Something You Should Know - Why You Think You Are Smarter Than You Are & Just How Healthy Are Restaurant Meals?

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Next time you are feeling stressed or need a little reassurance there is someone you need to call - immediately! It is a very close relative of yours. This episode begins with some stress reducing advice and an explanation of why it works so well. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/12/mother-phone-call-study-us-oxytocin I think we all like to believe we know what we are talking about but a lot of times we don’t. It’s human nature apparently. We believe things that are not true and we think we are smarter than we really are according to Philip Fernbach associate professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of a book called The Knowledge Illusion (https://amzn.to/3toAk1J). Listen as he explains why we do this and what the ramifications are for all of us.  When was the last time you used your parking lights on your car? And if you did - why? Listen as I explain why your car has parking lights in the first place, why they are likely amber colored (at least in the U.S.) and when you should never use them. https://www.infobloom.com/what-are-parking-lights.htm You might think that with so much emphasis on healthy eating that restaurants would be serving up some healthier and more nutritious food today. If you do believe that, you are wrong according to research. Dariush Mozaffarian, MD is a professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine and Editor-in-Chief, Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter. (https://www.nutritionletter.tufts.edu/). He conducted some fascinating research into just how nutritious restaurant meals are and the findings may surprise you. If you are concerned about your health, you will want to hear what he has to say.  PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Backcountry.com is the BEST place for outdoor gear and apparel. Go to https://backcountry.com/sysk and use promo code SYSK to get 15% off your first full price purchase! Go Daddy lets you create your website or store for FREE right now at https://godaddy.com Go to https://RockAuto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck. Write SOMETHING in their “How did you hear about us?” box so they know we sent you! Discover matches all the cash back you earn on your credit card at the end of your first year automatically and is accepted at 99% of places in the U.S. that take credit cards! Learn more at https://discover.com/yes Over the last 6 years, donations made at Walgreens in support of Red Nose Day have helped positively impact over 25 million kids. You can join in helping to change the lives of kids facing poverty. To help Walgreens support even more kids, donate today at checkout or at https://Walgreens.com/RedNoseDay. https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. 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. Today on Something You Should Know, why you need to call your mom the next time you get stressed out. Then, an interesting quirk of human nature that can get us in trouble. And that is, we think we're smarter than we really are in fact for most things we know remarkably little and yet we tend to have that misperception that we understand things

more deeply than we do if I ask you how a zipper works most people say oh yeah I know how a zipper works and then I say okay explain it to me and they go whoops also why do cars have parking lights and the good news is we're eating healthier. The bad news is not much healthier. And restaurants are a big part of the problem. We are truly facing a national nutrition crisis. We have more diet-related disease in terms of obesity, type 2 diabetes, poor brain health in adults. There is so much diet-related disease in our country.

All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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. This probably would have made more sense to schedule this in an episode before Mother's Day, but I didn't see it before Mother's Day, and so we'll do it now. We start today's episode of Something You Should Know talking about your mom. If you're feeling stressed out, you might want to give your mother a call. The mere sound of her voice can be very comforting, according to one very interesting study.

A group of young girls were put in stressful situations, like they were asked to solve some difficult math problems or asked to give an impromptu speech, things that would cause their heart rates to soar and their stress hormones to rise. Then, one-third of the girls got a comforting hug from their mothers. One-third of the girls watched a 75-minute emotion-neutral video. And the other third of the girls were handed a telephone with their mom on the other end of the girls were handed a telephone with their mom on the other end of the line.

The children who got to interact with their mothers had virtually the same hormonal response whether they interacted with their mother in person or over the phone. The girls' levels of oxytocin, which is often called the love hormone and is strongly associated with emotional bonding, rose significantly, and the stress hormone cortisol was washed away. So even if your mom is not nearby, if you need a little reassurance, a quick phone call to mom may be just the ticket. And that is something you should know.

