Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Can Your Grandfather's Diet Shorten Your Life?

Episode Date: December 1, 2018

Epigenetics is a fascinating field of genetics that studies how the epigenome and environmental, nutritional and social factors affect gene expression. Josh and Chuck explain how epigenetics works in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone. Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life?

What does that even mean? Well, it turns out it's possible. And I remember when we stumbled upon this topic in June of 2010, really, really fascinating stuff for me. And it turns out it's true. There is actually, well, how about this? I'm not going to ruin it. Just give it a listen everyone.

Can your grandfather's diet shorten your life? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And I'm Josh Clark. And that makes this stuff you should know, right?

Yeah. I hope so. This is our podcast. We've been doing it for a while. And you're welcoming new listeners. Yeah, here's another one. Okay. All right.

I'm pretty excited about this one. I've been wanting to do this one for a while. You've been bugging me. Epigenetics, Chuck. Let's do it. Let's do it. The cutting edge of research, of our understanding of life, not just human, of all life. My mind was blown.

It's a pretty big deal. Yeah. Real big deal. So, Chuck, you've heard of the genetic revolution. Charles Darwin. He had a long beard. Yeah. He loved sea turtles.

That kind of thing. He used to vacation in the Galapagos, right? He wrote on the origin of the species, and it was a pretty groundbreaking book. I would say so. It was basically what he came up with was we are driven by our genes, right? We have genetic code and our DNA, and that makes us redheaded. It makes us timid. It makes us courageous.

Prone to cancer. Right, exactly. And it makes us thick-tongued, all right? Sometimes. Yeah. And we are slaves to these genes. I mean, we can do the alter and we get them from our parents, but if we find out that over time, being thick-tongued is, say, advantageous to human survival, we're all going to talk

like me, but millions of years from now, at least hundreds of thousands. Makes for good podcasting. It definitely does, and I just look for it in the future when we're all running around with robot bodies. There was another guy, and actually Darwin, just to show off once, came across a type of orchid, right? The moon orchid, I believe is what it's called, and it had a very, very deep, I guess, pistol or steam, and I can never keep those things apart, and the nectar was down in there.

And he looked at that flower and said, you know what? There is an organism out there, probably a flying organism that has a proboscis that fits perfectly into that flower. Was it the hummingbird? It was a hawk moth, and sure enough, a few years later, some point in time later, they discovered the hawk moth, and it was pretty much literally made to fit, right? There's another guy named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who I know you've heard of as well, right? And all his Lamarckian stuff.

Right. He was about 60 to 80. He was working about 60 or so years before Darwin. Right. He had his own ideas based on giraffes, right? Yes. He said that giraffes' necks grew to reach the food, but it was just over the course of a few generations, right?

Right. And that kind of flies in the face of Darwin, right, who said it takes hundreds of thousands of years. With this stuff called epigenetics that we're about to talk about today, suddenly people are starting to go back and look at Lamarck, who was kind of dismissed as a quack, and say, you know what, Lamarck may have been right in this one. Yeah. Prepare for your minds to be melted.

That's all I have to say. Let's talk about epigenetics, Chuck. Okay. And go. Josh, let's first talk about the genome. Right. I heard a computer reference analogy that I thought was pretty spot on. If you think of the genome as computer hardware, then the epigenome would be the software that

tells the computer what to do and when to do it. But in this case, the epigenome tells your cells what to do, what kind of cells to be, when to activate or deactivate. So I guess every cell, or yeah, the DNA in every cell in the human body has the exact same DNA. Yes. You have like half of your mothers and half of your fathers, and it comes together and gives you your DNA, right?

Right. And if you look at the DNA in every cell from the kind of cell that makes up your fingernail, what would that be? A keratinocyte? Sure. Okay. To a sperm cell. Right.

It's a very, very specialized type of cell. They all have the same DNA. They have the same genes in there. But what makes them different and what makes a keratinocyte and a sperm cell, those things, are the tags on those genes. So some are turned off, some are turned on, and in a specific combination you have either a keratinocyte or a sperm cell or a neuron or a cell that makes up your eyeball, all of that stuff.

