, I think it was in a conversation with friends and people were talking about sugars and fats and just different aspects of their diet. And it really occurred to me that actually, what do we really know about what we're drinking? And we often hear a lot of marketing hype and claims about a lot of things we drink. And some of these things sort of ingrained in us that, you know, we believe about certain types of drinks and maybe whether they're good or not for our health. And I thought, actually, maybe it was some time, it was really time for somebody to look

into that and have a look at the hard science and see what that really shows us. One of the things that I've always heard is that, you know, you're supposed to drink plenty of water every day that your body needs to be hydrated and that your body will pull the water, use the water from whatever drink you have that has water in it, like coffee or tea or soda. Is that true? That is is true i think sometimes we think of there's only certain drinks we should drink to get that water and water itself being the best which of course it is the best but actually the majority of drinks your body will take the water it needs to hydrate and what you're looking for is what we call a net gain. So an overall gain of water from those drinks. And there's only a few that would actually reduce that. So probably alcoholic drinks is going to be the most obvious

because actually they make you need to pee out water more often. So actually you would lose water in those cases. But even a low, kind of quite a low alcohol beer would probably result in a net gain of water. So whilst that's not ideal for hydration, you know, overall, you know, you're probably getting most of the water you need from the drinks you have every day. Is there anything better than water for hydration? Yeah, that's something I was really thinking about, you know, what could be better than water? And actually looking at all these drinks and wellness drinks and all the claims we hear about different types of drinks, it still comes

down to water being the best. And ultimately, that's what our body needs. But of course, there are some beneficial compounds in some other types of drinks that might be doing some additional benefit. But for hydration, I think you can't really beat water. Soda has been pretty much demonized as being unhealthy, especially, you know, full sugar soda. What do you say? I would probably have to agree with that, because what you're really getting is a lot of sugar. And then you may have other ingredients in those drinks, which are, they're not ideal to say the least. So maybe some artificial colors or other kind of additives that maybe we don't want in our bodies. I mean, I think you have to sort of take it in context.

If you're just having some of these drinks, not, you know, not every single day and not many times a day. They're probably okay. But what we do know is sodas, particularly full sugar versions, are actually one of the greatest sources of added sugar in the diet. And so they're producing a whole lot of kind of empty calories and an awful lot of sugar that we just don't need. And given the problems with type 2 diabetes on the rise, obesity, these really are seen as significant problems. And to which people will sometimes say when they hear that argument, well, I drink diet soda. So the interesting thing about diet sodas and many other soft drinks is, of course, they've replaced the sugar with sweeteners. And there are many different types of sweeteners. You may be displacing some problems that you have with sugar over to sweeteners, one for another. Now, the research is kind of, we're not there yet to know definitively one way or another whether they're doing harm.

But there has been some research to show that some sweeteners may be causing some imbalances or problems with our gut bacteria. And we now know that our gut bacteria, of which we have billions naturally, they can be very sensitive and upset by many different factors. And it's very important that you maintain a good level of gut bacteria for your immune system, kind of defence against disease. So we don't really want to be upsetting that too much. And there is a little bit of evidence to show that some sweeteners may be interfering in that process. So I think ideally, we don't want to be taking in too many sweeteners. The other problem with sweeteners is they're many, many times sweeter than sugar itself. And if people have

these a lot, it may be changing their taste preferences to much sweeter, very intensely sweet foods. And this could be a problem, particularly in children, where then they don't really like natural sweeteners, say from fruit, and they prefer much artificially sweetened products. So one thing I hear a lot about is fruit juice. When I was a kid, fruit juice was considered a healthy drink. You drink your orange juice, you've got to have that for breakfast, it's good. And now we hear that fruit juice is as bad as soda, that the sugar content is very high, that it's no good for kids or anybody, and the science says what?

Well, I think you've kind of summarized it quite nicely. We did used to think of it perhaps as our one portion of our fruit and vegetables a day, but I think we're moving away from that because fruit juice does contain a lot of sugar. And the way it gets into our bodies, it creates sort of a quite a rapid increase in our sugar levels, which isn't ideal for your body to then process and handle. So what you want really to be eating is whole fruit because it's the whole fruit, the juice in fruit is also bound up with fiber and that's actually a much slower absorption and you don't get these kind of rapid peaks in blood sugar levels. So it's much more important to eat whole fruit than be having fruit juice.

