The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Fletcherize Your Life, Wawa Origins, Who's Your Zaddy?

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from choosing your zaddy to the origin of (arguably) the best gas station convenience store in the history of the world. (Yes, Wawa.) Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Perbita Saha. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. Welcome, everyone.

Thank you. Another wonderful weird week for us. And before we get into the weirdest thing I learned this week, I want to take a second to thank a few of our listeners. I want to thank all of our listeners because it's great that you're just giving us your time and attention every two weeks. We love hearing from you on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. And we hope that you will keep sending us your thoughts and prayers. But we want to especially thank a trio of listeners who, who go above and beyond, who are the weirdos among the weird.

One of them, we already mentioned previously on the show, Karen Patty, was our first ever sponsor, individual sponsor, our first listener supporter. You can do this on Anchor through the app or on the anchor website. You can contribute 99 cents a month. And it turns out we have another 99 cent a month contributor, Ronald Wayne Salah.

So thank you for that. We really appreciate the help. And five times as many thank yous to Damien John Murtag who gives $4.99 a month, which I just found out now. And maybe you've been doing it for a long time. But we so don't expect people to support the show financially that I had not checked in a while. So that means a lot. And listeners, if you have $0.99 or, dare I say it, $4.99 or, gosh, $9.99 to give us every month, it does really. help us keep the show going. So we appreciate it. And, you know, if you can't kick us any money, just send us nice things on Instagram and Twitter. It makes us happy. We love to hear from you. And with that, we'll get into the show. So on the weirdest thing I'm in this week, we start by offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, preparing for our next book club, et cetera. And we decide which one

we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Eleanor, why don't you start with your teeth? I want to talk about how many people aren't actually biologically related to their fathers without their knowledge. Oh, wow. Heavy. Are you going to make us all question our existence? Yes. Yes.

That is the goal. 100% of us will question if we're related to our fathers. and an undisclosed to be announced percentage actually won't be. Cool. Well, you know, send us a voice message if this episode causes terrible secrets to come to light in your family. On this episode of Jerry Springer. Pramita, how about you? What's your tease?

My story is a little less juicy, but more cheesy. It's about the origins of this is going to be a controversial opinion, but America's favorite convenience store chain, Wawa. Oh, yeah. No. No, no controversy here. Wow. Wawa all the way.

Oh, wow. Every time I'm in New Jersey, even if I'm not into a part of New Jersey where there are a ton of wawas, where I grew up, Wawba was like Starbucks is here in New York City. Like, it was, you might accidentally go meet your friend at the wrong Wawa because there were too many. Okay, well, that's wonderful. I'm really excited. My story is about a man who just wanted us all to masticate. as much as possible. I'm afraid.

I told Eleanor she would hate this one. I hate that word. I was not wrong. I hate that contact. So what should we start with? Maybe I think I want to start with the potentially life wrecking one, Eleanor. Okay, great. I know mine will potentially wreck your life, but this will affect the masses.

So, I mean, you know how it goes. It's 2020 now. You get a 23 and me gift for Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever. and it destabilizes your whole family. There's been this phenomenon that's been like fairly well reported on over the years of increasing numbers of people finding out that their families are not what they thought they were after they've had these take-home genetic ancestry tests. It's the plot of that book, Inheritance, which is a memoir about how genetic testing revealed

that people were not related as they thought, and it's also the plot of real life. So, you know, with these tests, basically what you do is it's typically like a cheek's swab, right? And you send it in. And a lab is able to very efficiently sequence your DNA, something you couldn't have really done, like, 20 years ago. But now you can do it for like a few bucks. And so they're able to see, you know, inside your genes. And they'll turn back like some scary, you know, some very obviously scary results. Like sometimes you might find out that you have like the brachia gene for cancer and you just get that in the mail because that's how they do it. They just mail you stuff and then hope you can deal with what happens next. Do you have to opt into

the health information or no? Yeah, you do, typically. And then there's also usually like, if you get them online, it's like you have to like scroll through a separate thing and like check off a box being like, I'm okay. I'm sure I want this information. But like nobody actually, it doesn't give people pause. In fact, it just makes people like impatient because they're like, why isn't this one available? Yes, you find these things out. But you can also uncover family secrets. So back in 2005, a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health did this sort of meta, they did this meta review, these researchers. And they found that even in the very early days of testing when looking at all of the available data, probably one in 25 dads isn't the biological parent of the kid in question. That's a lot of non-dads.