Human beings, probably including you and me, tend to think that we're a lot smarter than we really are, and we often believe things that are simply not true. Now, that may sound like a pretty big, sweeping, bold statement, but in fact, it appears to be true. That's what humans do. And there are some ramifications to, as you might imagine, to believing things that just don't happen to be true. And here to discuss and explain why we do this and why it's important is Philip Fernbach. He's an associate professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University

of Colorado in Boulder, and he's author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion. Hey, Philip, thanks for being on. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks. So I think that this is rather unsettling to a lot of people to hear that we're not as smart as we think we are and that we believe things that are not true because, because we like to think we are as smart as we think we are. And we like to, we like to believe that what we believe is true, but you say no. It's a remarkable feature of human beings that we can come to believe things that are verifiably false, not based in fact. And in fact, entire groups of people can come to believe things that aren't true, which is pretty amazing. And that goes from everything from sort of beliefs about

common household objects, like believing we understand how a toilet works, all the way to some of the most important things that we grapple with in our lives, like political policies or beliefs about other people and all kinds of other things. I have no idea how a toilet works, but it's pretty amazing that it does. And I'm so glad it does, but I have no illusion that I think I understand how it works. That's why I have a plumber on my speed dial. That's funny. So you're actually a bit of an odd duck in that respect, because there's a really compelling set of experiments that was done by a psychologist named Frank Kyle back in the 1990s. What he did in these experiments was ask people about how well they felt they understood sort of common everyday objects, like toilets,

which is my favorite example, but other things like zippers or can openers, pretty much anything you can think of. And the general phenomenon is that when you ask people how well they understand those kinds of things, they sort of nod their head. And yet what happens in the next phase of the experiment is I will ask you to explain to me in detail exactly how it works. And that's when people really try to reach inside and they don't find much there. They have a lot of trouble actually generating anything in the way of an explanation. So it actually turns out that for most things, we know remarkably little about the way that the world works. And yet we always, we tend to have that misperception that we understand things more deeply than we do. I love this because I have, I would never pretend to you that I know how a

zipper works. I have no clue how a zipper works. I just know it works. And that's all I need to know. That's all I need to know. And that's one reason that people suffer from this illusion is that we usually don't think at that level, of detail because it's not really necessary to do so. As you say, you can always call up the plumber if the toilet breaks. But we're not used to thinking at that level of detail and unpacking things. And so we tend to see things as being more simple than they are. Now, some people are kind of like you where if I ask you how a zipper works, you sort of mentally ask yourself the question before you answer. And you say, hmm, I guess I don't really know.

But most people aren't like that at all. Most people say, oh, yeah, I know how a zipper works. And then I say, OK, explain it to me. And they go, whoops. Now, there are certain areas of expertise or areas where the complexity is just kind of obvious where we wouldn't suffer this kind of an illusion. Like if you ask somebody on the street, do you know how a particle accelerator works? They would probably say, no, I have no clue. But many things that we interact with all the time that we have this sort of illusion of familiarity with them and we feel like we

understand them. Another great example is a bicycle. We have this great experiment, which was done by a psychologist named Rebecca Lawson, where she basically gave people a schematic of a bicycle and just asked them to draw in a couple missing parts of the bicycle. And it seems like it should be really easy, but it's a super hard task. Turns out that if you sit down and try to draw a bicycle, 99% of us are going to fail really badly. And it's pretty remarkable because again, it's something that we have tons of experience with. The bottom line is that the human mind is just not designed or built to store a lot of detailed information.

We tend to take in the world at a much coarser, more simplistic level. It seems like, although I don't understand a lot of things, zippers and toilets and things there are some things i think i am pretty smart at and yeah i probably am absolutely so that starts to get into the second major theme uh which i'm really interested in which is why we have this this illusion of knowledge and why individuals don't know so little about the world. And the answer is that human beings are not really built for individual thinking.

What we're built for is thinking in groups where individuals can have specialized knowledge. If you think about all of the things that humankind accomplishes, it relies on this incredibly distributed network of knowledge. Think about hopping on an airplane, right? Not one person on that airplane who knows everything about how the airplane works and how to fly it and so on. It's this incredible joint pursuit of engineers, pilots, crew, passengers, everybody coming together where each individual knows a little bit and together we can

know a lot. And so certainly we all have our areas of expertise. Now I will say that I am an academic. So I'm like the world expert on the tiniest little slice of knowledge in the world. And yet I continuously am learning how poorly I understand that little tiny sliver and how much more there is to know. And so the world is just remarkably complex. And so, yes, you probably are a relative expert in certain areas. However, there's always more to learn. Yeah, well, you'll never know everything about anything, but I don't know that you have to, right? I mean, you just need to know enough. Absolutely. You need to know enough,

