Something You Should Know - Why Exercise is Hard and How to Make it Easier & Food Pairings that Taste Sensational

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

One of the benefits of houseplants is that they clean the air in your home or office - right? Well, not exactly. Houseplants are great and they do offer some benefits, but cleaner air is not one of them. This episode begins with a discussion about this that I know you will find interesting. https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/12/health/plants-do-not-clean-indoor-air-trnd-wellness/index.html Exercise is difficult. 80% of us don’t exercise much. If exercise is so important, why is it so hard to do? Are we programmed to be lazy? Well, actually, yes. Daniel Liberman professor of biological sciences and human evolutionary biology at Harvard University joins me to explain why it is so hard to stick with exercise and offers some effective strategies that can help make it easier to incorporate physical fitness into your life. And the really good news is that it doesn’t take much to see huge benefits. Daniel is author of book, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding (https://amzn.to/3bHF51h). Why does tickling make some people laugh? In fact, some people laugh at the mere threat of being tickled while others aren’t ticklish at all. Listen as I reveal the scientific explanation for this and why you can’t tickle yourself. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-cant-you-tickle-yourself Chocolate and peanut butter just go together. And so do a lot of other foods. Listen to this fascinating explanation of why certain foods just go well together like kiwi and oyster or chocolate and bacon as well as other combinations you would never imagine. My guest for this conversation is food scientist Bernard Lahousse co-author of the book The Art and Science of Foodpairing (https://amzn.to/3oPv9GJ). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! You deserve to know what’s in your multivitamin. That’s why Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit https://ritual.com/something to start your Ritual today. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to https://babbel.com and use promo code: SOMETHING https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! M1 Is the finance Super App, where you can invest, borrow, save and spend all in one place! Visit https://m1finance.com/something to sign up and get $30 to invest! The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of our favorite podcasts! Listen at https://jordanharbinger.com/subscribe , Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you enjoy podcasts. Tru Niagen helps us age better by supporting the energy-generating engines that exist in our bodies, helping us restore youthful energy. Go to https://truniagen.com and enter promo code: SOMETHING at checkout to save twenty dollars on your first three-month supply!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today on Something You Should Know, you've probably heard that houseplants improve indoor air. But do they really? Then, how to make exercise easier, because most people don't do it and the benefits are spectacular. There's evidence that moderate dose of physical activity can reduce the risk of breast cancer by as much as 30-40%. Being physically active is by far the best way to prevent Alzheimer's. Nothing has ever come close to physical activity in terms of prevention. At least 30% reduction.

Also, why does tickling make some people laugh? And why can't you tickle yourself? And the science of food pairings. Why some foods just taste better together. So for example, chocolate and peanut butter. Or if you like ketchup, add some banana or strawberry. You can combine shrimp with blueberries and almonds. If you have a chocolate mousse, you can combine it with crispy bacon.

All this today on Something You Should Know. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now in-store or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply.

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. I'm certain that you have heard somewhere, probably several times,

that having houseplants in your home improves the air quality. I bet if you surveyed people, most people would agree with that, which is great, except it isn't true. If you do a Google search, you will see tons of articles about how houseplants are good for the air and which houseplants are best for cleaning the air in your home.

But interspersed between those articles, you'll also see some other well-researched articles from National Geographic and The Atlantic and CNN and a bunch of others that spell out in great detail that plants do nothing for indoor air quality. Yes, they look good. There's some evidence that having plants in your home is good for stress and mental health and a sense of well-being. But as far as cleaning the air, no. A study published in 2019 in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology debunked this myth by analyzing 12 studies on the subject from the past 30 years.

Now, there's also a belief that you get increased oxygen having houseplants in your home, but your home or office has ventilation that gives you plenty of oxygen, and if your home or office is oxygen deprived, a couple of houseplants isn't going to help. And that is something you should know. You have some sort of history with exercise. We all do. For many, that experience in history isn't great. Exercise is one of those necessary things that many of us struggle with. We hear things like the human body is designed to move. You've got to move. Sitting is the new smoking.