So their median finding was 3.7% of dads or not the dads, according to the literature available at that. time. But what is it to have, Eleanor? That's a great, that's a great point. A biological donor is what's really under question here. Your dad is your dad, whoever you decide that is. Wow. Now all I'm thinking about is all of the men that I refer to as Zadis. Those are the men I have chosen to be my Zaddies and my Zadis, they shall stay. Adam Driver. Yeah. I see, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call him a Zaddy's. I'm very pro. I just, that's not, so for me, like.

What makes him not a zaddy? It's just, wow, what a question. What constitutes a zaddy? I think, I think it starts from me with, like, hair color. Like, he doesn't have any gray. Right. I think a zaddy has to have some gray. So, like, at the end of, sorry, spoilers for Detective Pikachu coming up.

But at the end of Detective Pikachu, when Ryan Reynolds shows up in a sweat. and glasses and tastefully going gray, I was like, zaddy. That's the zaddy. I think, yes. Okay, I accept that definition now. But hey, the point was, your zaddy is your zaddy, whoever you choose. So, yeah, you know, we're, you know, it's complicated. But yeah, they were, so basically they were looking at all these analyses and the median

was about 3.7, rounded to 4%. And you get 1 in 25 people or not the biological parent they thought they were. When you discover this on 23 and me, they call it a non-paternity event, which is a hilarious name for radioactive fallout in your family. And so it's been really, it's interesting to think about this when you realize that at this point, as of the start of 2019, so a full year ago, 26 million people had done these at-home ancestry tests. So that's a lot of non-paternity events. Yes. And there has been some evidence that the DNA test, ancestry test market has been slowing down, which is interesting. I think it kind of makes sense.

Like when you think about it, like the people who really want to know have probably already sent in their cheeks swab. It's just saturated. Yeah. Like everybody else is clearly not doing it for a reason. So I'm curious, have you guys, have any of you done it? I did 23 and me like back before any of us knew any better. I was like actually, so it was, yeah, it was like a decade ago. Okay.

And I was still in college. Yeah. And I was like, I'm going to be a science writer. Mom, Dad, can I do 23 and me? And write about it? I wasn't going to write about it. I just wanted to do a fun ancestry test because I don't know. I thought I would see something interesting.

But it turns out I'm just half Italian and half Eastern European Jewish mutt. And I knew that already. So nothing revelatory there. Have you done it? I haven't done it, and I don't know what kind of answers I would be looking for. Like, ancestry is not as important to me, just because I'm pretty sure I'm full-blown Indian. But I like the ones that are, like, curated to, you know, your, like, microbiota and look at your poop. And I don't know.

Yeah. I would be curious what scientific claims they can pull off of those. Definitely. The more niche things being developed. Yeah. I've never done it, but my, so my dad and his brother both did it in like, well, must have been like 2008 or something. So, yeah, like similar timeline. And things were not great yet.

I mean, there are still a lot of mistakes that happened. But it was weird. They, they, they, it didn't challenge that they were related, but it gave them completely different results. So like we like know that we know when our family immigrated from Ireland. And nonetheless, my uncle came back. is like Iberian and like all of this like weird. That's a lot of the same letters. Yeah.

There. I never thought of that. It was just a typo. And then my dad came back with like the expected results. Sure. But yeah. So, you know, there are some issues. But it's getting better and better at telling you when your dad's not your dad.

