Something You Should Know - What Really Controls Your Behavior & How Being Too Clean Can Make You Sick

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

When it comes to successful online dating, the two things that seem to matter most are your screen name and your profile picture. I begin this episode by explaining what works best as determined by researchers who reviewed thousands of online profiles of people who were successful online daters and people who failed miserably. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150212212100.htm What determines your behavior? Is everything you do the result of your free will or is your behavior determined by something else? Could it be you are not responsible for your own actions? Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University joins me to make the case that we are not responsible for what we do – that it is determined by all sorts of biological influences. What he says will either make you a believer – or make you crazy. Robert is the author of several books including the bestseller, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. https://amzn.to/2LWQRZR Do you know what you look like – really? You’d think so but actually other people are probably better than you at identifying photos of you that REALLY resemble what you like you. Sounds odd, right? We shall explore why that is and why your self-image may be somewhat distorted. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=154010&CultureCode=en Are we too obsessed with being clean? Are we over-sanitizing our world? It looks like it. Marie-Claire Arrieta, assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada is co-author of the book Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World https://amzn.to/2vj6r7S . She joins me to explain the unintended consequences of keeping our homes, our children and everything else in our lives TOO clean. Those consequences include an increase in asthma, allergies, resistance to antibiotics and much more. Her website is www.LetThemEatDirt.com This Week’s Sponsors Hoka One One. Get free expedited shipping on your first pair of shoes by going to www.hokaoneone.com/SYSK and use the promo code SYSK FIXD. Buy 2 FIXD devices and get a third one free plus get 10% off your already discounted price at www.ListenToMyCar.com and use the promo code SOMETHING Simplisafe.com. Check out this incredible security system and if you order one through this special link, Simplisafe will donate a security system to a family in need. Go to www.Simplisafe.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, the secret to successful online dating is a good screen name and a great photo. I'll reveal the best strategies. Then, how you behave. Is it free will or biology? If you want to say it was free will that you decided to floss your upper teeth before your lower ones rather than the other way around, go for it. Basically, I think it's perfectly fair to say that what we call free will is the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. Also, do you see yourself the same way other people see you?

Probably not. And are we just a little too clean and sanitized for our own good? We shouldn't be cleaning kids just because they look dirty. Getting a dog is also recommended because just having a dog at home reduces the chances of a child to develop asthma and allergies. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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 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. 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. Just a quick reminder as we get started here today, because we've been getting some really great advertisers on this podcast that I suspect you might be interested in. And I know it can be a pain to go back and listen and try to find the spot where you heard the commercial and get the website and the promo code and all that. So we've now started listing all of the advertiser websites and promo

codes in the show notes. So if you hear an advertiser and you don't remember exactly what you heard, you can always refer to the show notes that accompany every episode of the podcast and find that information there. First up today, if you're trying to find love online, and that does seem to be the method that more and more people are trying, your online screen name can make all the difference. After an exhaustive review of screen names of people who were and were not successful in finding love online, a report in the journal Evidence-Based Medicine found the following.

You should avoid screen names with negative associations, like little, or or bug or killer and aim for something more playful like fun to be with. This type of name is universally attractive. Men are drawn to screen names that indicate physical attractiveness such such as Blondie or Cutie, while women go for names that signal intelligence, such as Cultured Bob. It may even be more important to start a screen name with a letter in the top half of the alphabet. That's because several measures of success,

such as education and income, are linked to names higher up in the alphabet, added to which a lot of search engines will sort names alphabetically anyway. Of course, an attractive photo is essential if you're looking for love online, so be sure to include one that features a genuine smile. That's really important. And women seeking men should wear red, as this is likely to boost the level of interest. Group photos showing other people having a good time in your company,

preferably with you right in the middle of the action, are the best kind of photos. And incidentally, women find a man more attractive when they see a picture of him that contains other women smiling at him, say the researchers. And that is something you should know. What causes people, you and me and everybody else, what causes us to behave the way we do? When we act a certain way, is it choice? Is it free will? Or are other forces directing our behavior? And if that's true, if other forces are directing our behavior, imagine the implications for

