Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Hangry?

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

When you’re hungry, you’re not yourself. So say the good people at Snickers and it turns out science backs it up. Being hangry is a verifiable thing, we’re just not quite sure yet what’s going on.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is short stuff and we

finally tackle one of the most important concepts of our time, hangry. It's real. It's a thing. Yeah, it definitely is. It's not just something people say in their marriage to poke fun at their spouse or their partnership. It is something that is real and it all has to do with physiological things, the makeup of your human body and the fuel that it runs on and the fact that when you don't have it, things change. Yeah, so we're not exactly sure what, like how the mechanism, the physical mechanism of being hungry translates into anger or hostility. There's some really good theories but there is like a physiological basis for that and that when you have plenty of

glucose, blood sugar, your body uses that as energy to power all sorts of stuff. But when that's low, systems start to get kind of shut down on the periphery and sometimes one of those systems they think is self-control because self-control can often require a tremendous amount of energy and when you don't have self-control, sometimes it's difficult to be polite to some people. Absolutely. The other thing that can happen is the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that involves hormone production as well as a lot of other stuff. It gets sort of out of whack and throws hormones out of whack and can suppress serotonin, which as everyone knows, is the feel-good neurotransmitter and if you're all of a

sudden not processing serotonin, then you're probably going to get the very least moody and maybe even angry. Yes. Supposedly for your serotonin production to really take a hit, your blood sugar has to drop really quickly from like 100 milligrams a deciliter to 55 milligrams a deciliter, which that seems like a precipitous drop. Yes. And by the way, quick end show correction, we said grams of caffeine instead of milligrams. Which one was that? The energy drinks episode. We were saying people were drinking 160 grams of caffeine. Somebody wrote in and said, I'm just trying to imagine what that would feel like before my heart exploded. So anyway, back to this. Cortisol is another thing that can be a culprit. If you

have too much cortisol going on, which can happen when you have low blood sugar, that's a stress hormone. So all of a sudden you've got one thing being depleted, which is serotonin. You've got the other thing in the opposite direction, cortisol being increased. And it's pretty obvious where that's going to lead. A big fight. You know where it's going to lead? Chuck, it's going to lead us right into a commercial break. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you. It got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology,

it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we should shout out our former friends and colleagues. Well, former colleagues, still friends, I'd like to think. Sure. How stuff works for helping us out with this episode. There are multiple articles on how stuff works about hunger or being hungry. And they basically created a study bonanza that just, it's a buffet of studies trying to figure out how to prove that hunger turns into hunger. And some of them are pretty lame, actually, even though they've been published in some pretty legitimate journals. Yeah, agreed. I think what they all do though is show that hunger is real.

But yeah, some of them are great. But let's talk about them. Yeah, they're just trying to get to the design down and no one's really cracked the code yet. Like for example, there was one from 2014 that appeared in the PNAS, the journal, that studied 107 couples. They measured their glucose levels twice a day. Okay. And then to measure how aggressive they were, they said, hey, here's a voodoo doll. Do what you will with it, right? Well, a voodoo doll of your partner or spouse. I think they use married couples, but I'm sure it's the same for non-married couples. But yeah, they said, here's voodoo dolls. Here's a bunch of pins. Yeah, do what you want. And what they found was when the person was super angry, they were jamming pins all over the face and body

of their partner's doll. Right. And then they also did a supplementary thing where they put the partners in separate rooms and gave them each the ability to crank the volume up on some music in the other partner's chamber. And the ones who were hungrier used more pins in the voodoo doll and turned the decibels up higher than people who weren't hungry. And of course, they made it so that the person just thought they were turning the volume up. They weren't actually affecting the volume, which is hilarious, but man, alive. Yeah, like, take this, Emily. Like jamming pins in a doll, like cranking up bad music. Yeah, here's some nickel back for you. Are we all still making fun of nickel back? Yeah, sure. I think that's fine. Okay. Okay. I didn't know if there was like a

rehabilitation that I had not noticed. Well, I don't know. No, they're still terrible. Okay. I feel bad for those guys at the same time. Yeah, I think they're like multi, multi, multi millionaires though. And I get the impression they don't really care. Yeah, because you can't feel sorry for anyone that has a lot of money, right? No. There were some other studies here. One was from Ohio State that basically, and a lot of this is correlation, of course, and not causation, but they found that self-control was linked to glucose levels in the brain. So people who drank a beverage high in glucose was less aggressive than people who didn't. I don't know if that's like any sort of suggestion, like to drink a sugary drink