But that's not the only crazy stat. So when I was looking into this and sort of these family dramas, according to Pew, a quarter of people who do DNA testing find relatives they didn't. know about, which, so that's one and four people are going to, like, turn up, like, maybe a distant cousin. But also, obviously, some people turn up much closer relations. Sure. They find out that they have, like, siblings or half siblings that they didn't know about. I was reading some stories, like, there was one in the cut about this couple who had been married for 38 years, and then they did these ancestry tests, and they found out they were

third cousins, which, as we've discussed, as I am famous for on the Arrested Development inner webs, you can marry your third cousin. And that's okay. But they were quite surprised. Sure. It's something that you probably don't want to find out by accident. No. That's just close enough to be off-putting.

Yes. If you weren't expecting it. Yes. If you were like, fifth cousin, I'd be like, oh, stop being dramatic. You're like literally not related. Yeah. Third cousin. Yeah.

There are like family photos somewhere of your shared great, great whatever. So, like, that's uncomfortable. Definitely. But it's also okay. But it's also okay. Well, their son immediately was like, do I need to get genetic counseling? No. And, yeah, as we all know, those of us who watch cheddar.

Eleanor got, for listeners who don't know, Eleanor wrote an article about how it's, like, really okay from a biological standpoint to have kids with a cousin. Obviously, inbreeding is a problem as it shrinks the genetic pool. You have fewer variations in your genes, which makes you more susceptible to having a bunch of damaged copies of a gene and having some resulting illness or does not being resilient to things because you don't have a lot to work with genetically. Just look at purebred dogs. You understand. But that only happens like when people and places have made a habit of inbreeding. And really like one-offs are generally fine, especially the farther off you get. But Eleanor covered this for us and then was on this web TV show Cheddar talking about it.

And there was a screenshot of Eleanor's face with the banner beneath it. Mary your cousin. Is it okay? Or something like that. Then somebody, I think it's splinter. Splinter. Resin piece. They wrote a very, like, salty thing about it.

I think it was literally called like interesting things happening on cheddar today. It was just my face with this embarrassing, like, go ahead and marry your cousin, like banner. And then to my great delight, the Arrested Development, Twitter account, and Reddit community latched onto it because of the marry your cousin maybe plotline. So it all worked out in the end, but it was mildly mortifying. Back to the actual topic of your fact today. I think it's really, you know, I have seen a bunch of stories about these like finding hidden. siblings and stuff. And I think it is so interesting to think about how much easier it was to have like totally secret families before the age of the internet. Because like I feel like most

families, I mean, maybe this is just an Italian thing, but like every family I know had some uncle or cousin who it's like, well, everybody knew that he had another woman in Tulsa. Always in Tulsa. And, you know, the whole, like, traveling salesman with another family trope, whatever. But I think, like, all of these stories are really putting into context, like, how easy, maybe not easy, but how possible it was to balance that when if people lived far away from each other, they just, like, wouldn't find out and would have no way of knowing.

And it's like just a couple generations removed from when that was really easy to do. So, yeah, there are a lot of, I feel like it's becoming less and less common for your family to have a rando that you don't know about. Yeah, you can't get away with it to the same degree. People would just be Googling their dads and be like, what the fuck? What have you done? Yeah, I feel like, too, a lot of the reason that this comes up seems to be linked to sperm donation, which makes sense. because initially it was supposed to be a secret. Like you were never supposed to tell anybody.

It was supposed to be this thing where it was like you don't ever have to talk about it. Like we can just get you this vial. Like you'll have a bio, you'll have this child who's not biologically related to you, but you never have to say that unless you want to. And so I think that there's like also a lot of cases where this is coming up because people, you know, had been planning on not really talking about that with their kids. And then their kids get a 23 and me test.

and it all falls apart. I just have to, this is like such a tangent because they didn't find out about this through sperm donation, but there was a really amazing episode of The Cut on Tuesdays where they were talking about this couple. And so these two women to have a kid got a sperm donor. And like their son was like playing in the neighborhood and met this other kid who he like really took an affinity to and looked kind of like. And then that kid's moms came over.

