Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: You Are Eating Fake Food & Interesting Facts You Didn’t Know

Episode Date: August 31, 2019

Men and women approach online dating very differently and consequently get different results. This classic episode begins with a discussion on who does a better job using online dating – and why. https://beta.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/08/online-dating-study-quantifies-whats-out-of-your-league/?noredirect=on A surprising amount of food sold in stores and restaurants is not what you think it is. Journalist Larry Olmsted author of the book Real Food, Fake Food (https://amzn.to/2ZB8Wif) is here to reveal how and why so much food is not what it pretends to be and how you can protect yourself from being a victim of food fraud. While it is hard to find anything wrong with reading – there is one caution for people who read in bed. Listen to discover how reading can sometimes disrupt your sleep if you are not careful. https://time.com/3642620/why-you-shouldnt-read-a-tablet-before-bed/ Could it be true that vertical stripes don’t make you look slimmer? Did you know that horseshoe crabs save lives? Or that Napoleon was really short at all? These are just a few of the facts discussed with John Lloyd author of the books The Book of General Ignorance (http://amzn.to/2cOd1aL) and The Second book of General Ignorance http://amzn.to/2cyNzq3.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, the different ways men and women use online dating, and one of them is much more successful than the other. Then, fake food.

You'll be amazed at how much food you eat isn't what you think it is. The foods that get most commonly defrauded are foods you can't recognize easily by looking at. So in national studies, when you buy Red Snapper in a restaurant or retail, you don't get it 94% of the time. So, like, I don't even know as I've ever had Red Snapper, even though I've ordered it. Also, important information for people who read in bed. And some fascinating facts you never knew or thought thought you knew, but turns out were wrong. Oh, here's a great one. Vertical stripes. Every woman knows that vertical stripes make you look

slimmer. They don't. It's horizontal stripes you need to wear if you want to look slimmer. There's a big experiment done in England in 2008 on that. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS

and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show.

There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to the first weekend episode of Something You Should Know. We're calling these

episodes SYSK Choice because we're going back and choosing some of our very best interviews and very best intel from episodes that are no longer available anymore and that maybe you haven't heard. Because we're now well over 300 episodes, and on some podcast platforms, like Apple Podcasts, they only allow a podcaster to have 300 episodes listed. And so as we have added new episodes, the early ones have been dropping off and you can't access them anymore. But there's a lot of really good information and intel in those episodes. Also, because I've gotten a lot of emails from a lot of people saying they'd like more content, they want more episodes. And so here we go. And we begin today by discussing online dating. Men and women approach online dating very differently.

And the result is that women tend to have more success at it than men. According to researchers who looked at this, when men are looking for a date online, what they tend to do is they tend to send out a lot of messages to a lot of women. And many of them are way, they're just way out of their league. It's kind of a, I guess the thinking is, well, why not? You know, take a chance. What could, what could it hurt? All the worst that could happen is you don't hear anything back.

So men tend to be more aggressive and they're more focused on their own interests and they tend to remain completely oblivious to their own attractiveness. And the result is that they just don't get very many responses because they're using this kind of mass email, mass marketing approach of send out zillions of messages in hopes of, I guess, of getting a few back. On the other hand, women take their own attractiveness into consideration before they send out messages, and then they kind of calculate the likelihood that they'll actually get a response before they decide who to contact. So they make fewer contacts, but get more responses and a better quality of response because, in essence, they stay in what they perceive to be their own league.

And that is something you should know. So what if I told you that a substantial amount of the food you eat isn't what you think it is? It's fake. It turns out that up to 10% of the food sold in stores and served in restaurants is adulterated, added to, or simply not what it claims to be at all. Joining me is Larry Olmsted. Larry is a food columnist who writes for Forbes and Investor's Business Daily, and he is author of a book called Real Food, Fake Food. Hi, Larry. So let's start with the definition of what fake food is. What is it in your eyes? Well, broadly, I define fake food as when you get something other than what you ordered.

So it can be completely fake, like you order lobster ravioli and it doesn't have any lobster in it. That would be completely fake to more of a gray area. Some of the labeling issues, like you order a natural meat thinking that it's going to be drug-free or somehow more natural and it's not. Or I talk a lot about the geographic indications, items like champagne and Kobe beef and Parmesan that are supposed to come from a particular place and be made a certain legally restricted way, but it's legal to do it otherwise.