And yet humans are also programmed to conserve energy. So the actual getting up and moving part is really hard. And then we have expectations of exercise, and sometimes those expectations are unrealistic, or the results don't happen fast enough, and we give up. So why is it that something so necessary is so difficult? And what does work to make exercise a part of your life so you don't dread it and actually reap the rewards. Well, here to discuss and explain the science behind this is Daniel Lieberman. He's a professor of biological sciences and human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and he's author of the book, Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy

and Rewarding. Hi, Daniel. Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. One of the questions I think people have and that I've always had is we hear that we're built to move. We really need to move and that's what we're built for. And yet people hate to do it. I mean, even when they go to the gym, if they get the parking space in front of the gym, that's great because now they don't have to walk so far. It's like two different universes. We're built to move and yet we hate to

move. So what's going on? Because of our evolutionary history, we evolved to be physically active, to move to get food and also move sometimes to avoid being somebody else's food. And sometimes we evolved to move for social reasons, right? When it was fun, like going dancing with somebody. But otherwise, when energy was scarce back in the old days, it didn't make sense to do extra voluntary, discretionary, unnecessary physical activity, because the energy you spent on that was energy that you didn't spend on taking care of your body and on reproducing and all the other things that natural selection cares about. And so I make a distinction between physical activity, which is moving, and exercise,

which is discretionary, voluntary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness. And until recently, nobody exercised. They moved, but they didn't exercise. And it's innate, it's natural to avoid what we now call exercise. Well, I think that's really important and should come as a relief to people who struggle with this idea that they don't exercise because they're lazy. They just can't stick with it. But that's a really deep programming, right? Yeah. Well, here's a fact I'd love to surprise people with,

but the average sedentary American is actually more active than your average wild chimpanzee. We evolved from creatures that were couch potatoes, and that's normal if you're a chimpanzee. My dog, she spends the entire day going from one comfy place to another comfy place, lying and resting about. She enjoys going out for walks and will run a little bit when she can. But she's basically a very sedentary creature. I mean, it's normal, it's natural to save energy if you can. And then yet, because we now live in a world where we suddenly made that possible to extreme extents. We now have to find ways to choose to exercise, and that's a challenge. But we shouldn't blame people for

their instincts. That instinct to avoid exercise is not abnormal. It's completely normal. People who get out of bed in the morning and just want to go running, all power to them, but they're abnormal. They're weird. They're the unusual human beings. Something I find really interesting about exercise, and I think even people who don't exercise much but do it occasionally have felt this, is when you're done, it's not the exercise itself you enjoy, but when you're done, that feeling of having exhausted yourself or worked out or whatever you want to, however you want to describe it, that feeling feels great. But part of that is the reward. And the reward is dopamine primarily. So dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is very involved in reward function. So when you do something that you like,

dopamine goes up and it tells you to do it again. And the sad thing about exercise is that dopamine doesn't make us exercise. You get the dopamine reward from having exercise. And also, you know, you also build up more dopamine receptors, so you get kind of addicted to it. So if you don't get your dopamine hit, you kind of feel, you get antsy and irritated. And, you know, I drive my wife crazy when I don't get enough exercise. But most of the time to get myself out the door, I have to somehow convince myself. Other people convince themselves in other ways by making it socially necessary or fun or rewarding or whatever. But it's in the modern world, we have to choose to exercise. And that's not an easy thing to do. And about 80% of Americans pretty much don't choose

to do it. As somebody who studies this, what is, in your view, what is it we have to do? I mean, the benefits of exercise are really indisputable and we'll talk about them in just a moment, but clearly there's a disconnect where people know they're supposed to exercise, but they don't exercise. And it's so important that they do. So what do we do? I think we need to recognize that the current approach that our society uses isn't all that effective. We've medicalized it. We've industrialized it.

We've commodified it. And that doesn't work for everybody. Prescribing exercise doesn't make everybody take it like prescribing a pill. And so I think an anthropological and evolutionary approach can help. And by that, I mean, if you look at what we're evolved to do, what we're adapted to do, we're adapted to move when it's necessary or rewarding. And so I think the trick really is to make exercise necessary and rewarding. And I think what often works, if you look at the literature, what often works is to make it social. For example, I go running often with friends.