to keep you sort of chilled out. I'm not sure about this one. I'm with you. There was also one that I think linked diabetes to glucose metabolism, obviously, but that they tied it to aggressiveness and decreased self-control as well. So that kind of supports the previous study, but it's kind of surprising actually, I guess. I wonder if people who have type 2 diabetes are more prone to hangariness than other people. Yeah, maybe. This 2018 study was published by the American Psychological Association in the journal Emotion. This one, I think I understand, but I'm not positive. Here's what they did, and maybe you can explain the kicker for me. There were a couple of experiments,

and these were online experiments, so it's always a little bit janky, but they showed 400 participants an image that was supposed to kind of clearly be either positive, negative, or neutral, and then an ambiguous image. In this case, they used Chinese pictographs and then said rate that according to like how pleasant it is to you on a scale of 1 to 7, and then tell us how hungry you are. And this is where I just don't quite get what it was as far as being primed. It wasn't very well explained. Can you explain it? I can, actually. So what they did was they found that the hunger year the people were, the more likely they were to give that ambiguous image like a terrible rating. They interpreted it as negative or something like that rather than neutral or

positive. That makes sense. But they really only saw this effect when the people who were hungry had seen that negative image first. So what the researchers are saying is that when you're hungry, you feel like you're mean to somebody, but it doesn't just come out of the blue. If your spouse comes up to you and tells you how much they love you and gives you a hug, you're probably not going to react with hostility. But if you're hungry and your spouse comes up and criticizes you, there's a good chance you're going to overreact and be a jerk in response. And that is hangry. So that was kind of the upshot of what they were saying. Okay. So there's like a context basically that's to it. Yeah, exactly. There needs to be a primer for hangriness to come about. But

yes, still, if you're hungry, you're more likely to be hostile if you're primed with something negative first. All right. Well, that makes sense. There was one in Europe that is, to me, these speak to me a little bit more because they're just very, very rudimentary and that they asked people to track their emotions very simply. Track your emotions five times a day for three weeks on this app and let us know like you're eating habits at the same time. And they basically said that like 56% of your sort of negative feelings or irritability is due to the fact that your blood sugar was probably low. Isn't that nuts? 56% of your jerkiness over that week or month or whatever, three weeks can be attributed to just being hungry at the time. Yeah, I find I'm most critical of

myself as a father. And like when I just don't do the right thing as a dad is when I'm busy doing something else. And I'm like being interrupted. Like if I'm like just trying to get this work email out or something, I can like be a jerk. But I'm curious to see if food is also playing a part there. Yeah, because I mean, it could be stress or being under a deadline. But yeah, I wonder too, you're going to have to create your own study with the app and pretend you're from Central Europe too. But it's weird though, because I'm also... Emily has more of an app, is more app to be hangry than me. Food is more not important, but it has that effect on her more than it does for me. And that for an overweight guy, I can skip meals all day long. I can even do a fast and I don't

feel like it really affects my emotions that much. I mean, that sounds to me like Emily's just more sensitive to blood sugar changes than you are, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe hers just drops more precipitously than yours does. Who knows? Yeah, there may be like a literal physiological difference. Right. But the upshot of all of these studies seems to be that we lose self-control when we're hungry. And that's a big trigger for hangriness. But at the same time, they've kind of shown that you can defuse being hangry by just being self-aware. Studies have kind of investigated if you show somebody that they're mad and hungry, are they more likely to lash out and they found no? Like if you know I'm being a jerk right now because I'm hungry, then you're

probably less prone to actually follow through on your jerky behavior. Yeah. And I think that's probably true for most reasons. Like if Emily was like, hey, you're trying to get something done and you're being very impatient with Ruby, has nothing to do with hunger. I think just about self-awareness, which is always a good thing to try and model. Definitely. Just ask yourself, why do I feel this way? Be curious about yourself. There's all sorts of neat stuff you can learn. Yeah. Or stick your head in the sand and never grow. That's right. Chuck just laughed charmingly and I've got nothing else. So that means it's the end of short stuff. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my

heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.