Something You Should Know - What Makes Food Delicious & The Fight Against Quackery

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, what your freezer does to the ice cream inside, and you're not going to like it. Then, why do we like certain flavors and dislike others? One of the most amazing features of this to me is that recent research has shown that when a baby is born, it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero.

Starting point is 00:00:59 Then, there are so many things you can clean in your dishwasher that are not dishes. And most people probably think they can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are more people today than ever who believe in nonsense and various aspects of pseudoscience. And I've kind of tried to forge a career battling those views. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world.

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Starting point is 00:02:00 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 Something You Should Know. Depending on how old you are, you might have to confirm this with your grandmother or something, but it used to be that if you had a freezer, every once in a while you would have to chip away the old ice and frost that would build

Starting point is 00:02:30 up over time on the walls of the freezer. And then along came the frost-free freezer, which pretty much everyone has now. But there's a problem. You see, your freezer regularly goes through a frost-free cycle, which means the temperature actually warms up in there as high as 45 degrees. During that time, the frost melts and evaporates, and that prevents the frost and the ice from building up. The problem is that your food starts to melt too, and then it refreezes, and that causes problems. This is a big cause of freezer burn, and it's why you get ice crystals on your ice cream. In fact, one food science professor calls frost-free freezers ice cream destruction machines. What happens is, as the temperature goes up and food starts to thaw,

Starting point is 00:03:20 the water from the food escapes into the air. As the temperature drops again, the water wants the food escapes into the air. As the temperature drops again, the water wants to re-enter the food, but it can't because the food is still mostly frozen. So the water sits on top of the food and freezes into ice crystals. And this happens over and over and over again, and can ruin some of the food in your freezer. One way to prevent or minimize the damage is to keep as little airspace as possible between the food and the package it's in. This will help prevent the water from escaping out of the food because it will have no place to go. And that is something you should know. One of the things that makes modern humans different from other animals, it seems,

Starting point is 00:04:06 is we don't just seek out food to nourish and satisfy us. We seek out really tasty, delicious food to nourish and satisfy us. From the way we prepare food and cook it and spice it, we want food to taste good. And even when it does taste good, we sometimes try to make it taste even better. So why is it that some food tastes good and other food doesn't? Why do you find some food delicious that I may find horribly distasteful? Here to talk about all this and why we find food so enjoyable, as well as how the pursuit of flavor has guided the course of history, is Rob Dunn.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Rob is an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University, and he's author of a book called Delicious, The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human. Hey Rob, so even though other animals don't, you know, they don't cook or spice up their food a whole lot, I imagine that other species have taste preferences, that some of what a tiger eats tastes better than other things that that tiger might eat. Every animal, at least in one way or another, seeks out delicious food. You know, the senses evolved to reward species for finding things that were on average good for them. And so the frog in some way or another, when it's eating a fly, is appreciating the fly.

Starting point is 00:05:31 But you're right that we as humans do something a little bit different in our quest, which is that we really, we try to bring different flavors together. We cook things, we ferment things. And the version of that that we undertake is special, but it has antecedents in other species. And so if you look at chimpanzees, chimps don't mix food, not really in the sense that we do, but they do make tools to find delicious things. And so chimps in some populations in West Africa will break off sticks. They'll make them just the right length. And then they'll use them to pound into the ground to get at these bee nests that are, you know, up to nine feet underground, just so they can get that honey. Not because it's nutritious or what they need, but really because it brings them pleasure. And so if you look across

Starting point is 00:06:23 species, we see examples like that, where species have figured out ways of finding things that are extra tasty. Why do we have this kind of oddity in that a lot of foods that are, quote, good for us as humans are not foods that we really like, and a lot of the foods we really like are not good for us. How is that when you would think it would be the other way around? Well, it's partially because good for us is dependent on our context. And so from almost all of our evolutionary history, for example, we needed more calories than we could usually get. And so in that context, you know, finding sweet things was definitely good for us. It was a ready

Starting point is 00:07:11 source of calories. And so our ancestors evolved sweet taste receptors to reward us for finding sugar so that we didn't die. And so in that context, sugar was good for us. But what changed is we developed the ability to produce near infinite quantities of sugar. And then in that context, sugar is no longer good for us. And the same could be said for most of the things we really enjoy, that in the context in which we evolved, they tended to be things that were relatively rare and that we needed more of. But in our current context, that shifted. And in some ways, that's because what we've made of the world is kind of the mirror image of our tongues. And so if you look at the foods that we produce industrially at huge scale, if you look at what you can find in the processed food aisles of the grocery store, it's basically all