Like this morning, I met a bunch of friends at the track to go do some intervals. And I promise you, earlier this morning, I did not want to go. It was dark, it's cold, it's gray, it's winter. I was feeling kind of grumpy for all kinds of reasons. But I had to meet them because I agreed to meet them at 7.30. And so I trotted off there. And by the time I got there, it was kind of warmed up a bit. And I had a great time because we were all cheering each other on and helping each other do intervals. And at the end, I was glad I did it. But the reason I'm glad I did it was because it was social, right? We were all helping each other

and making... And also, the reason I went was because I agreed to do it. And I, if I didn't want to leave them, you know, waiting in the cold and the dark while, while I, you know, I didn't show up. And then I think the final thing to realize is that we, from an evolutionary anthropological perspective is that, you know, we didn't evolve to do crazy amounts of exercise. You don't need a lot for the benefits. And, you know, the most common excuse people give for, for not exercising. You don't need a lot for the benefits. And the most common excuse people give for not exercising is they don't have enough time. And it's true, we're all busy, but the 150 minutes minimum that's recommended by every major health organization in the world, that translates to 21 minutes a day. You don't have to do it every day. You can spread it out

over the week, however you want. And just that 21 minutes a day lowers people's rate of dying by about 50%. It's huge. And 60 minutes a week is less than 10 minutes a day can lower your mortality rate by about 40, 30 to 40%. So you can get enormous benefits just from very, you know, moderate amounts of exercise. My sense is that people get discouraged easily from exercise because it really does take quite a while before you feel the results or see the results. And I think people approach exercise in a very kind of formal way, like I have to join a gym in order to really exercise. But we don't have to go to the gym. Just going for a walk every day can do enormous things

or dancing or running a little bit or whatever, jumping jacks. I mean, there's no, you know, with a friend, I mean, there's so many different ways to be physically active, many of which are completely free, don't involve any equipment, and can be a lot of fun. And we don't promote that very much. And the result is, surprise, surprise, a lot of people don't do it. Well, I think another part of the problem, too, is that people have equated, and I think the fitness industry has done a big disservice in doing this, that exercise is a great way to lose weight. And that's just not true. Absolutely not true.

It goes both ways, right? So it's true that if you want to lose weight, exercise is by far not the most effective way to lose weight. I ran five miles this morning, and that expanded about 500 calories. And the tuna fish sandwich I just wolfed down with a glass of juice and whatever is probably about the same amount, right? So you can easily make up for the calories that you spend because you're hungry after your exercise and you compensate. And furthermore, running five miles to spend 500 calories, that's a lot of work

for not that many calories. But if I dieted, I could lose a lot more weight a lot faster. And study after study shows that dieting is more effective for substantial weight loss than exercise. And the average American who's trying to lose weight is trying to lose 50 pounds. So that's a monumental amount of exercise if you want to lose it through exercise. But that said, exercise turns out to be extremely important, or maybe I should say physical activity is extremely important for preventing weight gain or weight regain. So the vast majority of diets, people lose their weight on a diet, it's hard, it's difficult, it's challenging, but they lose weight. And then the weight comes crashing back,

right? It happens time and time and time again. But study after study have shown that if you exercise during the diet, you'll actually lose a little bit more weight than if you don't exercise. And if you continue to exercise after the diet is over, you are much more likely to keep the weight from coming back. So physical activity is really, think about it as preventive in many ways, prevents weight gain and also extremely important in preventing weight regain after a diet so it should be a component of every diet when people talk about physical activity when you talk about physical activity and you ran five

miles today and there's a diff there's a difference between running and lifting weights and and i remember hearing a long time ago from this guy that did a study about how a huge percentage of people who end up in nursing homes are there not because they're sick, but because they can't live their life anymore. They can't unscrew the peanut butter jar. They can't get out of a chair