So the moms are talking. And they're like, oh, is it like donor like? 24601 and they were like Jean Valjean. Is it? And they were like yeah. So the kids were siblings

but then the thing that happens in this episode is that happens like four more times and this sperm donor was just like really like popular in this community in L.A. so all of these women had had kids with the same sperm donor.

So their son like found this kid at the playground. He found a kid in his kindergarten in class like he was just collecting siblings. Well and you could see like once you project that out to like high school, then that's where you end up with half siblings accidentally dating each other. Yes.

Yes. There are reasons definitely, like I was saying, I understand why originally, you know, people thought that they wouldn't have to talk about sperm donation, but there are really important reasons to be transparent about your biological material, right? Because like you do have these cases. So Elizabeth Wurzell, who was a writer, she wrote Prozacconation, and she recently died. And so I was reading obits of her. and her mom had cheated on the person that she thought was her biological father.

And the other guy knew and was in her life. He was kind of like a godfather figure to her. And when he died, his wife called her and was like he was your biological father. And he died from the brachia gene, which she inherited and is why she died from breast cancer. So it's like you need to know these things so you can make informed decisions. Like it's important. Yeah. If not even just so that you don't scare your family with a child.

23-and-me-me test. Like, there are other reasons. But yeah, because it's sperm donation is so often a part of this now, I wanted to look into sperm donor rules. And apparently you can go in two or three times a week. Yeah. And you can fill two or three vials at a time. So you can just, you really can father, like an army. An army of kids who maybe don't even know they're related. This New York Times story I was reading says that you can make $1,500 a month going in like twice a week. What? Yeah. And you can definitely make... I think you can make more than that. More if you become, yeah, if you're someone who is like sought after. Like a WinkleVi.

They have Bitcoin, but just as a backup. So then the one other thing I thought was really interesting was one of the researchers involved in that 2005 study that came up with this like roughly 4% number was saying like, you know, we just have to make counseling around this like widely available. And honestly, that still really hasn't happened. Yeah. So 15 years later, you know, people are just making sort of all kinds of strange discoveries. And, like, you know, that's fine. Like, you can choose, you can choose to learn those things. But often, I think people need more support with the results than they think they will.

Yeah. That was my story. Your dad's probably not your dad. Thank you. Just kidding. Statistically speaking, though, someone listening, that is true of you. Yeah. But it's okay.

Yeah. Pick your daddy. Pick your daddy. And stick with them. All right. We're going to take a quick break. and then we'll be back. Okay, we're back.

And Pramita, please tell us about Wawa, the greatest place in the world. Okay, so two out of three people sitting in here, well... Two out of three hosts. Producer, erasure. Yeah, what...

Okay, I'll start that over. Well, two out of four people sitting in this room today are from New Jersey, and the other two are, from very different parts of the country. So they might need a little catching out. I don't know. Please.

I've seen a Wawa. That's a good start. But, you know, most people know New Jersey for its highways. There was a recent study by, I mean, you can count your sources, but a libertarian think tank that ranked our roads to hell the worst out of any states based on traffic, fatalities, potholes, you name it. But, you know, nothing beats classic Jersey Road rage than pulling off the highway and hitting up a wah-wah. It's true. It's just a ginormous chain of convenience stores. There's 850 of them.

Wow. Not enough. Not enough. Probably still spreading like tuberculosis from the Garden State all the way south to Miami-Dade County in Florida. Wow. And the surprising thing is they all started from one little county. farm just west of Philadelphia. So yeah, we're going from hoagies or heroes, depending on where in New Jersey you're from.

Huggies, excuse me. There is also a cool story about why Hougies are named Huggies, but I don't know. I guess people can just look it up. To heifers. And the scoop is that the company started in the 1800s, and at first it was a metalworks factory, because that's what people did during the Industrial Revolution. And then a textile manufacturer, also spicy. But finally, by the end of the 1800s, the owner, George Wood, was like, okay, I'm going to settle down in Pennsylvania and buy a couple caps.