and that's a really important insight, because if I want to take a position, for instance, on whether climate change is real or not, or whether the healthcare policy that's being supported by my group is a good one. There's just no way that I can be an expert on those topics. I could spend an afternoon doing some reading and know more than I know now, but hey, hundreds of PhD theses get written about these topics. And in the end, what you have, but you are obligated to take a position, like you have to take a position on these things. You can't just throw up your hands and say, well, it's just too complicated. I'll never know. Because that's just a recipe for disaster. Instead, we do have to rely on the experts in our communities. And we

do have to rely on the information we get from those people. We're never going to know it all ourselves. However, that doesn't mean that we have to act like know-it-alls when we don't know what the heck we're talking about. So we should behave with a little bit more intellectual humility than we do a lot of the time. And what that means is that having attitudes that are more calibrated to how well we understand an issue. It doesn't mean not taking a position. Do you think from looking at this, are people who think they know how a toilet works also the guy that thinks he knows how a zipper works and also the guy who thinks, in other words, do the people who tend to think they know everything think they know everything? I think there is an individual difference in the extent to which people are in general susceptible to this illusion of knowledge. And one idea we've

looked at is called cognitive reflection, which was discovered by this guy named Shane Frederick. And basically what it is, is you take this little math test. And in this math test, they're very easy questions, but they're trick questions. And so anybody who spends a sufficient amount of time actually sitting down and working them out will get the right answer. They're not very difficult. However, there's an incorrect answer that kind of pops into your head. And the people who respond with that incorrect answer tend to be more susceptible to that illusion of knowledge because they're less reflective. There's this idea in psychology called dual systems theory,

the idea that we have two systems for making judgments and decisions. One is evolutionarily ancient and very fast and automatic, and you're not aware of it happening. That's what happens when an answer just pops into your head. The other system called system two is this more deliberative kind of thinking, the sort of thinking where you're having a conversation with yourself in your head, you're maybe working through a math problem. And those are really two separate systems. And some people are more dominated by that system one, that automatic system than others. And those two people tend to be a little more susceptible to this illusion of knowledge. And I think it's because they don't try to explain the world a lot

of the time. They just sort of nod along and say, yeah, I got this. I understand this. Whereas some people have more of a tendency before responding to actually think through things a little more. And then that sort of reveals the gaps in their knowledge. We're discussing this illusion of knowledge that I guess we all suffer from, that idea that we're not as smart as we think we are, and we actually believe things that are not true. My guest is Philip Fernbach. He is author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. So Philip, given what you've said, what does it mean to be smart? That's a great question. Great question. There's way too much

of a focus on smart as being this thing that the psychologists called G. G is short for general intelligence. And it's what we try to measure when we take IQ tests. IQ tests typically measure how fast you are at processing information, how much information you can retain, and whether you can solve sort of anagrams and things like that. All of these things that measure a very specific kind of mental horsepower. What I would argue is that because human beings are not really built for individual thinking, what we are built for is working together as a team to pursue complex goals. A more important kind of intelligence is really not about how much mental horsepower you have, but how much you can actually contribute to a group doing well or solving some complex task. And there's a million different ways to be smart. A good team is not going to have

10 people on it who all have incredible horsepower and ability to solve anagrams. What they're going to do is they're going to have complementary abilities to really work together to solve a problem. And, you know, this idea of G, it does correlate with achievement to some extent, you know, life satisfaction, achievement, things like that. But it's a pretty weak correlation. And one danger is that people see that as the only way to be smart. And they think that if they are not good at solving anagrams or solving tricky math problems really quickly, that they're dumb or something and that they

can't contribute and so on. And so it's a very narrow vision, a view of what it means to be smart. By the way, as an academic, I run into people all the time who have incredible mental horsepower. And, you know, they're good at some things, but trust me, they're not brilliant by any stretch at everything. So, yeah, I think as a society, we really should be taking a broader view of what it means to be smart. Yeah, because going back to the toilet again, I think it's really smart for me not to try to fix it if it's broken because I know I don't have the aptitude to fix it. I don't get it. My dad and I know some other people, they may have never fixed a toilet, but they have that mechanical whatever it is. The chances are if they took it apart, they would figure it out and they could fix it.