because they don't have the strength to do it. That's correct. They become frail. And that's because their muscles have atrophied because you could run until the cows come home, but if you don't exercise your muscles, they go away. Absolutely. So one of the most concerning aspects of aging is what's called, technically, it's called sarcopenia. Sarco means muscle in greek and penia is loss so muscle loss flesh loss and as people get older if they don't stay uh do some weights or strength training or you know climb trees or

whatever it is that you happen to do then then their muscles waste away because muscles and that has an evolutionary origin because muscle is a really expensive tissue you're you're a typical scrawny person like me, about 30% of my body is muscle, and that accounts for about 20% of my metabolism. So it's about the same as my brain. So one out of every five breaths I take pays for my muscle. And so because muscle is so expensive, if I were to bulk up and become like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I would end up needing 300 more calories a day to pay for that 10% extra body mass I would gain. And back in the day, that's a lot of energy, right? That's a serious amount

of extra foraging. So we adapted to add muscle when we need it and lose it when we don't need it. That gets us into trouble today, what I call a mismatch disease, because as we get older and we have all these machines that do everything, when you go to the supermarket, you don't have to carry anything. You push the shopping cart. When you go anywhere, you have a suitcase that has wheels on it. You don't have to carry your suitcase anymore. I mean, on and on and on. We have so many machines that do labor for us and do physical work for us. We no longer have to use strength. And the result is we get a loss of muscle that affects our bones as well. And then you can't get out of a chair. Activities of basic life become more difficult.

And then you set in motion of a vicious circle, right? Because as it gets harder to do things and you slow down, you end up doing less physical activity, which continues to perpetuate that negative cycle. And that's why every major health organization in the world recommends that as we get older, physical activity becomes actually more important than when we're younger. And in particular, strength training is an important component. So as we age, it's really, you know, if you're going to prescribe exercise, the prescription would be you should do at least two sets of strength training a week to supplement cardio. Cardio is still the bedrock of fitness and physical activity, but strength is also important, too. There's no question of it.

We're talking about exercise and the reasons to do it and ways to get motivated to do it. And I'm speaking with Daniel Lieberman. He is a professor of biological sciences at Harvard and author of the book, Exercised. Why something we never evolved to do is healthy and rewarding. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no.

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or what do we know from observing people who don't exercise that when they do exercise and really stick with it, it's because they did what? Well, I mean, part of the problem is that nobody actually has figured that out. Most of the interventions that we've tried had kind of small effect. The U.S. government, the Department of Health and Human Services in 2018 produced this massive hundred, several hundred page volume where they analyzed every single intervention study ever done to get people to exercise. Doctors prescribing it, Fitbits, emails that you get sent on a regular basis, texts, having more sidewalks in your

neighborhood, you name it. And people have tried it and it turns out that many of them have no effect and when they do have no effect. And when they do have an effect, they tend to be kind of modest. Now, of course, as I said before, even small amounts of additional physical activity are good. But I think the one thing that we haven't tried very well is to make it more necessary, right? Prescribing it like cod liver oil is just not working. Telling people how many steps they took a day on their Fitbit or their iPhone, you know, may help some people, but doesn't help that many people and not by a huge amount. So I think by taking an evolution, I'm really making a proposal here.

I don't have, you know, nobody's done the randomized control experiment, partly because it's illegal, right? But we used to do that in terms of school, right? We used to require physical activity in schools. And colleges, for example, used to require exercise. There was exercise. Every 100% of universities in the United States until recently had physical education requirements, which meant physical activity requirements. Now, only a handful do, and they tend to be very modest requirements. And studies have shown that the sorts of things you do when you're in college tend to be very habit-forming. And so,