So you're getting a legal product, but not what you think you're buying. And so how big a problem is this? The Michigan State University Food Fraud Initiative estimates $50 billion a year with a B, and the grocery manufacturers of America say that 10% of the commercially available food in our country is subject to some sort of adulteration. So as I say, if you're not leaving by the 8 items or less express line, you've probably got something fake in your cart. And in many cases, is this illegal, or is this just part of the process?

I remember hearing about the Parmesan cheese thing a while back about that there was, you know, wood chips or cellulose in it, but there's cellulose in a lot of things. Right. So it's legal, it's illegal, and it's sort of in between. And, you know, so some of the stuff is definitely illegal. Like when, again, you know, you order of the stuff is definitely illegal. Like when, again, you know, you order red snapper, which is the most substituted fish, and you're sold tilapia, which is much cheaper, but charged for red snapper. That is illegal, though. Almost nobody is being prosecuted for it. The wood pulp is not illegal. They're allowed to use it, but they're supposed to use the amount needed to do the job, which is to self-stabilize the grated cheese and keep it from clumping.

And in some cases, they were using 10 times as much as they needed to because it's cheap. And then at restaurants, there's a lot that's misleading. So there have been class action suits, but that's something that while there are legal consumer protections, it's settled civilly, not criminally. So where is the problem, do you think or imagine it all changes? But I mean, is the restaurant cheating me? Is the guy that sold him the fish cheating me? Or is it the guy that sold him the fish cheating me? Where's the problem? Well, with the seafood in particular, which is very convoluted, it's always been thought, you know, in the past when restaurants have been caught, they say, like you say,

my distributor sold it to me. The distributor says my supplier. The supplier says my importer. And it's always been sort of passed down the chain. But a very recent FDA study using DNA testing showed that 85% of our seafood was correctly labeled at the last point of sale before reaching the consumer, meaning on its way to either the retail store or the restaurant. And while that's not particularly good, 15 percent is still mislabeled. That's much better than the national average,

which suggests that the bulk of the fraud in seafood is happening at the restaurant or at the retailer, not down the supply chain. And nobody seems to care enough to file any criminal complaints? Well, I mean, restaurants are typically regulated at the state level. So the most publicized seafood scandal in the country was this Florida grouper scandal of 2006 when a lot of restaurants were selling a farmed Cambodian catfish that cost them a quarter as much as grouper scandal of 2006 when a lot of restaurants were selling a farmed Cambodian catfish that cost them a quarter as much as Grouper and passing it off as Grouper. And the Florida State Economics Crime Unit actually charged 17 restaurants. That's pretty rare. But now with seafood in particular, in 2014, President Obama created a federal task force to combat seafood fraud, and I do see some hope that

finally seafood will be cleaned up to some degree. Do you think that people care all that much? I mean, yeah, it's not great that if you order Red Snapper and they serve you a tilapia, that's fraud, but I mean, what you don't know doesn't hurt you. Do you think people really, in today's world, care about food fraud? Certainly hasn't been a pressing concern for most people, but then again, I think if most people knew the scope of it, they would care more, and also the health risk. It's kind of largely viewed as an economic crime.

You pay for lobster, you don't get lobster, but a lot of what you do get is stuff that you really wouldn't want to eat if you knew what it was. And, you know, in seafood in particular, I don't mean to pick on seafood. It's just so, you know, when you go to buy chicken, you're not picking a breed of chicken. You might buy organic or you might not, but you're buying chicken. But seafood, there's hundreds of different species, so it just lends itself more. And plus, most of our other animal protein is raised in the United States, but over 90% of the seafood we eat is imported.