Starting point is 00:08:05 rewards for your sweet taste receptor, for your umami taste receptor, for your salt taste receptors. And so we created this whole world of foodstuffs that supplies that pleasure. And we just made too much of it so that what we used to need is no longer what we need. Is there anything that is universally tasty that everybody likes? Or as you just said, a lot of this is learned or, or is there a food that they've, everybody that eats it loves it? All humans have the innate tendency to like sweet things. We all have sweet taste receptors. They're tuned a little bit different in different people. And so for some people, really sweet things are less appealing than they are for other people.

Starting point is 00:08:56 But everybody is born liking sweet things. Everybody is born liking savory things. So umami, it's a hard to describe taste, but it's in tomato soup. It's in Parmesan cheese. It's in miso soup. It's what gives some of their great taste to meat. And everybody is born instinctively liking umami. Salty tastes, everybody likes.

Starting point is 00:09:21 And again, that taste receptor is a little bit tuned. There are actually two salt taste receptors. One that says, ooh, that's enough salt, and the other that says, ooh, that's too much salt. And so the tuning of those is different from person to person, but everybody likes a little salt. And then you can learn through time to modulate those a little bit. And so as you get older, your preferences change, but you're born liking all of those things. And we've studied sour taste a fair bit in my lab, and all humans seem to

Starting point is 00:09:52 have the propensity to learn to like sour taste, but how much you like it seems to vary person to person. And we don't understand yet how genetic that is versus how learned that is. But then whether you like the food that has those things in it really depends on what the aromas are associated with the food, and that's learned. So let's define some terms here. What is the difference between taste and flavor and then how much of those things is actually smell? So it's different in different languages, but in English, flavor is this encompassing word.

Starting point is 00:10:28 And so if you talk to people who work in the senses associated with food, for them, flavor is taste. It's mouthfeel, which is the sense of touch inside the mouth. It's smell, which has two components that I can come back around to. It's the astringency. Does the food make you pucker? And it's even, for some people, it's even the sort of visual presentation of the food, that that also goes into this sort of overall experience of flavor. And so flavor is this encompassing thing. Taste is just the sensation triggered by your taste receptors. And so that's primarily on your tongue. It gets a little bit trickier than that, but that's more or less the main story.

Starting point is 00:11:15 And that's those key senses. That's sweet, salty, umami. But it's not fully understood yet. And so scientists are discovering new senses of taste as we speak that's not fully understood yet. And so scientists are discovering new senses of taste as we speak that are not fully understood. And so, for example, it's thought that humans might be able to taste calcium, but we don't know what that feels like. There's a new taste that's been proposed called kukumi, but we don't know how that's sensed. And so taste is for sure the tongue, but the full dimensions of that experience remain to be studied.

Starting point is 00:11:53 But taste is that narrow piece. It would seem that in order to survive, humans have had to basically adapt to be able to eat and to some extent enjoy whatever they could get their hands on because because that's the only way you can survive and as you pointed out everybody likes salty and everybody likes sweet but some people like more some people like less it seems that the human palate is very adaptable depending on what's available. One of the most amazing features of this to me is that recent research has shown that when a baby is born,

Starting point is 00:12:32 it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero. And so there are these great French studies showing that if a mother eats anise, like anise flavored candies when she's pregnant, and you hold up a little Q-tip with an anise smell on it, that the mother who ate the anise, that that baby will make like a nursing face in response to the anise smell. If the mother didn't eat the anise, the newborn baby will make a sad face in response to the anise smell. And this is true for garlic. It's true of the smell

Starting point is 00:13:13 of fermented fish. It's true of the smell of some cheeses. And so, you know, on the one hand, this seems like just a quirky feature of our biology. But if you think about our ancestors moving over some hill into a new climate and a new region where there are new plants, new animals, what this offered them is that in one generation, newborn babies could already be learning to love the new foods. And so babies could be primed for what the important cultural foods were already at birth. And what we can learn to love in different cultures is really varied. And so I work with a Greenlandic colleague and she works a lot on fermented Greenlandic foods. And a lot of those are