I think it's one of the reasons why people are less physically active today, because they're just not in the habit of doing it. So I would encourage us to try more interventions, kind of behavioral economic kinds of interventions that help us be more physically active. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who was struggling to exercise, and she heard about this website called stick.com. That's stick with two Ks. And it's a commitment contract model. So she sent 2000 bucks or something, I don't know exact

number, to this website. And if she didn't walk a certain number of miles a week, I don't remember what it was, maybe it was like 20 miles a week or 10 miles a week or something like that. The website would automatically send $50 to the NRA. And she hates the NRA. So it was for her a huge motivator, right? One of the things people have heard a lot about recently, I'm not sure where this started, was that sitting is the new smoking, that really sitting is not a good thing. Sitting is horrible. What do you say? What does the science say? It turns out that if you look at the data, it's leisure time sitting, which is really most strongly associated with negative health outcomes. So people who sit at work, but then are active in

the rest of the day do just fine. The people who are getting in trouble are the ones who sit all day long, but also sit to get to work because they're in their car, for example. And then when they get home, they continue to sit all evening. And if it's over too much sitting, well, then yes, it's a problem. But the other is that there are better and worse ways to sit. And what's been shown over and over again is that it's what's called active sitting tends to be best. So if you get up every once in a while and just turn on your muscles, essentially, by going to the bathroom or getting a cup of tea or petting the cat or fidgeting or whatever it is you're doing, or occasionally standing, for example. That's really beneficial. So it's the sitting bout duration that's really important.

So our ancestors rarely sat for more than 15 minutes, right? Because you have to get up to tend the fire or run after a kid or do this or do that. You know, they're not sitting inertly for long, long, long periods of time. But when you interrupt your sitting, you turn on your muscles, like turning on a car, and it turns on all kinds of genes, and it turns on all kinds of metabolic cascades, and has all kinds of benefits.

So let's not demonize sitting. Sitting is in and of itself, not the new smoking. But sitting too much, and sitting too inertly, does have negative health consequences. There's also the issue, I think, of people who think it's too late or I'm too fat or I've let it go too long and there's no point in starting now. It would take too much work. And so they give up before they even start. Fortunately, the good news is that that's just

not true, right? It's never too late to start. And there are plenty of studies which have studied that, which compare people's health outcomes, whether they're lifelong exercisers, lifelong non-exercisers, or people who start at various points in their life. And all of those studies have shown that there are enormous benefits to picking up exercise at any point in your life. And the reason for that is that every time you're physically active, you're turning on all kinds of repair and maintenance mechanisms

that have immediate short-term effects that are beneficial. And we often view exercise through the lens of weight loss, right? If the only reason to exercise is for weight loss, well then, sure, it's not gonna be the best way to do that. But there's so many other benefits to physical activity than weight loss. And we're really missing out on an awful lot of the one benefits by just focusing on that one outcome criterion. It's kind of a problem with our

current approach. There is a cumulative effect to exercise that I don't think is well understood by most people. And, you know, so when it's time to, do I take the escalator or do I take the stairs? Well, I'll take the escalator because even if I took the stairs, it's just once and what difference is it going to make? But it does add up. So can you give me some examples of the cumulative effects of exercise? If you stand instead of sit, you're spending about eight more calories an hour, which is about the number of calories in a slice of apple. It's not a lot of calories. But let's just say you have an eight-hour day of work and you stand for all those eight hours.

For a full year, you're talking about 23,000 calories, right? Which is a substantial number of calories. That's about enough calories to run about eight or nine marathons for the average person. So small amounts of very modest levels of physical activity over long periods of time add up to large numbers. I think people have a general sense that exercise is good for you, it's healthy, but people don't necessarily know exactly what that means. So could you describe some of the very specific health benefits of exercise? There's evidence that just that moderate dose of physical activity can reduce the risk of breast cancer for, you know, different studies come up with different estimates, by as much as 30, 40%. Being physically active is by far the best way to prevent Alzheimer's.

There's really nothing has ever come close to physical activity in terms of prevention and risk reduction for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, at least 30% reduction in the risk. Heart disease is almost entirely preventable through physical activity. Diet is also important, of course. We think it's normal for people's blood pressure to go up as they get older, but we've studied populations in Mexico and colleagues have studied populations in Africa and all over the world. And sort of non-industrialized, non-Western populations where people are physically active and don't eat lots of processed foods, the 80-year-old's blood pressure is no different than 20-year-olds. So the idea that your blood pressure necessarily

goes up with age is just not true. It's a modern Western thing. And high blood pressure is arguably the biggest killer of people on the planet. Well, I've always found it interesting that when people say they hate to exercise, they don't really mean that so much as they hate getting there. They hate the start of it. They hate the process to get to the exercise. But very few people, I think, engage in physical activity and later say, oh, I'm really sorry I did that. That's right.