Yeah. So it's essentially, it's a chemical tag that literally changes the physical structure of your genome. Right. So it'll bind tightly, let's say, to an inactive gene and make it unreadable or it'll stretch out an active gene and make it really accessible. Right. Physically changing it.

And epigenetics means above the genome because these tags, they're called methyl tags, which is what, one, hydrogen and two, carbon? Carbon and hydrogen bundles, yeah. Okay. That's a methyl group, yeah. It's a really simple compound, but they attach to the gene at a place where other proteins or enzymes normally would attach to activate it. So basically what they do is block a gene from being activated and they can silence

them. Yeah. So it's like a light switch. Literally you can turn off some genes and turn off others. Right. And the Honeybee, actually, is a pretty good demonstration of this. Did you read about Honeybees? No.

Okay. So you've got a worker bee, right? Uh-huh. Which is a sterile, kind of mindless, dumb bee that just does what it's supposed to do. No offense to any worker bees out there. Agreed. Hey, I'm all down with Mayday. Yeah.

All right. And with a queen bee, you have this, first of all, she can reproduce. She goes and kills other rival queens. Right. Kind of all sorts of other stuff that a worker bee isn't capable of doing. And what they found was a queen bee larvae are raised in this royal jelly, right? Right. Which worker bees secrete from their heads.

Uh-huh. It's this nutrient-rich jelly. So the larva grows in it. And what they found, yeah, it sounds kind of good, doesn't it? It does. Just because of the jelly part. Yeah, of course. What they found was that the royal jelly adds a methyl tag to the queen bee larvae's DNMT3

gene. Okay. And this gene is like literally the on-off switch. If this gene is on, it goes to the default worker bee, right? Right. If it's off, then all the genes that make a queen bee, a queen bee, are able to be turned on. Crazy.

Isn't it? So the epigenetics happens in bees as well. Yeah. And mice. Yes. They've done a lot of studies with mice, obviously, in the agouti gene in these mice. And they experiment with these mice affecting, basically, turning on and off the epigenetic switch.

So an un-methylated gene would affect the mouse's size and weight and then coat color. Right. So they're called fat and yellow. Yeah, instead of pork. It's just skinny and brown. Have you seen one of these things? Yeah. They're huge.

Yeah. They should all be named Wilbur. The cool thing is, though, they showed the difference between the skinny brown one and the fat yellow one. But then they also did experiments where they did half and half, like turned on half of them and turned off half of them. And they literally showed them in a sequence. I don't know if you saw this picture, but they went from fat yellow to skinny brown and

in between they got thinner and with spotted coats along the way. Crazy, like yellow and brown spotted coats. Yeah. Weird. It's that specific. Yeah. And one of the ways that they have found that they can manipulate these, what is it, aguti? Yeah, the aguti.

The aguti gene in these mice that I guess are bred specifically for this gene to be easily observed or something. Yeah, manipulated to. Is through diet. Right. So they've actually taken aguti gene mice, mothers who are pregnant, fed them a bunch of B vitamins in their diet. Yeah.

And soy, right? Yeah. Soy is a really easy grab for B vitamins, I believe, right? Fed these pregnant big fat yellow ugly mice B vitamins and their kids came out that healthy skinny brown, right? They had identical moms with the same, like aguti gene, same upbringing, same everything. Right. Just fed them the normal mouse diet without vitamin B and they had the big fat yellow

kids. Right. So diet is a really big factor in epigenetic changes. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. 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 will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Uh-huh. You know, 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, 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.

What Chuck and I are talking about right now is that science has found evidence that you can change the genetics of your children by eating B vitamins or by being abused when you're pregnant. Well, see, that's what gets me. Some of the, the diet like makes a little bit of sense, but the fact that an environmental stimulus placed on your mom or even your grandparents can affect your children or grandchildren, something you didn't even experience at all. Right.