Right. So taking a shot at it is probably a pretty smart thing to do. My taking a shot at it is probably not a very smart thing to do. Yeah, that's a great point. So if you are good at evaluating your own capabilities, and that's great. One sort of dark side to that idea is that as human beings, we react a lot to demonstrations of confidence. When someone acts in a confident way, we usually take that as a sign of competence. And so people get kind of conditioned to behave as if they understand everything and they can deal with any situation because that's kind of what we look to for our leaders. When a leader says, well, I'm not really the expert on that. I'm going to delegate

it to someone else, or I'm going to delegate it to someone else, or I'm going to find someone who knows that area better than I do. Well, in some types of cultures, corporate cultures, that is seen as a benefit, but a lot of the time, not so much. We often want the CEO to act like they've got everything figured out. So I do think there's a danger that we can be overconfident sort of because we get reinforced by people responding positively to behaviors that, you know, acts of confidence. It can lead to leaders that are sort of overconfident and domineering, I think. But do people generally have a pretty good sense of what they're good at, what their aptitudes are,

or what you're describing, it sounds as if people aren't. Yeah. So that's a great question. And let me give you an example. There's a phenomenon called, which probably many of your listeners have heard about because it's a pretty famous idea, called the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after a psychologist named David Dunning and another guy named Justin Kruger. They do studies where they measure people's aptitude at a task and they also look at people's confidence about how good they

are at that task. And it actually turns out that the people who are the worst at the task are actually the worst at evaluating their own aptitude. And they call that unskilled and unaware. And basically what the idea is, is that in a domain where you don't really understand the domain very well, because you're a novice, you also don't have the skills for evaluating how good you are. So they could do a study, for instance, where they test how funny people are. And you can have independent raters gauge if people are funny or not. And you can have independent raters gauge if people are funny or not. And you can also ask people how funny they think they are relative to their peers. And the least funny people are the most overconfident about their funniness.

And that's sort of a general phenomenon that applies to all kinds of things like how much you understand or know, how good you are at various tasks and so on. So the answer to your question is, in general, no. People are very bad at evaluating their aptitude, especially when they're new to an area, when they're novices. It also seems that no matter how smart you are or you were, unless you do something, unless you study something or fix toilets on a regular basis, you're not going to stay good at anything. Oh, yeah, that's another great observation. So it's not only that we fail to retain or that we don't have a lot of detailed information,

but we also don't retain detailed information very well. So I'm a teacher, and if I teach students a bunch of facts about the subject matter, literally a week or two after the semester is over, all of that stuff will be gone. What we retain is sort of the deeper stuff. And so unless you're using that knowledge, detailed information that doesn't have that sort of deeper structure to it is going to tend to fade. Let me give you another example. I leased a car several years ago and I was trying to get a good deal. So I spent an afternoon understanding the math behind how leases work. And I went into the car dealership and the dealer was

all kind of nervous and like shocked because they'd never met someone before actually understood the math behind leases. I went to lease another car a year or two later and I had completely forgotten everything I had learned and I had to relearn it. Now, when I relearned it, it was easier because I did have a little bit of those deeper structures ingrained there, but I didn't have the details. So if we don't use those details, they're going to fade pretty quickly in general. You know, I wonder what it means because you'll hear this all the time. People will say, oh, God, you know, Bob is so smart. Well, what do people mean when they say Bob is so smart? Is it that Bob knows everything?

Or what makes people believe that somebody is smart? You also hear people sometimes say Bob is so wise. And that means something very different a lot of the time. And I think it does come back to this idea that often people are impressed by shows of incredible mental horsepower. But people can also be incredibly impressed by someone who is thoughtful and deliberative and a good listener and sort of sees the world in a different way. And so there's a lot of different ways of being smart or being wise. And I do think that we overreact to these kind of shows of mental horsepower. Well, as you were talking, I'm thinking of people like my, I had an uncle who was just,

he was an academic. He was a professor at Yale in the economics department. You know, he skipped several grades growing up. He was so smart, but you wouldn't want him to fix your toilet. Absolutely. We as human beings have a narrow slice of the world that we can master. And some people have more aptitude than others to some extent and can master more areas or different kinds of areas. Some people do have more of a natural aptitude at certain subjects or a natural aptitude, as you said, with mechanical

know-how or with sports or whatever. But we have to just be realistic about what we as human beings can accomplish as individuals. And we shouldn't always try to be the master of everything. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to learn and pursue and try new things, because oftentimes that can be a very rewarding experience to try to do something that you think you're bad at or try to do something completely new that you've never done before. And it can be an incredible new learning experience. We're often also as human beings, one thing is, you don't know what you don't know. And so we can live kind of narrow lives where we continue to do the same thing and

feel that the world can only be seen in one way. And so looking outside of our perspective, trying new things, doing new things can be a really rewarding experience, even if we sort of know in our heart of hearts that we'll never be the best and we'll never know everything about that subject and we'll never completely master it. The pursuit and the trying can be incredibly rewarding. Well, I think your point's well taken. It seems right that human beings have areas of expertise that collectively make up a lot of knowledge, but that none of us are all that good at being smart at everything. And I don't think I want to be. Philip Greenbach's been my guest. He's an associate professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and he's author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks, Philip. Thanks for being here. Awesome. Nice to talk to you. 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 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 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. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