And that's why we need to make it necessary. Because our ancestors didn't have to choose to be physically active. They would starve if they weren't, right? And so we never evolved. It's just like dieting. We never evolved to go into negative energy balance on purpose, which is what dieting is, eating less than you're using. It turns on all kinds of mechanisms in your body to prevent you from doing it. You get cravings and your cortisol levels go up.

It sends your body into a starvation crisis mode, right? We never evolved to diet because our ancestors never were overweight when trying to lose weight. And we also never evolved to entice ourselves to do needless physical activity. But we now live in a world we've created because of machines and cars and elevators and shopping carts and you name it, we now have to find ways to choose to do something fundamentally abnormal. Now, we've succeeded with that for reading and school and various other things like that by making it necessary. And we can do the same thing for exercise.

We just have to choose to do it. We have to decide it's worth it. Well, this has been really enlightening and I think motivating to help people exercise because the benefits are clearly there. Daniel Lieberman's been my guest. He's a professor of biological sciences and human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. And the name of his book is Exercised. Why something we never evolved to do is healthy and rewarding.

You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Daniel. My pleasure. Take care. Thanks for inviting me. 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,

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then you understand food pairing. Some foods just go better with other foods. So why is that? And is it predictable? Is there a science to it? Or is it just trial and error? Well, it is science. And Bernard Lahousse knows a lot about it. He is a bioengineer, and along with his co-authors,

they consult with food professionals and chefs, and they've written a really wonderful book about this called The Art and Science of Food Pairing. Hi, Bernard. Welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on the show. Sure.

So what is it? What is going on when you eat, say, chocolate and peanut butter together, and clearly they, to many of us, taste better together than they do alone. So why is that? What's the magic that happens when you put those foods together? Yeah, this is really interesting. So as humans, we are variety seekers. We are not like pandas who only eat bamboo or koalas who only eat eucalyptus leaf. We crave for variety so if you make the association to for example music imagine that you would hear the same song every day so the appreciation would decrease once novelty

of that music has worn off. To keep something interesting you want something complex but also not too complex. So it's really finding the balance between something complex, but also familiar. And really a good pairing is to find that optimal level between the complexity, where the stimulation keeps us interested, but also the harmony, the coherence, some familiar elements. But is there something magical? Because I could randomly take two foods and eat them together and they taste terrible, and I can take two other foods and eat them together and they taste wonderful. So why? Maybe I should tell you how the story for me and for us started. I've always been passionate about good food. I had a grandmother who prepared dinner for the whole family every

week, who took us to Michelin star restaurants. And I've always been intrigued by understanding why some ingredients pair while others don't. And about 15 years ago, when I finished my studies as a food scientist, I started to reach out to chefs to understand how they make those combinations. So one of the chefs I started to collaborate with was Sanhoun Dejamre, a Michelin star chef from Belgium. And during one of the sessions we had, he was asking, Bernard, when I smell a kiwi, I also smell the sea. Is that possible?

So as a food scientist, smelling means aroma compounds. There are machines that can detect what aromas there are. So, analyzed the kiwi and indeed found out that in kiwi, there are molecules that smell like the sea, which you find in seaweed or in caviar of oyster. And when we analyzed oyster, we found molecules, that fruity molecules that you could also find in kiwi. So one of the first dishes that we ever made was a kiwi and oyster combination based on that aroma similarity. And in the meantime, we've traveled around the world, analyzed more than 7,000 ingredients from ants in the Amazon to kimchi in South Korea to find out what are the aromas and what are the associations they make to other food products. So it's all based on, well, isn't much of our sense of taste really our sense of smell?