It's kind of unfair. And actually I have to tell you the more I study this, the more worried I am for my own child or children, like really what they're finding is the decisions that you make, especially at a young age, are going to affect several generations because what you're doing is adding methyl tags. What we're talking about is pretty much the definitive answer to the nature and nurture debate. And what we're finding is both, you have nature, which is your genes, and they're very much

active, but you have nurture, which is the environment, whether it's diet, whether it's stress, whether it's lack of exercise, your body responds to these changes by saying, okay, all right, well, then we need to, if you're going to lay around and be fat, then we have to, we have to deactivate this gene. We'll punish your grandkids. And your grandkids who are trying to be normal are going to be fat little kids that live, you know, shortened lives. And this is where it came from, right?

Chuck, wasn't there, there was a study in Sweden that kind of broke this ground? Yeah. Didn't they find that it was a very isolated group of people in Sweden? And at the time they were very isolated at least where they couldn't get help from the outside world very, very readily. And I think they studied the famine, isn't that right? Well, they, they, how the famine affected the generations afterward. Well, they had like, feast or famine, it was like an agricultural town, and they looked

at these agricultural records that this town kept for some reason, like really detailed records for throughout the 19th century. And some years there was nothing in people starved death. The next year there was everything. And they found that the grandparents, the grandfathers who feasted and starved within a year of one another, their grandkids lived an average of 32 years shorter or less than it's the same, the grandkids of the same people who didn't have that kind of feast or famine experience in the same town around with the same socioeconomic conditions.

So yeah, that's three generations right there, right? Yeah. Did you hear about the Angelman syndrome and the Pratavadi syndrome? No. Don't lean on me. They, they, I saw, actually it was a PBS documentary, the, it's called The Ghost in Your Jeans. Did you watch that?

Uh-uh. Dude. It's on YouTube. It's in five, I think five or six sections of 10 minutes apiece. It's a full show. Uh-uh. Mind-blowing. Uh, they found that there's, there's these two different syndromes and I won't get too

deep into what they are, but Angelman syndrome and Pratavidi syndrome is what it's called. And they found. This sounds Italian. It's a Pratavidi. Yeah. Sorry. I dropped the ball there. Uh, basically what causes each of these is a missing piece of DNA and it can cause two

different disease, well they found it can cause two, these two different diseases that are completely unrelated depending on which parent it came from. Really? Which missing, uh, a part of the gene it came from. So basically, uh, it's as if the gene knew where it was coming from, like gene imprinting. The gene had a memory that, oh, it came from the father, so you're going to have Angelman syndrome or it came from the mother, so you're going to have Pratavidi. Right.

And this is a relatively recent discovery. We were talking about them looking at agricultural records of the, uh, 19th century in Sweden. That was a doctor named, uh, Dr. Lars Olav Bygren. But he was working in the mid-80s and he didn't really start to lay the foundation of epigenetic research until the mid to late 90s, so this is a very new field. But what they're finding and what Chuck was just saying is that your parents can pass on these epigenetic changes that happen within themselves, right? Um, and your grandparents can too.

Right. But this isn't supposed to happen. What happens when an egg and a sperm meet, right, and it's like, hey, here's my DNA. Here's my DNA. You know, they get together. There is actually a process where these specialized cells go through and basically clean the DNA of methyl tags, but they found that not all methyl tags get cleaned off. So diet can affect certain genes.

These methyl tags can be passed down and with abuse as well. Have you heard about PTSD? Yeah. Well, passed down? Yeah. They covered that in the, um, in that special as well. They did a test with, uh, pregnant women who were in New York the time of 9-11. Did you hear about this one?