Early last year, in March of 2020, I had a really interesting discussion about restaurants and how often we eat out and the quality of the food in restaurants. And it was really interesting, but it was right around the time when pretty much every restaurant on the planet was shutting down because of the pandemic. So it didn't really seem to make much sense to use that interview in the podcast. The timing was just way off. But now that we're going back and eating at restaurants again, I thought I would bring that interview back to the surface. Dariush Mozaffarian is a medical doctor, a professor of medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, and he is editor-in-chief of the Tufts Health and Nutrition Letter. He's also author of a study about restaurants that was published in the Journal of Nutrition. The study analyzed the dietary selections of more than 35,000 U.S. adults from 2003 to 2016.

And I think you'll find this really interesting. Hi, Dariush. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much. It's great to be on. So explain what you were attempting to do with this study in restaurant eating. We were really interested to you know, to understand what people are doing when they go out to eat at restaurants. What's the quality of the food they eat? How often do they eat at restaurants? And this question hasn't been looked at recently. And so we looked using nationally representative data at about over the last 20 years at how often

people are eating at restaurants and what's the quality of the food that they're choosing. And what did you find? Well, so first, you know, Americans are eating at restaurants more than ever. On any given day, about one-third of American adults eat at a full-service restaurant, you know, defined as a restaurant where you'll have a waiter and sit down and have a menu. And almost half, 46% of adults will eat at a quick-serve or fast-food restaurant, you know, fast-food place or where you go pick up something at a counter and eat. Now, none of that actually includes even cafeterias and work sites. This is actual restaurants. So an enormous number of meals are being consumed at restaurants by American adults.

And when we looked at the nutritional quality of the meals based on a validated diet score from the American Heart Association, which tries to capture a balanced diet, we found that the nutritional quality of the meals was surprisingly poor. So only about 30% of fast food meals were sort of medium nutritional quality, and the remaining 70% were of poor quality with almost none of ideal quality. And when we looked even at full-service meals where you're sitting down and you think, well, maybe people are choosing healthier food. Even there, half of the meals were of poor quality and the other half were of kind of medium quality with very, very few of ideal quality. And over the last 20 years, the other disappointing fact is that that hasn't changed very much. Fast food meals of poor quality went down a little bit.

It used to be 75% in 2003, and the most recent data now it's 70%. So it's gone down from 75 to 70%. And so in contrast to Americans overall are actually eating a little bit healthier in the last 20 years, that improvement's not coming from restaurants. And so I wonder if this is a surprise to people. Are people thinking, oh, I'm eating healthy? I mean, if you go to a fast food restaurant, I don't know that you're not really expecting high quality food or nutritious food necessarily, right? Well, you know, this is what everybody's doing across all the restaurants in this country. And so you're right. If somebody goes to a typical burger place and they get a burger and fries and a soda, they know it's not healthy. But people are also going to all kinds of sit-down restaurants after

work or with their families and trying, I think, in many of those cases to think about healthier selections. And so I think it is disappointing and surprising how far off we are from restaurants providing healthy foods and how it also really hasn't improved very much in about 20 years. And I want to emphasize that our research using a nationally representative sample of about 35,000 American adults doesn't distinguish the difference between what's on the menu and what people are choosing. We didn't study menu lists. We looked at actually what are people eating.

Maybe the restaurants are putting all kinds of healthy options on the menus. If you go to restaurants, those options are there, but people aren't choosing them. Well, I've always had this belief that part of the problem is that historically, people go to restaurants as a treat. So they tend to throw out nutrition guidelines out the window because this is a treat. We splurge. But now people go to restaurants so often that they're eating a lot of meals in restaurants, but they still have that mindset of, well, we're eating out.