Indeed. So if you want to create a fantastic dish next to the visual aspect you need to optimize for flavor and flavor it's a combination of smell taste and texture and indeed smell is the most important that that's maybe surprising but you can do the the following trick mix some cinnamon with sugar, and then you pinch your nose, and then you taste the sugar with cinnamon, and you will notice that you will not taste any cinnamon at all. So you really need your nose to experience the most of the food. And that's also why aroma is that important in making combinations. When I think of peanut butter and chocolate, I mean, they don't seem like they have a whole lot in common. I mean, you would know better than I, but they do taste good together, but not because they seem so similar or what.

Yeah, so there are nutty notes in chocolate that will match very well with the peanut butter. But you also have a change in texture. So the chocolate has a different texture than, for example, the peanut butter. And the most ideal dish you try to optimize for smell, but also for taste and texture. For example, if you have tortilla chips, they will taste better if you combine them with guacamole because you combine something crispy with something soft. But it's really the aroma that binds everything together

and opens up the possibilities. And food pairing is not only for chefs around the world, it's really helping you to upgrade some staple foods, like for example, sweet potato. If you analyze sweet potato, it has some roasted caramel, floral, and fruity notes. And if you know that, then you can go into different directions. So you can combine sweet potato with caramel and pecan because it has the roasted notes or because of the floral notes you can combine it with honey or for fruit with apple and so by really detecting what are the aromas and you can do that also by training your nose and finding out what are the aromas present you can find multiple ways to combine the food

products so the trick is to match similar foods in terms of what they smell like is that is that because they're because you said for example chocolate and peanut butter have different textures so that's a difference it's not a compatibility and that's what makes it appealing or guacamole and tortilla chips are different but you're also saying that some foods are similar so so how do you make sense of that well for for taste and texture you have to search for the contrast but for aroma for smell you have to search for similarity so for example chocolate and peanut butter they are more like roasted nutty products so that's why they combine together they are similar to each other but still there there is a difference which makes it more complex but I will give you some

other examples of surprising combinations that you can try at home. So for example, imagine you make a cheese and potato casserole, add some grinded coffee powder on top of it, you will add a different layer, or add some coffee powder to pumpkin soup. Or if you're working with cooked green beans, add some orange and hazelnuts. Or if you like, for example, ketchup, add some banana or strawberry. The strawberry will actually push up the aroma profile of the tomato in the ketchup. You can combine shrimp with blueberries and almonds. If you have a chocolate mousse, you can combine it with crispy bacon. Or you can just take a simple strawberry and add a bit of parmesan.

You will notice that you will create something totally new. And so when you pair foods the way you just described, is it predictable or is it trial and error? Must you actually just throw foods together and go, no, that didn't work? Or can you say, you know, because of this and because of this, I think these are going to go together well. It is predictable, but of course, so the advantage of what we do is that we can map out all possible combinations and that we can find out ingredients that pair very well, that nobody found before because they are in different parts of the world or they're new products. But of course, food, it is personal.

Some people are more adventurous than others. Some people have more experience with tasting some food. So of course, it will also be important in defining if you like a product. For example, chocolate. Chocolate can be combined with a lot of products. For example, it can be combined with chicken. It's done in Mexico with moles. On the other hand, if you go to Japan, one of the best selling Kit Kats in Japan, it's a combination with soy sauce and chocolate and soy sauce. Again, they match very well. But if you don't like soy sauce, it will not be your combination. If you never tasted soy sauce before, the combination in chocolate will maybe

be too complex or unfamiliar for you. Yeah, well, I would imagine that, you know, no matter how great the combination is if you don't like one of those foods combining it with another food isn't going to do any good because you just don't like that food but we're running a project for example with kids and a problem with children is that they don't like a lot of vegetables one way of solving it is actually by starting with the food they like and trying to find combination food pairing combinations that are close to what they like but a bit different and by doing that you can gradually move them towards certain vegetables that they didn't like before. Some moms use it as a trick. If you don't like certain vegetables, they will add something sweet

or they will add the fruit, something you like. It's actually a strategy that you can use. Well, clearly you wrote this really gorgeous book about food pairings, but everybody's different. Is there some way that people can get a sense of what they like, what their food preferences are? If people would be interested in knowing more about what they like, we actually have a new free website, which is my.flavor.id. If they fill in some survey, they can actually learn about