Yeah. This is a really recent study, right? Yeah. And they basically found that pregnant women that experienced that were pregnant at the time the towers came down and experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, they found that their babies had lower levels of cortisol just like their moms did, which helps you deal with stress, helps you, how you deal with stress. So these little babies inherited, basically inherited post-traumatic stress disorder from

their mothers in the womb, in utero. And cortisol is a hormone and it would be produced by a gene or expressed by a gene. And how much or how little is expressed depends on whether that gene is silenced, whether it's altered and that alteration comes from methyl tags, which can be passed down. So PTSD can be passed down, right? Yeah. And they're, what they're speculating now that, and this is obviously speculation because these kids are still young, but they're speculating that it's going to happen to their kids as

well. And that's going to be the real, like, gold nugget. Right. They're, they're, they do go away eventually, they think. Oh, really? Methyl tags. Well, they have in like fruit flies, with fruit flies, it's like 400 generations. But fruit flies have a generation every like five minutes, you know?

And then I think with mice, it's like 40 generations or something like that. And with humans, they expect it to be somewhere around three, maybe a few more. Oh, really? And then, yeah, because what's happening is our bodies are responding to environmental cues to change. And then after those environmental cues go away, the body's like, oh, okay, well, we can go back to normal now and get rid of this methyl tag. So we've got nutrition.

Right. You are what you're, you are what you eat, you are what your parents ate, you are what your grandparents ate. And then there's things like stress. Yeah. Which, parenting. Right. And yeah, I think they found with mice, mice mothers that didn't nurture their kids or

nurse their kids, raise kids, produce kids that were kind of jumpy and I guess had the mice version of PTSD and they theorized that the, the body had undergone an epigenetic change to prepare these mice for a stressful life, stressful life where they need to be on guard. Right. Exactly. Which if you think about it, Chuck, I wrote a blog post about this, it's possible. What we call PTSD is an epigenetic change that says you live in an environment where

you can't just, you can't relax. Right. So we're going to make you jumpy. You're going to be edgy and you're going to have flashbacks so that you're always, you know, on point and it's the result of an epigenetic change from a stressful event. Yeah. And the same, yeah, I think you mentioned abuse earlier. They found that one out of every five suicide victims was a victim of child abuse as well.

Yeah. So they're still kind of theorizing now, but they think there's a positive correlation there between, like you said, stressful upbringing and, and epigenetic change. Right. So what else? Well, do you, I mean, are we going to talk about the good, what could be good about this potentially? Yes.

Cause it could be really good. We're talking about, and it's still early going, we're talking about potentially curing things like Alzheimer's, cancer, mental disorders, multiple sclerosis. You name it. Thick-tonguedness. Yeah. Potentially being able to cure this because you can't, they found that it's really hard to fix like a cancer cell.

And so what the doctors are thinking now is it's really hard to, to fix a cancer cell, but it's a whole lot easier to turn these epigenetic switches on and off, which may in turn help defeat cancer. Right. Like you want to get a tumor suppressing gene going. Yeah. And then, but you want to get a cellular growth gene turned down a little bit. Right.

Like that. And that you just cured cancer. Yeah. This, this one doctor put it like this. And it's almost like a diplomacy instead of a war. Like you'll go tell the cell, Hey, you're a good human cell. You don't need to behave this way. You should not be behaving this way.

Yes. It's called as a cytidine. Looks good to me. As a cytidine. It was originally marketed for something else entirely, probably Alzheimer's, everything was. And then they come up with, they figure out that it's actually turning down these growth cells or these growth genes.

And they say, Hey, how about we use this for leukemia? Right. Bada boom, bada bing. There you go. Yeah. People all of a sudden in remission where they hadn't been before. Right. So it's pretty, pretty startling.

Yeah. It's still in the early stages though. Right. The other thing too is you can, you can, it's, it's easier to fix the epigenome. That's the good news as we move forward. It's also a lot easier to mess up your own epigenome, diet, diet and smoking and things like that. Yeah.

There was a, the guy who is studying Sweden hooked up with a guy who proposed the entire field of epigenetics in 1996. And then they got together with another researcher who was running that. You remember the framing, Framinghamton? Farmington. Is it? Farmingham. Framingham.