And certainly there are moves in public health and schools, for example, where they're trying to discourage fruit juice as being regularly consumed. And if it is consumed, it should be really just very small portions watered down with some water. For several years now, there's been a lot of hype about, you know, you've got to drink more water, you need to drink more water. If I think I've had enough water to drink, if I'm not feeling like I'm dehydrated or thirsty. Have I had enough water? The amount of water we need really depends on individual variations, whether you're in a hot country, whether you're doing a lot of exercise. But on average, we probably have around, you know, probably need around two to three liters of water a day. So to replace losses. And in your average person who's generally well adult, you have the feedback mechanism of thirst. And that's usually a pretty good indicator of whether you need to be drinking

more. But those mechanisms don't work quite so well in young children or older people or people with acute illness or chronic illness. And actually some of those need to be reminded or encouraged to drink more because their bodies may not be telling them so naturally that they need to drink. What is the myth about drinking and the things that we drink that you find most interesting that we haven't talked about yet that you would want to debunk? Well, I think a very common one is probably around alcohol. So I think a lot of people feel that drinking a small amount of alcohol every day is good for our health and it's good for the heart, for example. And a lot of people say this.

But I think we're really moving away from that now, or I say we, but the science is moving away from that now. Lars' review done a couple of years ago actually looked at nearly 700 sources of data over this and concluded that there was no safe level of alcohol. Now, that sounds quite dramatic and drastic, but we have to remember that we take risks every day in our lives. So it's just about balancing those risks. But what it did found, really, there's very little evidence to show that a small amount of alcohol regularly is doing us significant benefit. And the only benefits that have really been shown in the evidence after over large reviews over many many studies have been in women over about the age of 55 and even then it was a sort of one or two glasses a week of wine not every day so i really think that's a myth we need to get out there that it isn't healthy to be drinking alcohol

every day um and there's only really limited benefits from doing that. But there's a difference between what you just said that there are no health benefits to any level of alcohol. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for you. It may not be good for you, but is it actually bad for you? Well, just to clarify, I think what the review said, there was no safe limit. So it's not that there's definitely no benefits. There may be small benefits here and there, but when you have the ethanol or the alcohol on top of that, on top of whatever other ingredients, the harms may outweigh the risks. So we know, obviously, that people who misuse alcohol or take a lot of alcohol, there are significant harms from that, increased risk of many diseases

and a lot of problems. But I harms so it may be around um cognitive effects effects in the brain maybe around memory and they may only be small small effects but they may accumulate over time and we know this there's increased risks of certain types of cancers have been shown even with moderate drinking such as breast cancer now that's not to say that everyone who drinks will necessarily be putting themselves at harm, but it is just showing that data shows at the population level that there are these risks even from just moderate drinking. So certainly one of the most popular drinks around is coffee, and that's often held up as one of the things that science seems to flip-flop on, that one day it's good for you,

one day it's bad for you. So what about today? What about today? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, hardly a day goes by where there isn't another news story about the effects of coffee. It's a very popular drink, so it's a great one for scientists to look at. And many of its health or claims around its health benefits, the association is really quite weak and we don't have very strong data. But actually, there are plenty of compounds in coffee that may prove to be beneficial. And there's sort of evidence heading that way, but we just need to add to that data. And a really interesting link that I discovered when I was reading about it is even though we've got some of these inconsistent studies about various different potential

benefits, one area where the evidence is really quite strong and really gaining momentum is around the coffee reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, which I think is really interesting. And we don't understand the mechanism around that or why that's conferring that benefit, but that really is coming out quite strongly. So I think that's a very interesting one. I think obviously too much caffeine itself isn't great but when we say too much caffeine it really depends on the individuals and their circumstances so it's very clear that pregnant women need to limit their caffeine intake because there are potential harms but there are guidelines around that and actually for the rest of us most of what people are drinking each day is actually within limits that are fine. And it