things like criminal behavior. Do you really have a say in what you do or not? Well, you're about to hear a very different and interesting theory on why we act the way we do from Robert Sapolsky. Robert is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, and author of several books, including his latest, which is called Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Hi, Professor. Welcome. Oh, thanks for having me on. You bet. Well, I would like to believe, and I think a lot of people believe, that behavior is a choice, that we are responsible for what we do, we are responsible for the consequences of what we do, and that behavior is a matter of free will. So why is that wrong? The main thing that's come

out of the last couple of centuries of people studying what biology has to do with behavior is over and over getting people to stop in their tracks and say, whoa, I had no idea that had anything to do with behavior. I had no idea my upbringing, hormones, culture, my genes, my fetal life, etc. And after a while, the whole idea of free will begins to feel just a little bit suspect. But how can that be? I mean, I'm raising my right arm right now because I want to. Not because you told me to, not because you made me, not because of my upbringing, not because of anything other than my choice to raise my right arm,

which is now starting to feel a little foolish, raising my right arm, but it is my choice to do so. It's not, though, in that, for example, if you were raised in a culture where you didn't have a mindset of being skeptical and challenging, that wouldn't have occurred to you. It's to be something to do to reaffirm the notion of free will. If you had certain elevated levels of stress hormones in your bloodstream today, you may have been distracted and not paying attention to what I said, and thus you wouldn't have raised your arm, etc., etc.

And if I'm trying to be polite and be a good house guest, what I would say is, if you want to believe in free will, it's clear there's far less of it than people used to think. And it's in less and less interesting places. And at the end of the day, if you want to say it was free will that you decided to floss your upper teeth before your lower ones rather than the other way around, you know, go for it. Nonetheless, basically, I think it is perfectly fair to say that what we call free will is the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. If it's not free will that I floss my upper teeth before my lower teeth, what is it?

It's a billion biological influences okay so you do a behavior like flossing your upper teeth before your lower ones and that is a consequence of what went on in your brain one second before but what went on in those neurons one second before was influenced by the sensory stuff going on in the world around you seconds to minutes before. And your sensitivity to those influences were shaped by your hormone levels in the previous hours to days. And how well they affected your brain was shaped by the neuroplasticity in your brain over previous months. And then before you know it, we're back to adolescence and childhood

and what your fetal environment was like and your genes and culture and evolution. And in all those cases, they're making a difference. And the best way to show that is when you have an experimental manipulation in someone, you manipulate something in their biological environment, and they don't know it, and they behave differently. And after the fact, they would say, well, that was free will, obviously. And you know, experimentally, that's not the case. Great, great example of this. I love this study. You sit people down, and you have them fill out a questionnaire about their political views, social issues, economic, geopolitical, whatever.

And it turns out, if people are sitting in a room where there's a terrible smell from some garbage can sitting in the corner, on the average, it makes people more socially conservative. They're more likely to decide that somebody else's social practice that's different and alien from theirs is wrong rather than just different. It does nothing to your politics about economics or geopolitics or any such thing. Simply by having subliminally a bad smell making you feel slightly disgusted, people are more likely to judge something different as being wrong. If you get people and they're hungry, they become less generous in economic games.

They're more likely to cheat. If you raise their blood glucose levels, you reverse the effect. Just endless examples of that where there's stuff going on shaping our behavior, and we haven't a clue that that stuff's happening. And afterward, we say, well, good for me. That was my free will. But it seems to me those things you just described, having a smelly garbage can or the other things, are influences on behavior.

That's different than predetermining someone's behavior. They may be more likely to do something because of all the influences in their environment, but it doesn't mean they still ultimately did not choose to do something because of all the influences in their environment, but it doesn't mean they still ultimately did not choose to do that behavior. And maybe this is just the semantics, but in any event, so what? I mean, what do we do with all of this? Well, that's a good question. I spend all my time thinking about it these days. And the answer is, I don't know.

If people actually went and started believing that there's next to no free will, let alone that there is no free will whatsoever, I haven't a clue what the fastest is the world where we judge behavior harshly. And that's the criminal justice system. That's the whole notion that words like evil and responsibility and volition are compatible with 21st century brain science, and they're not. I mean, there's one example of that. So there's this part of the brain, the frontal cortex. It's like the coolest part of the brain. We've got more of it than any other species.