Starting point is 00:13:58 fermented meats that are really quite stinky and I think off-putting to some people. But for Greenlandic people who grow up with them, they're some of the most delicious foods anyone could ever imagine because of that amazing olfactory learning process. So I imagine that in the history of flavor and taste and food and eating, the day somebody said, you know, if we cook this, it's going to be a lot better, had to be a pretty important day. If we think about our evolutionary history, there's a point about 1.9 million years ago when our brains at that point were already larger than those of other apes. But they went through this bigger transition when the brains became even bigger and teeth became smaller to sort of accommodate that big brain, jaws became weaker.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And paleoanthropologists love to fight over just what happened during this period. What was it that allowed this evolutionary transition, which would then set the stage eventually for language, for building houses, for making clothing. And they disagree about almost every feature of what happened in that period. But they agree on two things. One is that somehow our ancestors were able to obtain more calories because they needed more calories for those bigger brains. And they also seem to agree that they were getting more calories by finding ways to make food easier to eat and more delicious. And that might have been through fermenting food. It might have been from being able to access more muscles. And so imagine sort of an

Starting point is 00:15:40 oyster-y early human. It might have been from finding new ways of getting honey. But one of the main arguments is that it was through beginning to cook food. Because once you could cook food, more of the calories in the food became available, more of the flavors became available, it was easier to chew. And it was this radical moment when we were remaking the world so as to make it more pleasing. And so whatever happened in that moment, I think it's a pretty amazing time. We're talking about taste, flavor, and deliciousness. And my guest is Rob Dunn. He is an evolutionary biologist, and the name of his book is Delicious, the Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human.

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Starting point is 00:17:08 Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. So Rob, as you look throughout history at humans and what they ate, because people have said, well, you know, we're carnivores. Oh, no, we're omnivores. But primarily, has the human diet been very meaty? Has it been meat was just kind of a special Sunday dinner kind of thing?

Starting point is 00:17:45 What generally have people eaten over the years? Meat, vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits, what? Well, the short answer is they've eaten everything. And so if you look across cultures and time periods, it's really variable. And I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about sort of humans and food is we've found ways to live successfully in many different diets. But if you kind of walk backwards through time, you know, if we think about sort of 4 million years ago, we probably had a diet that was kind of like a chimp diet. So it would have lots of leaves and fruit, would have had a little meat, you know, the occasional colobus monkey leg, it would have had honey. And then as we began to be able to hunt more,

Starting point is 00:18:26 we brought more meat into our diets. It's ferociously debated how much meat, but probably there were periods where humans in particular regions switched to much meatier diets. And then one of the things that happens is that in different places, humans almost certainly hunted out some of the biggest things. And so they would have switched to less meaty diets for a while. One of the things we don't understand very well is that at some point, our guts change relative to those of other species. And that changes which diets we do well with. And so one of the things is that our intestines get shorter, which makes it a little bit harder for us to eat diets that are just raw leaves because we can't ferment them as well as a

Starting point is 00:19:12 chimp can. Our teeth get smaller, which makes it harder for us to chew some of those things. And then the other thing that happens is that our stomachs get really, really acidic. If you look at a chimp's stomach, a ch chimp stomach is almost neutral as far as we understand. And the human stomach is more acidic than sauerkraut. And I actually think that that reflects a moment, which might have been 100,000 years in our story, when our ancestors switched to eating more fermented meat. And so rather being these noble hunters, they were the ones that ran in after the lion kill, grabbed that piece of leg and hung it up and ate it for a couple of weeks as it continued to rot. And they may have used their acidic stomachs to help them keep from getting really, really sick.

Starting point is 00:19:58 But it's varied is the short answer. Do we know when, there probably isn't a when, but this idea of, you know, not just getting the food and bringing it home and cooking it, but to really start to develop recipes to make it even better and even better and even better. Like, how did that happen? Or do we know when that happened? Or it maybe just happened? That's a great question, and it's not been studied very well. My personal impression is that once people started cooking food, then they would have become aware that cooking it one way versus another way changed the flavors. And if you could cook a food two ways and one of them tasted better than the other,

Starting point is 00:20:44 so long as you have a modern human brain, which has been true for at least 300,000 years, you're probably going to do what somebody would do today. You'd cook it the more flavorful way. And so I think that's pretty early. What we don't know is when people start spicing things, when people start mixing ingredients. But I think we'll start to see that in the coming years because we now have all sorts of amazing ways to study ancient food that we didn't used to have. And so I have a friend, Hannah Schrader, who he finds ancient pieces of chewing gum, many, many thousands of years old, and he can find the DNA in that chewing gum

Starting point is 00:21:22 and figure out what food people were chewing that's getting stuck in that chewing gum and give a sense for which ingredients were mixed together in that moment. And so I think we're going to start to see some more pieces of that story. At the same time, we certainly know there are modern cultures where people emphasize the flavor of food much less. And so I think it's also interesting to think about, well, you know, why do some peoples decide to eat plain mashed potatoes and not do anything else with them? You know, why does that occur? That's harder for me to make sense of. So what's the big takeaway here? Because it certainly seems that taste and flavor, it's a pretty compelling driving force for all animals.