So he bought up a farm in Wawa, Pennsylvania, and that was the beginning. Yes, it is. I was wondering if, like, the Industrial Revolution part was also named like Wawa, like Wawa metal or like something like that. But it's the town. Yeah. So that was, yeah, the company itself claims its origins from this iron factory, but it wasn't actually called Wawa back then. So that's a little bit revisionist, but. I like it.

To each their own. Their own daddies, you might say. So, yeah, he started this little dairy farm. and the cows he selected were very special. He shipped them in from the Channel Islands, which is a very scenic archipelago off the northern coast of England, and they are called Guernsey cows. So they're very fancy.

They're from Western France, and they were important to the island because they had these beautiful, like, red and white patchy coats and were selectively bred over time to produce a very rich golden-tinged, milk. So if you go to a fancy coffee shop nowadays, golden milk, M-Y-L-K, might be like a turmeric-style, I don't know, latte, priced at $7. But this was like actually gold-colored milk. Say Gregory's by name.

So the reason the Guernsey cows produce this very rich-looking milk is it's full of carotines, which is a pigment that comes out of the plants that they eat. I don't really know what carotines do to people. Like, there are rumors that if you eat too many carrots, turns your skin red orange. Jess is nodding very heavily. You are what you eat. I really like carrots. One time I was really nervous that that was true.

And I looked up the myth and I couldn't have had any evidence. So, jury's still out. Perfect. It is how birds turn orange and red. They just eat a lot of carrots. teens and that's a good thing. That makes them hot. That makes the ladies be like, all right, I'm going to have sex with you. That was also my thought process with the carrots. You can get the same effect by covering yourself in Cheeto dust if you want.

Very sexy. So, okay, so George Wood brings over these cows and pretty soon he realizes that this post-retirement life that he's creative for himself is in fact actually going to going to be profitable and just going to become another business. So he converts the farm into a processing plant and starts up a line of adorable horse-drawn dairy wagons and starts selling his milk around town and then beyond town. He also marketed the milk he was selling as doctor certified. Nothing meant anything. Exactly. Definitely a made-up label.

But still continued to be used by. you know, the dairy lobby in marketing today. And he and his family wrote out this delivery business until the 1960s. When people started going to supermarkets and being like, okay, we don't want lukewarm lactose delivered to our front doorstep anymore. But one of the grandkids was like, all right, we're going to also ride this trend. And they turned the dairy farm into a food market. And that was the first Wawa.

Wow. And now you go to Wawa and you can get hot stuffed pretzels, voodoo chips. Really good hoagies. Really good hoagies that you make, like, assemble yourself using a touch screen. When I was in college once I was up in Western Mass where they do not have Wawa. And I ate like a sandwich from a gas station convenience store. Not because I thought it would be as good as Wawa, but because my frame. of reference for what I could expect from a sandwich at a gas station convenience store was so

blown. Right. Like it didn't occur to me. You thought it'd be food. I thought it would be food. Yeah. Because at Wawa, it's not just food. It's great.

I mean, is it great food? No. But it's food and it's great. It's all about context. Yeah. It's like a subway sandwich. It's like it is assembled per your specifications on the touchscreen. So yeah, it's really, I can't stress enough to people who have not experienced a Wawa.

It's a sandwich at a gas station that you actually want to eat. And wow. That's a feat. What a concept. It is unbelievable as someone who's not from here. It sounds crazy. Everybody loves the Wawa. I need you to pull over to this gas station so I can buy a sandwich.