So let's, since we are picking on seafood, let's pick on something else. Olive oil. Yeah, so olive oil is one, you know, that I love it. I use way more than the average American. I eat olive oil in one form or another almost every day. I cook with it. I use it in my salad dressing. I pour it over my steak sometimes. If you ever have really good olive oil, you would do the same. But

unfortunately, a lot of people in America have just never had really good olive oil because a number of studies have suggested that the majority of the olive oil sold here labeled extra virgin does not meet the standard. The numbers vary depending on the study, but most recently, 60 Minutes did an expose on this earlier this year, just a few months ago, and they estimated 80 to 85 percent does not meet the extra virgin standard, which is pretty high. The good news is, you know, in my book, I give tips in each chapter on how to buy the real thing, and olive oil is one of these things that once you taste it, you'll know you just won't be satisfied with bad olive oil ever again.

Here I go back to seafood again, but you said something that's concerning me, and that is that often tilapia is substituted for red snapper. It would seem to me that those fish are so different that you should be able to tell them apart. In general, I mean, most of the fish that we eat is white fish, and most white fish, once they're cut up and filleted, look pretty much exactly the same. So there are several things in play here. One seafood, very well-known and respected seafood distributor I interviewed just told me, hey, I could take any three white fish fillets, put them next to each other, and you can't tell them apart. The foods that get most commonly defrauded are foods you can't recognize easily by looking at,

which is a fillet of fish, especially in a restaurant where it's under a mound of sauce maybe. But also the foods that are easy to substitute are foods people aren't familiar with the way they taste. So in national studies, when you buy red snapper in a restaurant or retail, you don't get it 94% of the time. So, like, I don't even know as I've ever had red snapper, even though I've ordered it. So, you know, it's easy. Every time you get it, you get tilapia or tilefish, which is another big substitute for it. You're not going to know what the real thing tastes like.

You know, if you live on the coast or go to the Caribbean and you get a whole red snapper down at the beach, that's a different story, but very few Americans buy their fish that way. Wait, wait, wait. I buy a red snapper at a restaurant and there's a 94% chance it's not? Exactly. And the most common substitute for red snapper is tilefish, which is high enough in mercury to be on the FDA's do notat list for pregnant women and sensitive diners. So this is another example where, you know, it's not just economic fraud. You're getting something you probably wouldn't want to eat if you knew. And red snapper is not a farm fish.

It's always wild caught. And tilapia, as I mentioned, is another big substitute. Tilapia is a very common, a lot of farm fish, tilapia and farm catfish, which are cheap to produce, are also versatile counterfeits passed off as a lot of different things. Grouper would be probably after red snapper, the priciest fish that's regularly defrauded. My guest is Larry Olmsted. He's author of the book, Real Food, Fake Food, and we're talking about food fraud, which you may not have even known was a real thing. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine,

erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

It's the podcast where great minds meet. 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. And so back to our discussion. Is it safe to assume that the more processed a food, the more likely it is to have been altered in some way that it would be considered a fake food? Absolutely, because again, you can't see it. So like when they had the European horse meat scandal, it made big headlines, but it wasn't like people were going and ordering a T-bone steak and getting a T-bone horse steak. This was in like frozen lasagna in the supermarket where it's ground up, chopped up. You can't recognize it. And, you know, there certainly are problems with even wholer foods here in the U.S. Like, you know, you try to buy grass-fed or natural or drug-free beef, and a steak looks like a steak.

But it's worse once it's ground up. Coffee is a good example. You buy – coffee is almost always on the list of the 10 most adulterated foodstuffs in the world but you buy coffee beans, whole beans, you can't really be cheated. They can't throw a bunch of like pinto beans in there and tell you it's coffee. You're not going to buy that. You can tell by looking and smelling and feeling that they're coffee beans. Once you buy ground coffee, all bets are off.

Everything from acorns to roasted corn to sawdust has been found in there. This is kind of frightening. I mean, you would think that there was somebody at the gate watching all this and that we were pretty safe and everything was under control. And sure, there's going to be exceptions, but a 94% chance that you're getting ripped off is not an exception. No, and Red Snapper is the worst. So with seafood across the board, one national study was over a third, I think 37%-ish, it's

in the book, was mislabeled nationwide. That's pretty bad, you know, a third. But again, you know, like I said, it's not just seafood. Some of the most adulterated foods are staples like honey. Honey is what they call a single ingredient food. You buy a jar of honey, it's supposed to be just honey, but it's very easy to cut it with high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar or cane sugar. Honey is essentially sugar, but it's the most expensive form of sugar.