Yeah. The, the Massachusetts study, the heart study. Yeah. It's like 40 years long or something. Right. Remember Great Britain's version of it? It's like the Avon longitudinal study. Yeah.

Okay. So this guy had a friend who had access to these, these files. And what they found was that 166 fathers in the study started smoking around age 11. And so they started looking at these, these guys and found that their kids were shorter and fatter and just generally unhealthy than other kids, even controlling for other factors as well. Wow. So smoking is a problem.

Drugs are a problem. Sure. Cocaine-addicted mice pass memory problems on to three generations of their offspring. Yeah. It said that cocaine especially, triggers epigenetic changes that affect like hundreds of genes at the same time. Yeah. So.

Because memory is just such a complex process. Yeah. So don't do cocaine. No. And don't smoke. It's just a bad idea, especially at a young age. And Chuck, there's a project underway, you know, remember the human genome project completed in March of 2000.

Yeah. Which is now that they're kind of like, pfft. Exactly. There was a, did you read this time article? No. At the end of it, the author is talking about the epigenome project. That's the big daddy. Right.

And he was saying that the human epigenome project is going to make the human genome project look like the homework that 16th century school kids did on their abacuses. So think about this. What they found in the human genome project is 27,000 genes that were mapped, right? Right. Just, just fiddling with these combinations increases the map that needs to be created exponentially. Right.

Like Domino's Pizza has 27 ingredients that produces, they do, I went and counted, produces 88 million different combinations from 27. Wow. Imagine 27,000 ingredients. How many different combinations does that produce? Sure. This is the scope of the human epigenome project that's underway now. Wow.

What, what about pizza hut with all their like stuff crust and eat it backwards and the ingredients are underneath your pizza and. Probably even more stuff. Yeah. But I think Domino's has more pizza because they've got like the Philly cheesesteak one and they have like the cheeseburger, the bacon cheeseburger, which is really good. Yeah. They do like the Reuben sandwich pizza.

That would be very good. That would be good. Yeah. So epigenetics is changing everything. I think at its core, it's going to, it's going to point out that all of our understanding of medicine is just an odd way of describing an epigenetic change. Yeah. You know, like psychology, psychiatry.

Yeah, I predict that our future and complete understanding of humanity is going to be a combination of sociology and epigenetics. So we, we thought we were on to something with mirror neurons, but forget what we said. I'm just kidding. Actually. Yeah. I think that you could probably explain that epigenetically and with sociology as well. Have you heard of this guy, Dr. Bruce Lipton?

No. He is, uh, he's got a documentary out called the living matrix. And at first I was reading him, I was like, wow, this guy's really on to something. But then I started reading other people saying, this guy's a quack. Oh yeah. Yeah. He basically, he's a big epigenetics guy, but he thinks that your brain can essentially change your genetic expression by manipulating the epigenome.

Like just concentrating. He thinks the placebo effect could potentially be explained by this and like a spontaneous remission and cancer, spontaneous combustion, spontaneous remission, obviously is when you go into remission with no known cause, not from, you know, any treatment. And he says, this is explained because you're, you have a profound change in your perception of your life and what life is all about. And that can potentially alter the epigenome. Well, you could also make a case that this guy, what this guy is talking about is decreasing

stress, which stresses wreaks havoc on us and could create methyl tags and alter gene expression. Maybe he's just using a quacky way of describing, lowering your own stress levels by increasing self-confidence. Yes. Interesting. When you see these people though and you watch a YouTube video and you think, wow, my gosh, that's the secret to the future.

And then you see all these other people that go, that guy is such a quack. Yeah. But at the same time, you could, you could say, well, maybe those other people are unimaginative. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. This episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. 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. Ah, 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 will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander 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, 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. So if you want to learn more about epigenetics, I strongly recommend University of Utah's website. It, um, have you been on it, Chuck? Yeah. Why didn't you recommend that to me? It did.