Yeah. And you realize when someone asks you why you like Wawa, you can't quite explain it, but you keep raving about it. It truly is a cult. Right. You don't know why you. been indoctrinated, but you just are. So yeah, they ended up, the company ended up selling this dairy farm and their especially French English imported cows. But they do buy up 92 million quarts of milk each year from Pennsylvania local farms to make their coffee and other cheap,

but shockingly delicious food items. I should say that Wawa is not perfect. She's struggling with this. As most things aren't, this is a horrible confession. They did have a very big credit data breach recently that my mom immediately called me and grilled me on how many times I'd been to Wawa in the past year and made me read back my credit card statements to her and I was like, Mom, I got this. I can tell when there's suspicious activity. But if you are also a Wawa frequenter, definitely go on.

online and read up on that and make sure. I was so scared of what you were going to say. I thought you were going to tell me some ethical pitfall. And like, you know what? You know who else had a huge data breach? Equifax. And I never went to Wawa and said, I'm trusting you with my data. I just bought a hoagie.

So I feel I don't take, I don't put that up that. But yeah, check your stuff. I feel like the whole state of New Jersey had that conversation. Like Bruce Springsteen called his accountant. It was like because there's been a Wawa breach. How bad is it, man? He will definitely write a song about it. And it will sound good because it's Bruce Springsteen.

So the actual site of the farm in Wawa, Pennsylvania, the family donated it to a natural land trust. And now it's just a public hiking spot that you can go wander the three miles of trails. You can go birding. And for those who don't know, I love to go look at birds in random places, and I will definitely be hitting up Wawa, Pennsylvania soon. But one little piece of irony that I liked is that you can see Canada geese there,

which you can pretty much see Canada geese anywhere in the U.S. But the name Wawa, which Eleanor was waxing poetic about, the name Wawa means Canada goose in a local Algonquian dialect. Whoa. So that's why their logo has a Canada goose on it. That's cool. It is, once you know the meaning behind it, it is a beautiful name. Yeah.

And this is actually my favorite nugget of the story. When I reached out to Wawa's PR team, this wonderful woman named Lori sent me some historical documents. And I will read verbatim. Oh, my God. Just like a majestic flock of Canada geese flying synchronously in V-Formation, Wawa employs the principles of teamwork, group consensus. and encouragement. Oh, my God. That's beautiful.

They're good. And now you are part of the cult. You're also indoctrinated. There we go. Jess is still undecided. I'm neutral. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about the great masticator, Horace Fletcher. That is what people called him. I didn't make that up. So he was a little. a self-taught nutritionist known as, you guessed it, the Great Masticator at the turn of the 20th century. Have either of you guys heard of Fletcherism before? No.

What? Okay, so Horace Fletcher had a whole diet paradigm that he marketed that revolved around chewing. He just thought that if you chewed your food way, way more than the average person does, It could make you eat less. You'd save money because you were buying less food. Like as a household, you would lose weight. You'd be healthier. You'd enjoy food more.

He thought it would solve all of your problems. Okay, now that you say it, I've heard it. I think my grandmother practiced this at some point. I didn't know how to name. It was super popular. So like a lot of grandmas probably were really into Fletcherism. And in some ways, it was way more sensible than most fat diets today. It basically, if you really just stripped it to its core thesis, it was about mindful eating, learning to recognize true hunger.

So we'll get into more details on the diet in a minute. But Horace Fletcher was an interesting dude because he left home in Massachusetts at 16 and he had a bunch of different jobs. He like managed an opera house, I think. He did some like art curation. He had odd jobs, but they were all like. white collar odd jobs. And then he started to deal with indigestion and weight gain around age 40. And so he was thinking about like, what can I do to make myself healthier and change my life? And that's how he came up with Fletcherism. Wow. Which is a terrible word. Bad. So I have a couple of passages from his book

Fletcherism, colon, what it is. No. Which was a bestseller. That's a meme. He made like a million dollars selling this book. What it is. You know it would be great if he spelled out the colon. Yes. It wasn't the punctuation. Yes. So there's this one part of the book where, you know, it's an intro to his philosophy, if you will. And there's this header that says, what do I eat? When do I eat? How much do I eat? He says, my answer to all these questions is very simple. I eat anything that my appetite calls for. I eat it only when it does call for it and I eat until my appetite is satisfied and cries enough, which was in italics with an exclamation point, just to be clear. So I say to all who ask me these questions,

as applied to themselves, I cannot advise you appropriately what to eat, when to eat, nor how much to eat. Neither can anybody else trust to nature absolutely and accept her guidance. If she calls for pie, eat pie. If she calls for it at midnight, eat it then, but eat it right. And what it is. That's where the weird part comes in. Because up until then, this is just mindful eating, right? It's like, don't eat just because you're bored or you're sad. And that I can totally get behind.