So you can cut it with kind of any cheaper sugar. People aren't going to notice, and you're going to make money. And a couple of the scientists I talked to liken this whole thing to the drug dealing. You have organized groups that are going out of their way to import illegal or defective products and sell them, and the margins are similar to selling heroin or something, except very few people ever get caught and go to jail. It's a really safe way to commit crime. But if I go to the store and buy a name brand honey, I mean, is the problem getting to that level? Or is it these, you know, the farm stand honey that some guy might, in his kitchen,

throw some corn syrup in there? I actually think it's the reverse. I recommend buying your honey at the farmer's market. And I'm not like, you know, a farmer market junkie where that solves all our problems. Some people think it does. Honey in particular, it's one of the few foods that, one of the only foods we have that is really produced everywhere, even in cities. So you can always buy local honey. And the vast majority of the fraud found has been with imported honey. So I recommend buying it local.

You know where it comes from. The largest financial fake food crime ever perpetrated and prosecuted in the United States was honey. $80 million worth of imported Chinese honey. Chinese honey was banned at the time because it was known to have unapproved antibiotics as well as to sometimes be adulterated. And this group, I mean, this ring, really a criminal ring, for years systematically transhipped honey from China, which means they sent it through third-party countries like

Malaysia or Turkey and relabeled it as a product of there to avoid the ban on Chinese honey, and brought it in until they finally got caught. And their honey was both cut with corn syrup to make it cheaper and adulterated with banned antibiotics. If you buy American, are you helping yourself? I mean, are you going to be much better off if you're, like you say, you're not buying imported honey, you're buying American honey? It really all depends on the food. It certainly does with honey. It definitely does with seafood. That's the number one. If you can buy domestic seafood, you're much better off. Almost basically all of our wild-caught salmon, which is very clean, comes from Alaska. Most of our wild-caught shrimp, which is the best commercial shrimp in the world,

comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Even our aquaculture, the standards are much higher here. It's hard for the average American to buy domestic farmed shrimp because there's so little of it commercially available. But if you could, if you can find it, I would eat that, whereas I would not eat any imported farmed shrimp. So for seafood, for honey, for certain products, definitely. Not so much our mainstays, though. Beef, poultry, and pork are all raised pretty hideously here in the U.S. So now that you've pretty much framed this problem, and it's worse, I bet, than anybody ever realized, what's the advice? What are the tips? You say you have some tips for people. So let's get to some help here. Sure. The biggest general rule of thumb

would be, you know, buy your food in the wholest form. I mentioned the coffee beans. You're not going to be cheated. Don't buy them ground. And same with, I like to use the example of a lobster. There's very few realer foods than a Maine lobster. It's not farmed. It comes out of the ocean. It's wild caught. You know what it looks like.

They can't substitute anything else. You buy lobster ravioli, there might not be any lobster in it. So, you know, fish. If you know what a red snapper looks like and you buy a whole red snapper, you've just alleviated the entire problem. Just most Americans don't buy whole fish. So whatever the food is, if you buy it in a more recognizable form and even with, you know, like I get a lot of questions about frozen pizza. Frozen pizza is really popular in this country. It's convenient, certainly easy to make.

And I don't want to say, you know, you shouldn't eat frozen pizza, but if I'm going to buy a frozen pizza, I'll buy a higher quality pizza to start with, like an Amy's Organics or something like that, that I can recognize all the ingredients. But I say, buy a cheese pizza and then put, you know, your own Parmesan cheese, your own sun-dried tomatoes, whatever it is you want on it, because then you control more steps in the process. It's going to taste better also, but the more heavily processed the food you buy, the more things are hidden in it. I think this is really eye-opening for a lot of people like me who really never knew that it was the problem that it is,

and it's actually a little scary. I didn't write this book to scare people. I called it Real Food, Fake Food, and I put the real food first because real food is wonderful. It's delicious. I mean, I come to this from a taste background as a food journalist. I want people to eat real food. It's sort of a glass half empty thing. My take is eat real, avoid fake, not be scared of everything you eat. So the good news in a lot of these foods, these olive oil and Parmesan cheese and a lot of other things, is there are some simple solutions. Once you know