What does the frontal cortex do? It makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do. Gratification, postponement, long-term planning, impulse control, executive function, all these great sorts of things. And if you damage somebody's frontal cortex, you produce somebody who knows the difference between right and wrong. And nonetheless, they can't regulate their behavior at that critical juncture. They're going to make the wrong choice every time. And remarkably, about 25% of the men on death row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to their frontal cortex. And you get somebody in that situation, and you're not talking about evil,

you're talking about like a car whose brakes don't work very well. Well, you're right, that would certainly make a very different world because what you just said is not what most people believe, and perhaps more importantly, it's not what people want to believe. And it's intuitively very, very tough because we are trained, particularly in a culture as individualist as our own, that we've got a whole lot of faith in internal loci of control and being the captains of our fate.

And we sure don't like the idea that we are biological organisms. And the weird thing is, you know, if it's going to be hard to accept that our worst behaviors are just biological, I suspect it's going to be even harder for us to accept that our best ones are as well. I'm speaking today with Robert Sapolsky. He is a professor of biology at Stanford University and author of the book, Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Don't you hate it when that check engine light comes on in your car?

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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. 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. So Robert, in the case of someone who makes bad choices because their frontal cortex is damaged, well, they don't make bad choices all the time. Sometimes they make good choices, good decisions. They behave themselves well. So why? Why aren't they misbehaving all the time if this is so biologically programmed? damage to their frontal cortex. And, you know, if anybody cares about this minutia, a sub area of it called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And then you've got somebody who's like your textbook case of, you know, the difference between right and wrong, but they can't regulate. They regulate their behavior just fine in some circumstances. People with damage there

can sit and give you fabulous, prudent advice about how you should go about living your life and what moral decisions you should make, but get them in a circumstance when they're emotionally aroused, where they're stressed, where they're tired, where they're hungry, where they're frazzled in some way, and the limited frontal capacity that makes them okay at giving you dispassionate advice goes out the window at that point. In other words, brain regions work better when they're not being stressed. And this is a part of the brain that's a great example of that. And thus, you get people who can have perfectly appropriate behavior in one setting and because of their biological constraints it goes out the window and the others I mean to take a very like nuts and bolts example of it you get somebody with a

dementia like Alzheimer's if it's not too serious in the morning they can tell you their name their grandkids names what decade it is whatever and you get them late in the day and they can't tell you any name, their grandkids' names, what decade it is, whatever, and you get them late in the day and they can't tell you any of those things, something called a sundowner effect. So you say, aha, some of the time they know the name of their grandchildren. So when they say they don't remember the names, they're choosing not to because some of the time they can. No, the answer is blood glucose levels change over

the course of the day. And by the end of the day, like you got a brain that doesn't work very well, that's not getting as much energy as it does in the morning. And thus that challenging task that you could just barely pull off at breakfast, the name of your grandkids, you can't do in the evening. But so what does this do to the concept of personal responsibility? It sounds like you're saying there is no such thing. Yeah, and this is where, like, people get all agitated and say, how's the world supposed to function? And this is where my answer is, I have no idea. But what I take some comfort from is we've already shown societally that we could handle this in at least one domain where we could look at abnormal human behavior and subtract out any notion of responsibility or volition and replace it entirely with biology and get the word punishment completely out of the equation and things still work okay and society hasn't fallen apart.

And the example that I always come back to is epilepsy. 500 years ago, if you had an epileptic seizure, the best of European science had an explanation for what causes seizures, which is you're in cahoots with Satan. And the medical intervention was absolutely obvious. They burned you at the stake. And somewhere along the way, people figured out, ah, it's not demonic possession. It's a neurological disease. And these days, if somebody from out of nowhere with no prior history suddenly has a seizure, and in the process, while they're driving a car, they hit somebody, it's tragic, it's horrible, but no one says this person was evil.