may be giving people increased alertness throughout the day. But I don't think with any of these drinks, actually, there's no benefit from going absolutely overboard and drinking just one thing many, many times a day. I think, although I'm slightly going off onto tea, there's a really interesting study I came across of somebody who clearly was very keen on the benefits of tea. And this was black tea. And it was a lady who was she was only about 47. And she presented to doctors where essentially her teeth were so brittle, they all had to be removed. Her bones were very, very brittle and had a lot of problems there and she had something called skeletal fluorosis and this is caused by an

excess of fluoride in her tea because there's actually fluoride in tea itself not just the water that you may be having it with and it turned out that she was drinking a jug of tea every day that contained some over 100 tea bags in, and she'd been doing that for 17 years. So she just had this huge excess of fluoride in her diet. So it just goes to show that you shouldn't go overboard on any of these types of drinks. Well, the tea thing brings up an interesting point because there are drinks like green tea or I've heard people talk about a water with lemon that they have some sort of magical properties and do they? So green tea has been found to have, well it's got thousands of different compounds in many with potential to help our health. Some of them have been studied and have really been found to have a real promise. These things called cakins, a type of compound, and it's particularly rich in green tea. And as I keep saying, I think a lot of

the science is heading towards showing that these can be really beneficial and certainly green tea without any added know added sugar or milk or anything like that and most people do have it just sort of as it is and it is looking quite beneficial but again this is some of the studies looking at the compounds in teas and coffees actually look at extracts and in studies rather than the tea itself. So if you're taking a green tea extract, it'll have many times the dose that you would be receiving in a cup of tea. And so when you have a very high dose of green tea extracts, for example, you might be interested in taking. Actually, people have had significant health harms from taking those, particularly around their liver problems, very serious liver problems. So there are certainly beneficial properties of green tea. In terms of lemon and water, I would have to say not really. So really, you're just taking in water and a few drops of lemon or maybe a slice of lemon in there. And that is really just giving you a bit of lemon juice.

And there really has not been any hard evidence to show it's a miracle for anything. Isn't that interesting, though, how something like that catches on? Because I know a lot of people who swear that it's magical. And as you say, it doesn't make sense that it would be magical because it's just lemon and water, but somehow it kind of caught on. Well, I think that it's true. I think with many, many drinks, there's such incredible marketing or hype around them.

And it only takes some well-known people to come up with some sort of gobbledygook around the science to promote something. And they may look amazing themselves and people want to emulate that, that people believe it. And then it gets repeated and repeated maybe on social media and through other channels. And then everyone just believes that's true. And that goes across an awful lot of drinks. So people swearing by, you know, a glass of wine a day or three cups of green tea or whether other types of wellness drinks, for example. But this is really what I was really interested in looking at was, is there data to prove some of these claims?

Well, I want to go back just to touch on, because you said that, and I've heard this before, that there are things in green tea that have potential health benefits, but like what? Like it'll help you live longer, it'll do what for you? Well, I think we often hear about the term being antioxidant, so antioxidant properties of some of these compounds. And what that means is kind of sort of reducing the risk of damage to your cells or helping to repair cells.

And why that's relevant is that cell damage can go on to cause illness, ill health effects, and the same with inflammation. So if you can have anti-inflammatory properties in some of these compounds, then you're helping reduce the risk of inflammation in the body, which also is associated with lots of health conditions. And that's really how they feel that the compounds are working. So they're just reducing the risk of your body really having this sort of damage that occurs all the time and therefore reducing the risk of developing other illnesses. It's difficult to prove these things because many of the studies into a lot of the drinks we're talking about are called observational studies. So you get, maybe you sort of compare

two groups of people, one who takes a drink regularly and one who doesn't. And then you compare whether they've got any differences amongst them. And that's very interesting, but you can't prove cause and effect. So you can't prove that the people who are taking a drink are different in some way because of the drink they've taken, because usually there's so many other factors to take into account. What else have you found in the research about drinks that people might not be familiar with? I think I was very interested in some of the research around water. A couple of things. One was around actually bacterial growth within water.