Starting point is 00:22:12 So to me, it's the recognition that every species of animal out there is making decisions based on flavor. And so if you watch the crow, you watch the house finch, you watch a mouse, they have taste receptors, they smell their food, and they choose. And to know that, you know, yeah, each species sees a different world, but each species also tastes a different world. And that in there in some way, you know, sometimes conscious, sometimes not conscious, there's a reward system for finding what's good. And so that fascinates me. And that we're starting to understand the genetics of that. And so, you know, we're starting, we can now compare the taste receptors of different species. And so we know that cats, so felids in general, so house cats, tigers, leopards, they don't have sweet taste receptors because they get all of the nutrition

Starting point is 00:23:06 they need and the energy from just killing other animal species. And so their sweet taste receptor was unnecessary and it broke. And so, you know, on the one hand, that's an interesting quirk of evolutionary history, but it also means that, you know, every time you present your cat with something you think it's going to love because it's sweet, it actually can in no way taste that sweetness. And the same is true of dogs. You know, they have different taste receptors than we do. And so the subtleties of those differences change how they experience the food we give them. And so there's this constant evolutionary part of the story that I find fascinating too. But the biggest thing for me is there really isn't a field that studies

Starting point is 00:23:52 flavor and deliciousness and evolution in a holistic way. And so, you know, for somebody who's young and just thinking, oh, maybe I'll be a biologist or an anthropologist or, you know, a molecular scientist, most of what we could discover about deliciousness has not yet been discovered. And that to me is pretty wonderful and fun. Today, it seems like we have a lot of, you know, fake foods, artificial foods, cheese puffs and Doritos and things. How do those kind of foods that are not in nature, how do those fit into this discussion? Yeah, I mean, well, the companies that produce those things look at them with great care. And so what they've figured out is how to sort of give a super reward for our taste receptors. And so if you think about a Dorito, a Dorito has been engineered to kind of perfectly suit the taste receptors and to make them happy.

Starting point is 00:24:49 And then it has a very simple smell that we learn to associate with Dorito and we learn to love. And that's not an accident. That's a very intentionally produced to take advantage of how our sensory systems work. Interestingly, that also happens in nature. And so there are a lot of species that want to be eaten. And so fruits want to be eaten so that they're passed through the digestive system and then their seeds are dispersed somewhere else. But some fruits have figured out ways of triggering our taste receptors, but without giving us food. And so there's a fruit across tropical Africa that

Starting point is 00:25:26 produces a molecule that hits the bottom of the sweet taste receptor, but is not sugar. And so the plant makes that molecule. It doesn't provide any sugar. And primates go and eat the fruit and eat the fruit and get almost no reward for it, but the fruit itself gets dispersed by the primates. And so in some ways, the Dorito is totally unnatural. In other ways, it's doing the same kind of thing that nature also does. Well, there is so much to this topic of flavor and taste that I think most of us don't know, and yet we're tasting and flavoring things every day. So it's really good to understand this. I've been talking to Rob Dunn. He's an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University,

Starting point is 00:26:12 and the name of his book is Delicious, the Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Rob. It's been a great pleasure. I'm going to go eat some lunch now because now I'm hungry. 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

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Starting point is 00:27:12 With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. You know what quackery is, right? And it's such a great word, quackery. Quackery is when people spout theories and medical cures for things that are, at best, unproven and possibly useless, and at worst, potentially dangerous. Terms like snake oil salesman and huckster all come to mind. There's a lot of quackery in science and medicine and nutrition, and a lot of it isn't easy to spot.