Do you do nothing about it? Absolutely not. If the seizures can't be controlled, the person shouldn't drive. And every state has laws as to how long you have to be seizure-free to be able to get your driver's license back. But when the person's license is temporarily revoked, nobody sits there and says, aha, justice is served. But epilepsy is involuntary. Murder is not. Exactly. But 500 years ago, it wasn't. 500 years ago, somebody made the choice to align themselves with Satan, and this is how you can tell they have a seizure, and thus they made the choice.

They made that choice. Nobody told them to go, like, hang out with Satan, and it's their own damn fault when we burn them at the stake. And somewhere along the way, 100, 200 years ago, most people in westernized societies learned instead to say, ah, it's a disease. 50 years ago, more like 60 now, if somebody had schizophrenia, like the parents of this like teenager asked the doctors, what caused this? What caused this? The answer then that

every like wise psychiatrist would have told you was, you caused it. You were a lousy mother. You mothered in a style that's called schizophrenogenic mothering. You generated schizophrenia in your child. It's your fault. And somewhere in the 1950s, people learned, oh, no, it's actually a biochemical disorder. In the 1960s, if you had a kid who wasn't learning well at school, there were all sorts of technical terms that might be invoked. They were lazy. They were unmotivated. And then biology taught us that sometimes there's little cortical malformations in the brains of some kids, and they reverse letters or they invert them, and we now call this dyslexia. Oh, they're not choosing to be unmotivated.

It's because of some subtle, screwy biology we had never heard of before 10 years ago. And all that's happened is we learn more and more of that stuff. But I think the flaw in your argument, though, is that, yes, we were wrong about epilepsy and schizophrenia and dyslexia. You can't make the jump that because we were wrong about those things, we must be wrong about everything else. You've got to prove those individual things. And for you to say that because we were wrong about dyslexia, that we must be wrong about murder, bank robbery, and kidnapping, you can't make that claim. I mean, that's going to take a big leap of faith to get people to believe that. It's going to be a huge leap. And what we

often have to remember is people who were no less smart and no less empathic and no less subtle and concerned and all these great things we attribute to ourselves, at some point in the past, had a completely different interpretation. It's heartbreaking, but that damn kid, just as lazy as hell, and if they just got it together, they would learn to read. It's heartbreaking to have to take their mother away and burn her at the stake,

but she chose to become a witch and be demonic. And, you know, people 500 years from now and probably 50 years from now will look back at us these days and say, my God, the things they didn't know about then and the decisions that they made based on that and the damage that they caused. So let me take another stab or two at this. There are cultures in this world that don't tolerate behavior that we tolerate here. And consequently, people from this country, say, going to Indonesia, where they're much stricter about drugs and things like that, somehow they develop the self-restraint on their own, it has nothing to do with biology,

to behave themselves and not break the law, whereas here they might. And don't you think that it's possible that someone could just not have learned empathy and things like that growing up, that it's not biological, it's just they haven't learned what it takes to be a good citizen. Absolutely. But the one thing I disagree with there is, absolutely it is biological. How? Okay, an example. So when you're a kid, you don't have a very good frontal cortex. It doesn't fully mature until you're about 25, which is kind of amazing. So you're a kid, you're a three-year-old, you don't have a very good frontal cortex, and you were put through a training process by which certain frontal neurons become stronger,

stronger at regulating your behavior. As this training occurs, your parents sit you down, and every time you go on the potty, instead of peeing in your diapers, they give you some M&Ms. They're toilet training you, and as we all know, when kids are around three or so, that's like great training. And on a mechanical level, your frontal cortical neurons have learned to talk to the neurons that control your bladder and say, don't do that right now, don't do that right now, wait until you get to the bathroom. And an environmental intervention, an aspect of your upbringing, your training, your acculturation has given your frontal cortex the capacity to control your bladder. Okay, that one does not seem very shocking

when it's sort of stated that way. And it's the exact same thing on a much, much more subtle level when we train kids to do things like share, or how would it feel if someone did that to you, or, and so on. And what you see is people who were raised under circumstances of tremendous adversity neglect abuse things of that sort not only are they less capable of empathy as adults not only are they more likely to do all sorts of damaging antisocial behaviors but you can show by the time they're five years old their frontal cortexes are not developing as well as in other people. You can show the mediating biological steps. So you're absolutely right that how we