themselves, what drives their liking, and as such, you can find out what vegetables they actually would like to eat. So you said before that crispy bacon goes good with chocolate mousse, which comes as a surprise to me. But if you were to take 100 people and they all liked bacon and they all liked chocolate and you gave them chocolate mousse with crispy bacon, how likely is it? Are they all going to like it? Are half of them going to like it, a quarter of them? No, in this case, almost all of them. I also wonder how people's expectations affect this. If you tell people that you're going to combine foods that don't sound like they might go together, like chocolate and bacon, isn't their expectation going to affect whether or not they like it?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. One of the tricks that chefs use is that when they start to work with food pairing, they often do that in the appetizers because people are much more open in appetizers than in main dishes. They're more critical in the main dish. So if you give a combination of chocolate with soy sauce without saying, the chance is high that people will like it. But when you indeed in advance say it's soy sauce and chocolate, then they will say, whoa, I've never tasted that before. That seems like gross. I will not like it. And they will not like it. Same is true, for example, with beer. Beer, people often combine that with savory foods, but certain beer also work really well with sweet foods, but because with desserts, but because people are not used to combine it,

it will be less preferred. What are some other combinations that might go together that maybe people haven't thought of before? For example, cauliflower combines really well with nutmeg, but if you add grapes to it, then you add an extra layer. Or shrimp and tomato, it's a classic combination, but if you add rhubarb, you will lift it up. For example, I was talking about the ants. When you went to the Amazon, we found ants that really tasted like lemongrass and are perfectly combinations with pineapple. Wait a minute, wait a minute. You said ants, like insect ants, taste like lemongrass and you combine them with pineapple?

Yeah, yeah. And before I was also very skeptical. But when I tasted these ants, they really taste amazing. It's like lemongrass and ginger that you're tasting. And there's one chef in Brazil that combines the ants with pineapple and serve that as a dessert. Well, that's the perfect example of something that if you told me ahead of time, I'm probably not going to like that because it's bugs. But if you didn't tell me, I probably would. Yeah. And if you are in a setting of a top restaurant, you're probably also more open to trying new foods. And it's really amazing combination. How do you cook ants? I think they roast them in the oven or they dry them. You see actually the shape of the ants on top of your piece of pineapple. And lastly, is there really any way for the average home cook to come up with pairings?

Or do you really have to study this and know it? There's no like magic formula. No, there's not a magic formula that you can learn by heart. You can train of course your nose but online there are many combinations that you can find. We have a blog where you can find lots of combinations and the trick is really to start really simple. Take a piece of strawberry and parmesan and taste it together. Combine the bacon with the chocolate mousse. Try to add coffee powder to your cheese and potatoes.

So very simple, not very fancy, but try to upgrade the foods that you already like by adding a little twist to it. Well, the whole idea of why some foods taste better with other foods and why some combinations taste better than the foods taste by themselves. I think people have always wondered why that is. And it's interesting to get some explanation and some ideas to try. Bernard Lahousse has been my guest. He is co-author of the book, The Art and Science of Food Pairing. And the website that he mentioned earlier, where you can put in some information and see what foods and what vegetables you might like and what to combine them with, that website is my.flavor.id. My.flavor.id.

And that is also in the show notes. Thank you, Bernard. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know. Okay. Thanks a lot. Tickling is a funny thing. In some cases, just the threat of being tickled causes people to laugh. But other people don't seem very ticklish at all, no matter what you do. So what's the deal here? Well, as near as science can tell,

tickling actually causes us to panic. Someone is touching us and we don't know where or with what pressure, and that panic causes us to laugh. This also helps explain why we can't tickle ourselves. Our brains have developed the ability to distinguish between expected and unexpected sensations. We have a panic response to unexpected sensations, and that's a good thing because it helps keep us sensitive to predators.

But if we try to tickle ourselves, it's expected. We know where and how we're going to touch ourselves, so there's no panic reaction, and therefore no laughter. And that is something you should know. Our audience is growing by leaps and bounds, but we can always use your help to grow it by bigger leaps and bounds. If you would just share this podcast with someone you know, do it right now, today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks.

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