Did you see it? I don't think so. I did. Oh, there's like a month ago when we, uh, yeah, you can turn up gene expression, turn it down. There's like, um, a lot of foods that you should eat if you want to alter yourself epigenetically, especially if you're pregnant. Or go to YouTube and watch the ghost in your genes from PBS.

It is literally mind blowing. Well, not literally. People always say literally. Yeah. It's figuratively mind blowing. You might just explode. Talk about changing your genetic expression. And if you want to read some very beautiful prose on epigenetics, uh, shock full of flight

simulator references, read, uh, how epigenetics works by typing epigenetics in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, indeed, Josh. Josh, you remember Sarah, the amazing 11 year old fan? It's not 11 anymore. Who captured our hearts when she first emailed early on in the days of podcasting. Yes, I do. Like she was one of the first fans actually.

Yeah. The amazing 11 year old fan is now Sarah, the amazing 13 year old fan. Gosh. I know. I feel so old now. We've been doing this a while. Well, yeah. And we should keep like once a year, we should update people on Sarah's age.

And then when she grads, if we're still doing this in five years, when she graduates college, we should go like, uh, or a high school. Yeah. We should go to her graduation or something. We should give the commencement speech. We should. I call valedictorian. Well, yeah.

And the principal would be like, who are you guys? Yeah. Can we get security in here? We'll say I'm the valedictorian. He's a salutatorian. What do you mean? Uh, so this comes from Sarah. She checks someone this from time to time and she's still just as cute at 13.

She's not all bratty now that she's a teenager. Hello to some of my favorite people. Today I earned some strange looks from people about my knowledge of Legos or Lego bricks. I also tried making a sphere of Lego, but I couldn't figure it out. Also today's my birthday. I'm really excited that I'm finally a teen yahoo. Do you remember what I asked for and what she asked for? She's got a blog now and she asked if one of us could comment on her blog and I went

to her blog and commented in her blog is basically her and her little friend talking back and forth to each other about stuff. How cute. Do they dot their eyes with hearts? No. Well, I don't think you can do that, but it is really, really cute. And I'm actually going to encourage people to go to her blog. I hope she gets mad traffic.

And her blog, Josh, is sarahlovesaustraliancommercials.webs.com and here's the clincher. It is S-A-R-A-H. There's no W-W-W, right? No. And she misspells Australian. All over the place. All over her blog. Which makes it even cuter.

She spells it A-U-S-T-R-A-I-L-I-A-N. So it's like O-S-T-R-A-L-I-N. A-I-A-N. Right. She spelled the whole U-R-L. H-T-T-P, colon slash slash S-A-R-A-H-L-O-V-E-S-A-U-S-T-R-A-I-L-I-A-N-C-O-M-M-E-R-C-I-A-L-S dot webswebs.com. And I hope people go by there and check it out. I hope so too.

So she turned 13. She says, by the way, can you please not tell Kristen, Molly, or Katie that I think you guys are better than them? I think that would be kind of like bragging. It would be kind of like bragging, which is why we would never do it. We would never tell them, and they, I'm sure they don't listen to our show, so they'll never know. And then she closes, and this is Emily, just thought this was the cutest thing ever.

Well, so long, farewell, our alveeter saying goodbye, adieu, adieu to you and you and you. And then in front of the seat she says, in case you didn't know, that was from the sound of music. Yeah. So long, farewell. Yeah. And that's one of Emily's favorites. Well, you should sing the rest of it too, adieu, adieu to you and you and you.

So Sarah, happy birthday. You're awesome. You're a dedicated fan. Clearly she is. We just think you're super cool. And good luck with the blog. If you do learn how to dot eyes with heart, we want to know Sarah. Happy birthday to you.

If you want to become a fan who's captured our hearts, send us something interesting. We want to, we want another super fan. And be a cute little kid, otherwise you're not going to capture our hearts. That helps as well. Broken English doesn't hurt too. True. You can send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 band or each week to guide you through life. 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.