are raised and what values and what cultural mores and thus what kind of like ecosystems or ancestors were like living in when they invented those cultural mores centuries ago. All of that stuff matters. All of that stuff matters because it's shaping the kind of brain you're constructing. And that's biological. Well, as I listen to this, I mean, this is pretty hard to get your head around. And as I said earlier, I think it's not only hard for people to believe this, but I think people don't want to believe what you're saying, whether you're right or not. Robert Sapolsky has been my guest. He is a

professor at Stanford University of Biology and Neurology, and his book is Behave, the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, and you'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Professor. Thanks. You too. Take care. 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. 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. Certainly in the Western world, we are really big on clean. We have sanitized our environment. We clean with antibacterial soaps. We get upset if our kids get too dirty. But it appears we may have gone too far. Things are too clean, too sanitized.

And that can cause trouble, particularly in children, but in adults as well. Perhaps a little more dirt and a few more germs may be just what we need. Marie-Claire Arrieta is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, and she is co-author of a book called Let Them Eat Dirt, Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World. Hi Marie, so what's the problem here in a nutshell? Lay it out for me. Let Them Eat Dirt, Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World. Hi, Marie. So what's the problem here in a nutshell? Lay it out for me. Well, the main problem is that there seems to be a society-wide missing of microbes.

We are lacking enough microbes, especially early in life. And we never thought this to be a problem. We actually thought, oh, you know, the less microbes, the better. But now recent science is telling us that we actually need microbes to survive and live a healthy life. And what are microbes and where are they? So microbes are tiny living organisms like bacteria, viruses, protozoans, and so on. And they live actually on every inch of our bodies with the vast majority of them living in our guts.

So what changed? What have we done that has messed around with these microbes? Society has begun this quest to clean up the world, and for a pretty good reason. It's thanks to things like hygiene and antibiotics that infectious diseases have been on a steady decline, and that has been really good. It's thanks to those things that humans live longer now. The problem is that we've taken it too far. We've overkilled the microbes. And again, we never thought this was a problem until we realized that microbes are almost like an organ in our body.

They're really, really critical in the type of things that they do for us, especially when we're babies and children. So what are you suggesting? I mean, the title of your book suggests that we let kids eat dirt, but that's probably a bit of an exaggeration. But perhaps, you know, we just need to chill out. It means a few things. It means that, yeah, we should relax about hygiene, for sure.

It means that we should really be careful about their diet. There's certain diets that, you know, the high-calorie, high-sugar, high-refined flours that are really bad for this community of microbes that lives inside of us and that we're missing a lot of fiber. It also means that we should be really careful about antibiotics because antibiotics really affect this community of fiber. It also means that we should be really careful about antibiotics because antibiotics really affect this community of microbes and it actually predisposes the use of antibiotics in early life, predisposes children to a number of diseases later on like asthma,

allergies, obesity, diabetes, all sorts of different diseases and disorders. So that means to do what differently? Let my child do what that maybe I'm not letting them do now? So many things. One big thing is the restriction of antibiotics. You know, use them only when they're necessary. It also means that we should allow them to be dirty and to be kids. Keeping good measures of hygiene that we know is good in preventing disease,

such as washing the hands, right? So hand washing is important, but we should do it at the times when we know it works, after we use the washroom, before we eat, if we have been with someone that's sick. But we shouldn't be cleaning kids just because they look dirty, because dirt really does not mean disease. Getting a dog is also recommended, because actually just having a dog at home reduces the chances of a child to develop asthma and allergies. It does seem that in the last few decades, this push to clean and sanitize everything has really taken on a lot of force. For sure. And one sees that in the market, right? There's so many products that use the word antibacterial as a sales feature. And we find them in everything, not just soap, but even fabric.