It's a treat. One interesting thing that we looked at was, well, maybe people are going to restaurants because they know it's a treat, whether it's a full service or a fast food restaurant. And so, you know, this is where they're going to binge. They're going to enjoy themselves. And so we grouped American adults by how frequently they went to restaurants. Was it once in a while? You know, was it sort of in between or was it more than once a day, several times a day? And we thought, well, if that's why people are making their choices as kind of a treat,

the people who go the most frequently are going to have the best choices and the people who eat very rarely are going to be the decadent ones that choose these unhealthy choices. And we, in fact, found the opposite, that the people who go rarely choose the healthiest meals when they go and the people that go the most frequently have the worst choices. And so it doesn't seem that people are thinking ahead of time, well, I'm doing this as a treat. It's just that these are the products that are marketed, that are socially acceptable, could be less expensive, that Americans are used to eating. So you're not seeing, it's not a case of restaurants are being deceptive. They're not dressing up unhealthy meals as healthy and fooling people, right? Well, our research, you know, is looking at what people are eating over, you know, almost 20 years

in a large national sample. So it has a lot of strengths. What it can't do is tell you the reasons. And so, you know, we didn't look at the marketing practices or the advertising practices of restaurants. You know, I will say that from my own experience and as a scientist and as a physician watching ads go by, you know, on your computer or on the television, there are certainly plenty of examples of deceptive practices where, you know, a hyper-processed sandwich with processed deli meat, processed cheese, processed bread, almost no vegetables at all, is billed as low-fat. You know, this only has X grams of fat, so it's good for you.

Again, our research didn't go into this, but certainly we know from other experiences there's plenty of deceptive marketing. And so what do we take away from this? I mean, if this is what people are choosing, then this is what people are choosing. Well, right now, you know, we are truly facing a national nutrition crisis. We have more diet-related disease in terms of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and likely many immune and autoimmune diseases, poor brain health in adults, poor learning in children. There's so much diet-related disease in our country, it's estimated to be the number one cause of poor health.

And our health care system, government budgets, family out-of-pocket costs, and what private businesses are paying for health care for their employees is all being drowned in rising health care costs. And so to say, well, this is what people are eating, it's no big deal, is not the right answer because we literally are in a crisis of diet-related disease. And so something needs to be done about it. And we've previously looked at overall nutrition of Americans over the last 20 years. And as I mentioned earlier, it's gotten actually a little bit better. Americans are eating a little bit more fruits and vegetables, a little bit more whole grains, sugar-sweetened beverages are going down, nuts and yogurt are going up. The changes are pretty modest, and we're still quite a ways away from where we want to be. But on average, overall, Americans' diets are actually slowly improving.

And so if that's true overall and we see that restaurants, which make up a big proportion of those calories, are not improving, it means that most of the improvement is happening outside restaurants and meals that people are buying and preparing for themselves. And so restaurants are not keeping up. And so this means that both consumers have a responsibility to choose healthier foods, but restaurants have a responsibility to make sure there's healthier options that are on the menu and change the defaults. One easy thing to do is change the defaults. If you order something instead of coming with fries as the default, it comes with a salad as a default rather than the other way around.

And then finally, I think government has a role to play. Government's paying for much of this through rising health care costs. And so governments need to create incentives and disincentives, rewards and penalties for companies that do the right thing. Like what would you have the government do? I mean, I don't want the government telling me what to eat. One example is, you know, things that are clearly harmful shouldn't be allowed. And so trans fat used to be allowed. And when we discovered how harmful it was, the FDA said, you know, this is no longer generally regarded as safe. You can't just put it in

everything. And so trans fats have largely been eliminated. In other more innovative approaches, the government could give tax policy relief for restaurants that develop and market healthier foods and could give tax disincentives. Maybe you can't take advertising as a deduction. If you advertise really unhealthy foods, you can do it. You can sell it, but you can't also reduce your taxes because you're contributing to, you know, rising healthcare costs. So I think there's innovative tax policy that could be done. And then I think, you know, part of this is also just providing education to consumers. And we have the dietary guidelines every five years. They're not, you know, extremely well-funded to then be translated to the public. And so people are pretty confused about what's a healthy diet and what they should

choose. One thing you said, well, a couple things that I would take issue with is the idea that people are confused. I don't think people are confused. I mean, they know what healthy food looks like and they know what unhealthy food looks like. If they choose unhealthy food, I don't think you're going to find that they would say, oh, I had no idea. Really? This is not healthy? I don't think there's the confusion you think there is. Well, you are much more, probably better educated and knowledgeable about these issues than the vast majority of Americans. There are many polls and many government and industry reports talking about this consumer confusion, right? Two-thirds of

Americans, for example, in a recent Gallup poll said their number one priority for preventing weight gain is to eat low-fat foods, even though the 2015 dietary guidelines said that we don't have to limit fat anymore. Low-fat diets don't help us keep our weight stable. And so people see a product that advertises low-fat, they think, oh, that must be better for me, let alone all the other things I talked about. Plant-based, it must be good for me. Natural, local, it must be good for me. So I really do think people are quite confused. Big picture, people probably know that a soda is bad and that fruits and vegetables are good. They kind of get those general contours.