what the problem with Parmesan cheese is, it's really easy to buy the real thing all the time and not have another care in the world. So some of them have pretty simple solutions. But if you buy whole Parmesan cheese, there can't be any wood in it, right? Right, there can't, but that's not, to me, the biggest problem. The wood pulp, you know, thing played well for the media because it sounds like there's sawdust in our food and it's sexy, but it's only grated cheese. To me, the big problem is that real Parmesan cheese comes from Italy, from Parma, where it's named for, and it's made under super strict regulations. So every time you buy a wedge of real Parmesan cheese, you know exactly what is in it, which is only three ingredients, how it was made, and what's not in it, which is any kind of drugs, fertilizers, pesticides. You buy a wedge of Parmesan cheese made somewhere else, like in the U.S. or in Argentina, you'd no longer know what's in it.

So to me, that's a bigger problem because anybody who cares about food and cooks isn't using that grated cheese anyway. It's the people who are going to the fancy cheese section and seeing a wedge of what's labeled Parmesan cheese sold for $18 a pound and thinking it's real who are really getting ripped off. Again, once you know how to look for the real thing, it's pretty easy. Well, I think you've done your job here today, which is to arm people with the information so they can make better choices about the food they buy. Larry Olmsted

has been my guest. He is a food columnist. He writes for Forbes, Investors Business Daily, and his book is called Real Food, Fake Food. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Larry. Thank you. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice.

Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. There's a British television show called QI, as in quite interesting, and it's all about knowledge, knowledge that you never knew. And out of that television show have come a couple of fascinating books, The Book of General Ignorance and the second book of General Ignorance.

John Lloyd is one of the producers of the television show in Britain, and he is also the author of the books, and he is here with some fascinating information. And, John, first, we have to talk about the horseshoe crab. Having grown up near the beach on the East Coast, I have certainly seen many, many a horseshoe crab, and I never had any idea how fascinating they were or are. Well, the horseshoe crab is an amazing creature, and it saved more lives than absolutely you can imagine because its blood has a peculiar property. It contains a substance called LAL, and whether or not it coagulates when you put a new drug into it will tell you whether the drug is safe to use on humans.

Nobody knows why this is. They're harvested in enormous numbers, and as a kind of payback for their kindness in saving literally millions of lives, we harvest the crabs, and the blood is taken out of them in small amounts so they can still live, and they're put back in the sea. So no crabs are harmed in the testing of new drugs in that way they're a remarkable creature what do you mean oranges aren't orange the ones i see are orange well yes that oranges it depends where you live in the

world oranges are a subtropical fruit not a tropical one but of course they're grown everywhere in the world in tropical countries they uh like one of the most fascinating things I think about nature is that every fruit and every flower, no matter what color it becomes, starts green. Oranges are no different. But in tropical countries, they stay green. And they're eaten, for example, in the Philippines or Honduras. They're eaten green. They're orange on the inside inside but green on the outside.

And rather lovely, I think. It's a bit like a sort of Christmas treat. They should sort of sell them like that, I think. But because people expect oranges to be orange, in Honduras, for example, they're eaten green by the locals. But for export, they're sprayed with ethylene, which turns them orange. Isn't that amazing? So they have to, for export, they have to be orange. But many countries, they're eaten green. So you say that Napoleon wasn't really short, which is a common belief amongst people, that he was quite short, and that's where we get the Napoleon complex from.

Well, I know the Napoleon complex, but like so many other things in the book and in life, it's not so. Napoleon wasn't actually very short. They made a mistake when they were translating the autopsy, which is conducted in French, into English. They got the measurements wrong. He wasn't five foot two, as is often said. He was actually five foot six and a half, which made him two inches taller than the average frenchman at the time and half an inch taller than every and half an inch taller than the average english person and he was two and a half inches taller than nelson the great british admiral uh the reason that we think of him as being short is partly british propaganda

which is you know they all the cartoonists made out that he was, you know, a tyrant and a dwarf and all that kind of stuff. But also because he had a regiment of grenadiers, his bodyguard, who was particularly picked to be extremely tall. They're all over six foot tall, which in the 18th century was massive

because it's very little known that people in the 18th century were actually shorter than they had been in the middle ages in the 14th century they they they'd become about two inches shorter because of the poor hygiene and living in cities that kind of stuff so what does your handwriting tell about you well uh not very much um i'm not too up on the handwriting thing i one of the things about the books, Mike, is there's so much information in here. And we expect you to memorize every single thing in it.