So many things with the antibacterial word. So there's these gel hand sanitizers hanging from every other backpack that you see in kids going to school. That never happened before. The same with diaper bags. They all have at least one enough, or if not two. And moms are making people, you know, sanitize their hands before they touch a baby. And while that's a good idea if someone's sick, it's really not necessary in a healthy baby. So yeah, there's this attitude that we need to be clean around children to prevent disease,

and that's not true. Well, but wait a minute. One of the reasons that people carry around and use hand sanitizers is we've been told, and there's been, I think, some pretty good evidence, that that is how you catch disease. That's how you catch a cold. Airplane surfaces are filthy, and people get sick from touching the tray table that the last passenger touched who had some, you know, bizarre cold from some foreign country. And that's why we use hand sanitizer, because the way people, for example, catch a cold is a person with a cold has bacteria on their hand,

they touch a surface, then you touch a surface, touch your nose, and you get sick. Yeah, and you make a really good point. We're often reading all these misinformed reports of what germs are. Well, there's a minimal risk of getting a cold from touching a surface in a gym, for example. That risk gets reduced if you wash your hands, you know, after you work out. And there's nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't just forego hygiene. But we shouldn't just be washing our hands just because they look dirty after playing, in the case of a child, after playing in the playground. Because unless the child was playing with someone sick,

there's no risk in getting an infection in that case. But isn't that the way we normally get sick, is we pick up germs that can cause illness on a surface or from somebody's hands, and if we got rid of those germs from our hands, then we wouldn't get sick. The way we normally get sick, the vast majority of exposures to disease-causing microbes come from direct contact with other people that have them. In the case of bodily fluids, sneezes, but it's rarely that that's going to happen from a surface. Of course, it depends on where we're talking about. If we're in a hospital or if we're in a place with a very high concentration of people,

then yeah, the risk goes high. But for the most part, no. For the most part, that kind of risk is actually quite minimal. If you think about it, if it was so risky to get disease from touching surfaces, the human race would have been wiped out, you know, millennia ago. We have pretty strong immune systems that usually take care of those kind of exposures. We do not have an imminent exposure to disease-causing microbes in all surfaces. We have to be careful in certain places for sure. And again, we have to be careful about hand washing before we're going to eat and

after we use the washroom. But for the most part, we do not have to go overkill on trying to disinfect these surfaces because it's been shown, there's enough studies showing that this kind of impulsiveness to overclean ourselves does not lead to a reduction in infection. It really doesn't. Most of the talk or all of the talk about this seems to be focused around children. What about adults? Well, the reason why we focus our discussion in children is because the evidence is overwhelming that there is no other time in life where it's more critical to expose ourselves to, you know, a healthy microbial load than early in life. Of course, when we become adults, our microbiome or this community of microbes inside of us has already been established and it's pretty resilient to changes. So it's not

to say that it's not important, but during adulthood, what becomes more important is actually diet. Because at the end of the day, our microbes inside of our intestines are where we eat. And they do not do well with the type of diet that we have nowadays. So, you know, fiber intake in the form of vegetables and fruits and non-refined grains and sugar, that's the type of approach that adult people should be using to continue or to promote a good, healthy microbiome. What about, there's been in the last, I don't know, 10 years or so, quite a push for people to take probiotics.

Does that help, or is that just maybe a little bit of insurance? Or what's your take on that? It does and it doesn't. So the issue with probiotics is that they're not regulated. So anyone can come up with a product and you do not actually have to prove that the product works to sell it, as crazy as that sounds. So there's really good products out there that have been tested for many diseases. But for, you know, a regular person, if you show up to a health store or to a pharmacy and ask for a probiotic, it's really hard to know which ones do work from the ones that don't. One of the things that we did when we're writing this book is that we created a website. It's letthemeetdirt.com. And there's specifically a link for a reputable source of

probiotic information that includes the products that have been tested for a specific ailment. And people should refer to those types of resources whenever choosing probiotics. And let me give that website again, because you said it pretty quick there. It's letthemeatdirt.com, and it's under the resources section about probiotics. But you like probiotics, yes? I take them. My kids take them as well. But there's also, you know, probiotic-containing foods like beer, yogurt, sauerkraut, pickle vegetables, and other things that we know are healthy for you and for your microbiome.