But everything in between, I think people are mixed up. Yeah, well, maybe so. But the idea that low-fat food is the way to lose weight, and they came out in 2015 and said that's not necessarily so. Well, but for the previous, what, 30 years, it was necessarily so. So you can't just put out a report and have everybody just buy into it immediately and say, oh, okay, fine. You're exactly right. And this is why I think a lot more resources need to be put into educating the public through a range of ways about the changing science. Something that we haven't talked about yet that I guess I thought we would have talked about by now

in this conversation is the size of restaurant portions. That that is a big health problem because it has raised people's expectations of what a portion is, and it also allows people, when they go out and eat, to just stuff themselves because they figure, well, I'm paying for this. If I don't want to take it home, I got to eat it now. And they're eating huge, huge meals. Well, that's absolutely true. And that's, you know, a very clear economic incentive they have because food is, you know, the cheapest it's ever been in human history as a proportion of income or, you know, gross domestic product. And so at the end of the day, it doesn't cost much more for the restaurant to put a little bit more food on your plate,

especially if they're inexpensive, unhealthy ingredients. And so they put more on your plate so that they can charge a little bit more. And that's the supersizing of both not only restaurant foods but supermarket products since the 1970s is really a direct function of food being so inexpensive or the ingredients being so inexpensive. And in contrast, for many of the healthier dishes that are prepared well, they do cost more and they're harder to make. And so, you know, you're not going to get this massive portion size often of salmon

or this massive portion size of some really artfully created healthy asparagus because those things are more expensive to create that way, to get the fresh asparagus and drizzle it with, you know, excellent extra virgin olive oil and cook it just right is a lot more expensive. But at the end of the day, running a restaurant is a business. You have to give people what they want. You can't tell them what they should eat. That's not why people go to a restaurant. So if the change is going to happen, it seems you have to make people want to change, not ram it down their throat. Yeah, that's right. And so system changes are

needed to slowly shift consumer knowledge and culture and demand. So the same way we used cultural change to change habits around smoking or to change habits around people wearing their seatbelts, which were kind of unheard of in the 60s or 70s to think smoking was bad or wear your seatbelt, but now it's a cultural norm. There's a lot of things that we can do and the government should do to sort of start to change the knowledge and culture around healthy eating. And at the same time, because of those challenges, as I mentioned, government should be rewarding through tax policy or other innovation policies, investment policies. They should be rewarding companies that are trying to do the right thing because it's going to save the government

money in their bottom line. 28% of the federal budget is spent on health care and going up, and 30% of the average state budget is spent on health care and going up. And so if governments want to start to reduce that, to bend that curve and to actually start to reduce that, they need to start rewarding companies for doing the right thing. You're right. If a restaurant by itself tries to make a change, it's much harder. That being said, there are new chains, a lot of new chains that are successful and growing

that are really selling more minimally processed, healthier foods, salads and other things. But they're still a minority. Yeah. Right. Well, I think all the fast food places, the national chains offer a salad. I never see anybody order it. I mean, I'm sure people do, but that's not why people go there. Yeah. Well, having been in—I'm originally from the West Coast, but now I've been in Boston about 17 years,

so I'm not going to say this with the right accent, but it's a wicked, complex system. You're right. Well, and I've always thought, and there's so much evidence, that this whole idea of what makes a meal and portion size is... And someone explained to me that, like in the cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, they've revised the recipes for what... The recipe that now says feeds four used to say feed six, because portion

size expectations are just so much bigger now that people think that if you eat what you used to eat, that's not a whole meal. An example that I often use to think about this is cars. And in the last century, we were able to reduce deaths per mile driven in cars by over 90%, a massive success. I mean, people used to die, deaths from car accidents used to be one of the leading causes of death for many age groups in the middle of the last century. So we had this remarkable success of a pretty complicated problem, how you prevent deaths from car accidents. And if you look at what we did, we did address the driver a little bit, but we mostly addressed the product, the car. We addressed the environment, the roads, and we addressed the culture, especially around drunk driving.