Learning to actually know when your body needs fuel and to really like appreciate that fuel and take it in mindfully is great. And that is actually like the most healthy way to eat. Unfortunately, Horace Fletcher was not totally right about how to go about doing that. there's a reason that people into his diets were often referred to as being in the chew-choo cult. Oh my God. You were supposed to chew all your food until it was literally liquid. That's disturbing. And if you couldn't like tip your head back and have it run down your throat, you were supposed to spit it out.

I'm sorry, Eleanor, I told you. I told you you would hate this so much. Go to jail. I found an article from the Harvard Cribson in 1909, which is really hilarious, just like anything written by a boy at Harvard in 1909 is inherently hilarious. And how this person was reporting on a visit from Mr. Fletcher to the campus. And he explained his theory that a digestion is of two kinds, involuntary and voluntary. Over the former, we have no control. But before the food passes the, quote, guillotine line, We are responsible for what we eat. Therefore, we should let the appetite have free control, but great care should be taken not to exceed the appetite. So basically, his whole thing was that, like, once you swallow your food, it's done. It's over.

But you have all of this power over what food you swallow, which is technically true. A fact. So he basically said, like, you should really ruminate over your food, like literally ruminate. like literally ruminate it like a cow. Yeah. Yeah. And only swallow it could be made liquid. And he was arguing that your saliva would have already started digesting that for you and that that was like what was natural and good. That any food that didn't sign on to the process of starting to predigest itself, noticeably in your mouth, was not meant to be eaten.

Oh, no. What were those things? Well, like most food. Also, you might ask, what about food that's already liquid? it. And for that, you should like roll your tongue around in it for a while, just like really luxuriate in it before you let it slip down your gullet. His book actually includes him. There's this section where he like waxes poetic on a week that he spent only drinking milk for some kind of research experiment. Like that was his only food. And he was like truly no more natural food

to exist on. He's like, it's unfortunate that as we get older, that becomes less true. But He's like, trust me, just only drink milk and you'll be so happy. And he talked about really like exploring the taste of every mouth full of milk and how it made him really appreciate it and the mouth feel. And honestly, just reading it gave me diarrhea for like a week. Take a laugh. Going to be real. Yeah. And yeah, he became a millionaire and it actually really extended into a whole life philosophy in his book.

He talks about like fletcherizing your friends. So he's Gwyneth Paltrow. Yes. This is goop. Yeah. It's literally goop. By the time it's trying to make Fletch happen. But yeah, he was like, fletcherize your life.

Like it was actually kind of, it reminded me a little bit of like Marie Kondo because the fletcherizing of your friends is like, listen to your body. Does it spark joy? Yeah. Does it slide? seamlessly down your throat. If not, spit it out. Same with friends. Oh, my God. So much of it sounds empowering, but then just the actual thought of spending so much of your life chewing your food is very the opposite of empowering. Right. Yeah, it is awful. And in fact, it was very popular and also like just kind of seeped into less like radical schools of diet and nutrition. But it just like

in terms of being like, you know, you should chew your food more. It's healthy to eat slow. And, you know, it is healthy to be mindful while you eat and to not like rush. And it takes your brain some amount of time to realize that your stomach is full. So it's always great advice to, like, pace yourself. But, you know, the flip side of that is like, yeah, wait 10 minutes. And if you still want the pie, then eat the pie. Even if it's midnight, according to Fletcher. And so it did like work for people because they were eating less food. a 1927 experiment, so this is not long after he died. He got bronchitis when he was like 69, and he definitely had like lost weight. But he was also a millionaire, so that probably helped.