We expect you to memorize every single thing. Any good author would know his book. That's okay. Well, you tell me some of your favorites. Okay. Well, I certainly got a few of those. We love the fact that English isn't the official language of the United States. In fact, it's not even the official language of England or Australia, I suppose, because there was never any need to make something that was generally obvious. But certainly nowadays, Spanish perhaps ought to be an official language of the United States. English is certainly an official language of Canada, along with French.

Banknotes, people think they're made of paper, but they're not. They're made of cotton or linen. Oh, here's a great one. Vertical stripes. Every woman knows that vertical stripes make you look slimmer. They don't. It's horizontal stripes you need to wear if you want to look slimmer. There's a big experiment done in England in 2008 on that. Who made the first

flight in an aeroplane? Every school kid knows Orville and Wilbur Wright. But actually, there was a guy who beat them to it by 50 years. Admittedly, it didn't have an engine in it, but he was a coachman who did a flight in Yorkshire 50 years before. And the guy who invented the glider that he flew in also went on to invent self-righting lifeboats, caterpillar tracks for bulldozers, automatic signals for railway crossings, and seatbelts. An amazing guy called Sir George Cayley. Nobody's ever heard of him. So here's an interesting one in the book that I think probably most people would get wrong,

and that is, how many legs does an octopus have? Because I would guess eight. The answer's two. They only use two of them as legs. The other six tentacles they use as arms for all sorts of things, you know, feeding and grasping things. And one of them, the male octopus, uses as his organ of generation, and he actually puts it into a hole in the female's head.

This is such an odd way of reproduction and mating. It was discovered by Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, in 500 BC, but it was so strange that nobody believed him for 200 years, and it wasn't until the 19th century that this was actually proven. Another thing we love is, can you name a fish? Okay, if you look at a big encyclopedia of fish, they will tell you there's no such thing as a fish, because fish are so different from each other that actually a human being has more in common with, say, a salmon, is more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to, say, a lamprey or a hagfish. That's extraordinary, the diversity of life on Earth. Okay, so what

happens if you paint a woman in gold paint? Ever heard that? Goldfinger. Yeah, okay. There's been a myth for years and years that the actress Shirley Eaton, who played the girl in Goldfinger, did actually die because she suffocated because her paws couldn't breathe. But this is nonsense.

Even on the set, they left a little patch of skin unpainted by gold paint because they believed, and the doctor on the set believed, that if they covered her completely, she would die. Now, this is nonsense because we don't breathe through our skin. There's only one animal in the world that breathes through its skin. It's a tiny mouse in Australia, and even that grows out of it as it becomes an adult. And Shirley Eaton didn't die at all. She lived to, she's still alive as far as I know, and she brought her autobiography in the year 2000. Because if we did breathe through our pores, then anyone who went scuba diving would suffocate. Good point.

Listen, thanks, John. I appreciate it. I love these kind of interviews where I learn things that, you know, I thought I knew that turned out to not be true and also learn new things like, well, who knew about the horseshoe crab? It's fascinating. John Lloyd is the author of the General Book of Ignorance and the Second General Book of Ignorance, both of which are based on a television show in Britain that John is the producer of called QI. Let's talk about reading in bed. It seems that it's fine to read in bed if you're actually turning paper pages,

but according to a study, e-books and tablets and phones are bad for bedtime and seriously disturbing your sleep. Harvard sleep expert Charles Eisler says this technology is ruining our natural 24-hour day and forcing us to turn in later and experience serious disrupted sleep patterns. Sleep disorders are statistically on the rise, and most experts agree that e-books and late-night technology are playing a significant part in that trend. Reading from a paper source, like a book or a magazine, with a traditional lamp lighting it up is much less disruptive to your system than those backlit LED or blue-based

lights that you find lighting up your e-book reader, your Kindle, your laptop, your computer, or your phone. And that is Something You Should Know. And that's it, our first weekend episode of Something You Should Know. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening 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.