And if you look at all the changes to the car, crash bags and collapsible steering wheels and shatterproof windshields and safety standards and all the different things we did for the car. All the things we did for the environment, guardrails and speed limits and rumble strips and many, many other things, the way highways curve when you go around corners, all of those things were developed over many years. And then you look at the culture change, especially around drunk driving with the designated driver campaign and Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other things. To me, that's a broad roadmap for addressing the food system. We do need to address the consumer, the driver, a little bit, and we do need to have more education. But we need to address the product,

which is all the foods that are sold in restaurants and in supermarkets. We need to address the environment, where and how we're getting food in cafeterias and sporting events and other things. And we need to address the culture so that, you know, getting a clearly terrible, unhealthy meal that's bad for you and your family is no longer culturally seen as okay or as a treat. And that will take, you know, a similar multifaceted approach that we took to car safety, which was, you know, roughly, I would say one third, this was driven by consumer demand. One third, it was driven by innovation and business competing against each other. And one third, it was driven by government regulation to say, you know, here's new safety standards for roads or for cars. Something that has always mystified me is how the concept of eating well,

of good eating, not junk, healthy eating, has had the worst press, the worst PR campaign ever. When you just say the term healthy eating, what people hear is sacrifice. I can't, I can't, it's not as good as something that isn't nutritious. And yet, a lot of nutritious food actually tastes good, and I've never really understood why no one's ever been able to come up with a fast food place that doesn't serve crap and actually serves things that are good and people will eat. But it does seem to be a big PR problem that nutritious food means sacrifice. You know, I think you're right. That's a common perception. But as you said, it's kind of like exercise. Once you start exercising regularly, you feel great and you can't ever go back. And similarly, once you really start eating

foods that are minimally processed and taste good, it's really hard to go back to unhealthy foods. Part of this is because, as you said, for 30 years, we said, okay, fat's bad for you, all kinds. Salt is bad for you no matter what. Sugar is bad for you no matter what. So it was a message of abstaining and sacrifice. We're really trying to shift the message with the science to there are really healthy things in the food supply. You need to eat these really healthy things in the food supply. Minimally processed, bioactive-rich foods like fruits, nuts, beans, vegetables, minimally processed whole grains, fermented foods like yogurt and probably even cheese are good for you.

And that really the worst things in the food supply are full of starch and sugar and salt and ultra-processed. A lot of the grains, a lot of the cereals, a lot of the crackers, a lot of the breads, that's actually probably one of the worst things in the food supply. Well, I think it's an important message, but I think it's going to be a tough battle. And the reason I think it's a tough battle is because I don't think people care in the way they need to because one meal doesn't make a difference, right? No one eats one bad meal and gets a heart attack because of that bad meal. At least I hope not.

But there is that delay that your diet affects your health later on, but it doesn't affect it now. And so it's really going to be tough to change people's attitudes, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Dariush Mozaffarian has been my guest. He is a doctor, professor of medicine at Tufts University, and editor-in-chief at Tufts Health and Nutrition Letter. And thank you for being here, doctor. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks very much. Have a good day. My son, Owen, is going through the process of getting his driver's license. He has his permit, so we spend a lot of time talking about cars and traffic and driving. And he asked me about parking lights. He said, why does this car have parking lights? So I looked it up. Originally, parking lights were intended to be used when cars were parked on narrow, poorly lit streets to alert drivers that there was a car there,

and in some countries they're still used for that purpose. Interestingly, in almost all countries except the United States, parking lights must be white. That white light is easily visible even in poor conditions. In the U.S., parking lights are typically amber to help distinguish them from white headlights or red brake lights. In the U.S., people sometimes turn on their parking lights when they feel, it's not dark enough to turn on my headlights, so I'll turn on my parking lights. However, in most places in America,

it's actually illegal to drive with your parking lights on, even during the day, because parking lights are supposed to indicate a parked car. I've never heard of anyone getting a ticket for driving with their parking lights on, but I guess technically you could. Really, you should either have your headlights on or no lights on when you drive. And that is something you should know. We deliver a lot of interesting

and useful information on this podcast, and I bet you know people who would like and benefit from all the information we provide. So please tell them about something you should know, ask them to listen, share the link, and you can feel good knowing that you're responsible for bringing at least some of those listeners to the fold. 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. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.

Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,

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