Starting point is 00:27:53 Today on the internet, anyone can say anything and come off as credible. So it's important to understand how to tell truth from quackery or pseudoscience. Someone who's been at the forefront of this for a long time is Dr. Joe Schwartz. He's director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society, and he's author of a book, well, he's author of several books, but his latest book is called Quack Quack, The Threat of Pseudoscience. Hey, Joe, welcome to Something You Should Know, or welcome back. Hi, Michael. It seems that quackery has been around for a long time, and I think people think that they

Starting point is 00:28:32 know how to spot it, that they're somewhat immune to it because it's been around a long time and we know quackery when we see it. Just because it has been around a long time doesn't mean that we have developed an immunity to it. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are more people today than ever who believe in nonsense and various aspects of pseudoscience. And I've kind of tried to forge a career battling those views. Sometimes it is frustrating, I must admit, but it also has been a lot of fun dealing with the various aspects of quackery. So just to get specific and put a face on this, what are some of the quackery things that you have seen and you have dealt with in your career

Starting point is 00:29:20 that you think are important for people to understand? Well, of course, there are some funny ones and there are some more serious ones. The more serious one that I've had to deal with a great deal is homeopathy, which I believe is perhaps the most absurd of all the so-called alternative remedies. Well, and I think people have all heard that word homeopathy, but I bet most people don't really know what it means. So what is, specifically, what is homeopathy, but I bet most people don't really know what it means. So what is, specifically, what is homeopathy? The vast majority of people have no real idea what homeopathy is, and if they have any kind of idea, they equate it to just sort of an umbrella of all

Starting point is 00:29:59 kinds of, quote, natural therapies. This is not the case. Homeopathy is a very specific pseudoscientific practice that dates back about 200 years to a physician in Germany by the name of Samuel Hahnemann. Now, Hahnemann actually was, I think, a pretty good guy who was disenchanted

Starting point is 00:30:19 with what he had been taught in medical school back in those days because, you know, what did doctors learn back then? They learned how to purge patients. They learned how to bleed patients. And he didn't see his patients really getting better with this. So he searched for better methods of treatment. And one treatment that was popular at the time,

Starting point is 00:30:41 because it actually had a good chance of working, was to treat patients who suffered from malaria with an extract of the bark of the cinchona tree, which grew in Peru. Today, of course, we know that that bark contains quinine, but they had no idea of it back then. And he knew that he wasn't always successful with the treatment because he didn't know exactly how much of this ground up bark to give to his patients. So he experimented on himself. And he started to take the bark of the cinchona tree to see how much he could stand. And it turned out that he developed a fever, the same kind of fever that he saw in his patients who suffered

Starting point is 00:31:25 from malaria. And at that moment, homeopathy was born. The term actually means like cures like. So Hahnemann came to the totally unscientific conclusion based on his experiment that a substance that in a healthy person causes a symptom will cure those symptoms in a sick person in a diluted version. Now, this, of course, goes against everything we know in biology, chemistry, and physics. And yet, if you were to ask people, you know, just ask them on the street, what is homeopathy? That's not what they're going to say. I think most people believe homeopathy is kind of this umbrella term for natural or alternative medical treatments. Which is unfortunate because it is this one specific area for which there is no reputable scientific evidence. Unfortunately,

Starting point is 00:32:23 it is still extremely popular, essentially because it is marketed as having no side effects, which of course is true. Because when you're taking something that contains no active ingredient whatsoever, you are not going to get any side effects. But when you are taking a homeopathic remedy, you are getting something. You're getting a good dose of placebo. And as you know, if you believe in something strongly enough, it can help benefit your symptoms. Of course, it doesn't cure the underlying disease. It just changes your perception of the disease. And this is where the danger of homeopathy comes in, you know, because people always say, well, you know, what's the harm in homeopathy?

Starting point is 00:33:06 You're just taking water and nothing more than that. Well, there is no danger physically in the actual therapy. The danger is in believing that it may do something that it cannot do and to use it to the exclusion of other remedies which may actually work. I'd like to talk about herbal remedies. You walk into a health food store and there's all kinds of herbal supplements that supposedly treat disease or prevent problems and do things. And you would think, well, if they didn't work, you would think by now people would have caught on and not buy them, but people do buy them.

Starting point is 00:33:47 And also, if they didn't work, how is it that they can keep selling them if they don't do what people say they do? In the U.S., this is quite easy to do because of a piece of legislation that was passed way back in 1993 called the Health Supplement and Dietary Education Act. This was legislation that made it legal to basically sell anything as long as it was a natural product. If you could find it in nature, you could sell it. It did not have to go through any kind of FDA approval. And of course, most herbal remedies fall into that category because they do occur in nature. And of course, it is very easy to kind of, you know, promote herbal remedies in a blanket fashion because many of the proper medicines that we use today do originate from plants. The classic example, of course, is morphine, which is isolated from the poppy.