But the thing with probiotics is that they aren't as good as they could be. that there seems to be a link between this over-sanitized, over-clean world and an increase in the incidence of things like asthma and allergies. Is the evidence strong? Can we draw a really clear link between those things? Very much so. So not only, you know, epidemiological associations, very strong ones, For example, kids that are raised in farms, kids that are breastfed, kids that are being born vaginally, they all seem to have lower risks of asthma and allergies. Whereas on the other hand, when you have antibiotics early in life in the first year of life, if you're born by a C-section that puts you at a higher risk but research done by us has very you know clearly shown and there was another really

strong study from from UC San Francisco finding that when really young babies this is even before they get disease at one to three months of age. When they're missing certain microbes in their guts, they have a much higher risk to develop asthma. And then using experimental models, using mice, we were able to very clearly show that once you put these microbes back into the animals, that protects them from asthma. And this has been widely accepted by the scientific community. In fact, the stronger evidence seems to be with the asthma, allergies, and obesity too. There's some just really neat work that is truly groundbreaking. We did not know about this only five to seven years ago, but microbes do a lot more than what we thought they did initially.

And it surprised many of us, including myself. I was a microbiologist that used to study, you know, the bad reputation of microbes, how they cause disease and how to fight them. And we're changing focus, many of us, because we're truly realizing how important they are. But it does seem to be this kind of tricky balancing act. You know, if you've got a one-year-old who's crawling around the floor and we hear about, you know, what people drag in on their shoes is all over the floor and it's, you know, toxins and things.

It's kind of hard to separate, like, the good from the bad when it comes to dirt and germs and things. And so I get maybe that's why people just clean up everything because that way you don't have any bad stuff. Yeah, exactly. And that will be okay if by doing so we weren't preventing, you know, this necessary exposure. And again, it comes to a balance, like you're saying.

When I wouldn't allow my children to go crawling in a subway station or in a crowded mall because, you know, there's a lot of people. I don't know who's sick and who isn't. But at my house, I know who's sick and who isn't. And I know that my house is a relatively clean place. So there's extremely minimal risk, even taking into consideration the fact that people, you know, walk with shoes inside of a home and drag things in. That's dirt. But again, let's go back to this idea that we have an immune system. If really the risk of getting infected with something came from just touching dirty surfaces, there would not be human beings in this planet.

Think about all the millennia that happened with people living closer to the environment. We've gotten really good at preventing disease, but this prevention of disease does not come from merely just cleaning the surfaces. It's thanks to vaccines. It's thanks to hand washing during these affected times. It's thanks to the fact that our water source is clean, that we collect waste, that we got rid of pests like rats and mice. Those are the really dangerous ways of getting diseases. And as a society, we've gotten really good at managing them.

And we should continue to doing that, but we should also unlearn these unaffected habits of preventing disease. The only thing that they do is preventing us from and preventing children from encountering the microbial world that they need to encounter. Well, it seems this is a case of unintended consequences in a lot of ways where we think we're doing the right thing because it's a good thing to be clean and sanitized and all, but there are some results to that that may not be ideal. My guest has been Marie-Claire Arrieta. She's an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. She's co-author of the book Let Them Eat Dirt,

Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World, and her website is letthemeatdirt.com. Thanks, Marie. Thank you. So, you would think that you would be pretty good at picking a photograph of your face that most resembles what you really look like, but probably not. In a study, people were asked to choose one of several photographs of themselves that closely resembled what they really looked like. Then strangers were asked to pick the most accurate photos after having

watched these people in a video. In general, the strangers chose different photos and chose more accurate photos of the people than the people chose of themselves. Researchers theorize that memories of what we used to look like interfere with our ability to choose images that are good representations. Also, we may be more inclined to choose a flattering picture of ourselves rather than an accurate one. Interestingly, there were better results when people were smiling in the photos. Even though current passport guidelines prohibit smiling in the photographs because that distorts the normal facial features, photos of smiling faces are rated as being more like a person's actual appearance. And that is something you should know.

My email address, if you would like to write to me, is mike at somethingyoushouldknow.net I try to respond to all of them. Sometimes I may miss one or two. I get a lot, but I do try to respond and take your questions, comments, and

ideas seriously. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes.

And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note

from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.