And it hadn't really occurred to me. I think many of us have reusable water bottles these days and actually you think of water as being quite clean and you'll fill it up and then you use it and then maybe next time you want to use it you just give it a quick rinse and you're good to go but actually what we i did find that there's quite a lot of research to show that these things called biofilms so this kind of slimy layer of microorganisms can build up in these water bottles from you swigging all the time. It's introducing bacteria and you get this layer. So actually I would challenge some listeners to go and look at some of their water bottles that

maybe they just quickly rinse out and stick your finger in and see if you can feel if it feels a bit slimy, that might be some microorganisms that are building up a layer in there. And it was a good reminder that every time you use your water bottle to give it a good scrub out with a good scrub and with some soap. Is there any reason to believe that that bacteria is harmful or it's just gross? Well, that's a good question. I think we don't know. I think it is a bit gross, but could it be resulting in people feeling not quite right that day and they don't really know why? I don't think anyone's studied that in particular. I think that's a really good question. Again, it's a knowledge gap and certainly one that would be great to know more about.

I think another area that was very interesting was looking at studies around ice. So we have ice in our drinks a lot of the time, particularly in the US where you have a lot of ice in cool drinks, and how there's such in places where it's been used en masse. And that was another good reminder of how, again, we think very carefully about hand hygiene and safety when we're preparing food, but maybe in bars and hotels and places where they're serving drinks a lot, maybe they don't think quite so much about hand hygiene when they're serving drinks. What about milk? We drink milk. We start hand hygiene when they're serving drinks. What about milk?

We drink milk. We start drinking milk when we're very young. And lately I've heard people say, well, cow's milk isn't good for you. So what does the science say about milk? In terms of whether or not it's good for you, there's been a lot of studies and then a lot of reviews of all the studies put together. And overall, it seems to be that milk does have some benefits, especially in terms of growth, in terms of calcium content, which helps bones and good for children's growth. And there are some other elements that it may be useful in terms of heart health, for example. There have been many claims about areas where it may not be so good, but I think the weight of evidence shows that there seems to be some benefits of having it.

But of course, it's not for everyone. And there are now more people are turning to plant milks for whatever reason. Any concern there? I don't think really there's concerns about plant milks but in my mind I like to think of it as quite or those milks as quite a different product from milk. I think it's tempting to think of them as sort of some way you could compare them but actually they're completely different things that so nutritionally you get very different benefits from them and if you look across plant milks, there are so many different options that give you different benefits. So if you're taking something that's based on oats, so oat milk, you're going to get different benefits

than a plant milk that's based on nuts or one that's based on soya, for example. Well, as I listen to you talk, what's interesting is that when we talk about diet, there's no one right food that if you just eat this food, everything will be fine. With drinks, though, if you just drink water, then you don't really have too much else to worry about. Life might be a bit boring, but water is about as good as it gets when it comes to a drink. And understanding how all these other drinks affect us i think is really important alexis willett's been my guest she's a science communicator and author of the book drinkology the science of what we drink and what it does to us

from milks to martinis and you will find a link to that book at amazon in the show notes if you'd like to buy it. Thanks, Alexis. No, thank you. It was very interesting. Something I like to do when I go out to eat, and I like to go out to eat, is to look at restaurant menus. Because I've heard that there's really a science to it, that restaurant menus are designed oftentimes in a way or several ways to get you to spend more money. For example, if there are no prices on the menu, and I've seen that sometimes, there's a good chance that you'll spend more money because people don't like to ask how much things are in restaurants. I guess they feel that asking makes you look cheap.

But you wouldn't go to a retail store and buy a sweater or a suit or something and not ask how much it is. But for some reason, we're hesitant to do that in restaurants, and chances are you'll spend more money. In fact, just the absence of a dollar sign can increase profits. Research shows that diners spend 8% more if there are no dollar sign icons on the menu. And then there's the descriptions. Tangy, zesty, succulent, crispy.

These are some powerful words on menus. If the menu can get your mouth watering, you will tend to spend more. And this is intel from a guy named Greg Rapp, who actually is a menu engineer who helps restaurants design their menus so you will spend more money. And that is something you should know.

I always appreciate your help in spreading the word about this podcast. So please tell a friend, share the link, and let them listen. 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,

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