Starting point is 00:34:55 We have digitalis that comes from plant the foxglove. We have the Madagascar periwinkle, which gives us a cancer treatment. So there are numerous examples of drugs that are based on herbs. However, when someone suffers from congestive heart failure, they're not told to go out and graze in a field of foxglove. The active ingredient is isolated, purified, so that physicians can prescribe the proper dose. But none of that kind of thing is mentioned with the promotion of herbal remedies. And some of these are, you know, just made by taking various plants and grinding them up, putting into a capsule and selling them without any significant trials. And because there's no need to carry out these trials, they can just market this through health food stores and, of course, these days online. remedies and natural treatments to prevent disease, that you're just part of the big

Starting point is 00:36:05 medical establishment, along with big pharmaceutical companies that really just want to sell drugs to people, and you're part of the problem, and that these remedies do work, it's just that you're trying to keep the lid on it. So, you know, that's a common response to which you say what? Let's start out by saying that pharmaceutical companies are not philanthropic enterprises, right? They are there to make money. And there certainly are skeletons in that closet. There's no question about that. We've seen drugs being marketed and overhyped. And essentially, the truth is that virtually no drug works quite as well as the detail salesmen say that it works. Nevertheless, Big Pharma does a great deal of very, very sound research. They have great scientists. And the best way to make money is to sell drugs that

Starting point is 00:37:06 actually work and that have minimal side effects. So they really do carry out excellent studies. Unfortunately, there is sometimes a difference between what the scientists in big pharma say and what the salespeople say. And it is not true that they try to sweep the competition under the carpet. I mean, that just is not the case. Pharmaceutical companies do a great deal of research on natural products because there may be some truth in there and they will try to fish those out and convert them into proper products. But what I think we in the scientific community have to emphasize is evidence. Always look for the evidence. When you hear that something is supposed to work

Starting point is 00:38:01 for some condition, take a look to see where that information comes from. Does it come from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, or does it come from some website that tries to sell some sort of a product? That's our theme, really. Look for the evidence. If we can, I'd like to quickly run through some of the things that you talk about as quackery that other people think is useful and get your comments on them. Detoxing, that's become quite the thing, to detox, to get all the toxins out of your body. What's the evidence according to science? The science says that there's no evidence for the kind of detoxes

Starting point is 00:38:46 that you're mentioning. The body, of course, has all kinds of mechanisms to remove potential toxins. The kidneys and the liver do a very good job of that. And the skin does a very good job of preventing those toxins from getting into the bloodstream in the first place. But that doesn't really sell. What sells are products that you take orally or that you insert into the nether regions of the body that are supposed to draw out toxins. But those toxins rarely get mentioned in terms of what they actually are, just this generalized expression that toxins are being removed from the body. And there's just no evidence that any of these products do anything. Mostly they are laxatives. And of course, there will be some effect. You will see some body output

Starting point is 00:39:42 when you're taking laxatives. But that has nothing to do with reducing potential toxins in the body. This is just a marketing term that has no scientific basis. For example, alkaline detoxing. This is something that is very popular, the notion that you drink alkaline water or eat alkaline foods is the miraculous way to remove toxins from the body. And this has no scientific substance whatsoever, but they claim that the body's pH can be altered by eating these foods and that cancer can only grow in an acid environment and that by drinking alkaline water, you can reduce your risk of cancer. You can make this sound very, very good with some appropriate pseudoscientific lingo. But the fact is that the pH of our blood is maintained at about 7.35,

Starting point is 00:40:49 very effectively by the body. Our blood is really what we call a buffered solution. And nothing that you eat or drink can significantly alter that. Something that you say is quackery is vitamin C. And I find that so interesting because taking vitamin C to prevent a cold or to fight a cold has become so popular and so believed by so many people that you wonder how that happened. And if, again, if it's so useless, why do people continue to believe it if there's no evidence to support it? Yeah, therein lies an interesting story. It all started with Linus Pauling, the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and he also won the Nobel Prize for peace. And my career, of course, has been in chemistry.

Starting point is 00:41:48 So from very early on, I basically worshipped Linus Pauling. And then he went off on this tangent, and that was vitamin C. Believing, purely based on anecdotal evidence, his own and his wife's, that taking large doses of vitamin C was a treatment for the common cold. Now, because this was coming from someone as eminent as Linus Pauling, it got a lot of publicity. He wrote a little book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold. And because, of course, Linus Pauling had introduced this idea of vitamin C, other researchers said, well, you know, this is something we really need to look at. And they did look into it. So experiments were done, and it turned out that it just didn't do it. Taking the vitamin C regularly did not prevent the cold. Of course, Pauling had an out for this.

Starting point is 00:42:48 He said it was because the doses were so low, and he recommended taking much higher doses. He said he himself would take 15 grams a day. Now, vitamin C is a rather innocuous substance, but taking very high doses will give you diarrhea, which is, you know, not necessarily pleasant. But anyway, many, many studies were done on vitamin C, showing that it really wasn't effective in preventing the common cold. However, there were some studies that suggested that if you took a gram of vitamin c an hour for four hours at the first sign of a scratchiness in your throat you had a chance of averting the cold and i think that there is something to that now again i i cannot quote really strong scientific evidence for that. I have my own personal evidence. I think that that

Starting point is 00:43:46 actually does something. But as you know, anecdotes and science really don't amount to much. I would really like to see someone do that particular study in a rigorous fashion. But then Linus Pauling, unfortunately, went even deeper into this with his notion that vitamin C was also preventative and potentially a cure for cancer. We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and a number of cancer studies have been done on that. Since you're really at the forefront of all of this, what is it you're hearing now in this fight against quackery? What are you hearing now being touted that you think needs to be explained? Well, I think exposure to electromagnetic radiation is something that comes up repeatedly now.

Starting point is 00:44:33 People worried about cell phones, people worried about 5G networks having some effect on their health. And there is just no evidence for that whatsoever. With radiation, as with chemicals, dosage is always important. Now, one of the tenets that we constantly refer to is that only the dose makes the poison, and you always have to put things into context. You know, if you ask a question, for example, is aspirin toxic? Well, there's no real answer to that. If you take an aspirin tablet and you lick it, there will be no effect. If you have a headache and you take two aspirin tablets, your headache will probably resolve. If you take a whole bottle of aspirin tablets, you will go away, not the headache. So dosage is important in every context.

Starting point is 00:45:29 We have to take a look at how we are exposed. For example, oral exposure is not the same thing as inhalation. It's not the same thing as dermal exposure. And then, of course, we also have to deal with numbers. We have to deal with amounts. How much are we exposed to? Science revolves around numbers. Whenever a scientist asks a question about toxicity, it always comes down to how much is there?

Starting point is 00:46:01 What have we been exposed to? And this is something that you don't see in the quack world. It's always a yes or no. They don't bring numbers into the game. This will cure you, never mind what the efficacy is. Well, what you said earlier about the evidence, I think, is so important. It's all about the evidence. If you're going to say something is true or something will work to cure some disease, you've got to be able to prove it. And if you can't prove it, then people should be skeptical.

Starting point is 00:46:38 Joe Schwartz has been my guest. He is an M.D. and director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. And the name of his book is Quack, Quack, the Threat of Pseudoscience. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And the show notes are the descriptions just below this podcast, most likely, wherever you're listening. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate that very much. Thank you. You probably have a dishwasher in your kitchen, and if you do, you should know there are things you can wash in there besides the dishes.

Starting point is 00:47:18 For example, those glass globes from light fixtures. Your lights will be much brighter after a cycle through the dishwasher. Just make sure to skip the heated dry cycle. Shower heads and faucet handles. Put them on the top rack and run the pots and pans cycle and it will brighten the handles and unclog the shower head holes. Plastic hair brushes, combs, and accessories. Residue from hair products build up on these items over time. So get rid of all the hair first, then put them in a mesh bag or a dishwasher basket on the top rack and run them through the regular cycle.

Starting point is 00:47:53 Baseball caps. Put them on the top rack and use Borax instead of dishwasher detergent. And every once in a while, it's a good idea to run your pet's bowls and toys through the dishwasher, as it will help prevent the growth of bacteria. And that is something you should know. Here's a challenge for you. Write a review of this podcast in 10 words or less, and then post it on the platform that you're listening to this on. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, CastBox, wherever.

Starting point is 00:48:24 And there it will be, your words and your name for everyone to see. 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.

Starting point is 00:48:52 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,

Starting point is 00:49:10 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,

Starting point is 00:49:32 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

Starting point is 00:49:43 about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for 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.

Something You Should Know - What Makes Food Delicious & The Fight Against Quackery

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