So this 1927 experiment, it claimed to show a drop in weight and caloric intake, but it was just the one researcher, like periodically trying Fletcherism for a few months. It wasn't like an actual study of multiple people. And he did also notice a drop in muscular endurance and basal metabolism, meaning he was weaker and his body was burning less calories at rest. He also found he was less efficient at the typewriter. He was starving. That's what is going on there.

Also, plus, for some reason, he said he had a market increase in his ability to solve chest problems, which is what happens when your study has an end of one. Maybe he just learned how to play chess good in that time. And the thing about fudterism is that it's basically juicing, but it all takes place in your mouth. You're the juicerro. That's a thought that I had. So there was this 2017 study that I get a lot of angry Instagram messages for having covered back in 2017. But so cardiologist evaluated the existing evidence on a bunch of fat diets.

And they called out juicing for its tendency to actually sneak extra sugar and calories because you're removing all of the healthful fiber from a fruit or veggie when you juice it. So you're basically just drinking sugar water with some vitamins in it. And like most of the time you would be better off eating like a few carrots and apples than drinking a whole juiced grocery carts of vegetables and fruit. Which is not to say people can't enjoy juice and that it can't be like part of a healthy balanced diet. But anyone who tells you you should try to like live off of it for days at a time is not being smart because it really is just sugar and some nutrients but not many and no fiber. So the thing is that for people practicing Fletcherism, where this whole philosophy was like, if it can't be swallowed like liquid, spit it out, they were really not consuming like any fiber because fiber will not become liquid no matter how much you chew it. And we're probably mostly just getting like small amounts of like sugar and maybe some vitamins and minerals. And that's just like not healthy.

It is like lower calorically than if you actually ate the food. But yeah, it's not a good way to live. But we can fletcherize our lives by just being more mindful about what we eat. You know, it really blew my mind how wonderful and ahead of its time his baseline philosophy was. It's just that his methodology was really fucking stupid. Yeah. But, you know, you got to sell books. And I guess people weren't ready for the like self-love if you want to eat pie at midnight.

and take a walk in the rain. Then, like, do that. Instead, he was, like, how do I let people enjoy things and also not let them enjoy anything at all? So, yeah, the Choo Choo Chult is still, you know, when you Google Pletcherism, when I was, like, searching for research material for this, like, there's still people who share it as a, like, diet secret.

And I'm just here to say, you're not eaten if you're fletcherizing. You are literally not consuming your food and that's not good. You should, if you feel tempted to not consume most of the food, you are, quote, eating, you should talk to a doctor about that. Yeah. There's probably a better way for you. That's it. That's my whole story. Well, I think something that's interesting from like the conversations around what purpose does food serve for us today is we forget about, or at least the like medical side of things forgets about the socialization part. And definitely with Fletcherism, like, you are not having a conversation with people over

dinner. You're just staring at their faces and chewing loudly at each other. It sounds like a David Lynch scene of just, like, a family sitting around the table in silence, chewing. Yeah. And each one has like a little silver spit bucket for when their food won't disappear. Wow. Yeah, I would just consume so much more alcohol if I were.

I was thinking oysters. Like, oysters, I feel like are Fletcher, are perfect. Yeah. You chew them like two times and they've disappeared. Okay. Yeah. Isn't that like... Well, they're pretty...

You don't really chew them. Yeah, but they want to go. That's true. They do. They want to be taken. Once they're past that guillotine. Yeah. It's over for them.

So what was the weirdest thing we knew this week? Everything. I feel like Fletcher. Chorism was just radically upsetting. I second that. Oh, thank you. Radically upsetting, you say. It was such a chapter.

Yeah. Well, I'll take that. And yeah, I mean, it's a great reminder that a lot of the fat diets that exist today are all truly dumb. And one day people will have names for you that are as silly as the choochoo cult. And your grandkids will laugh at how you tried to subsist on bacon and then got diarrhea. and we're like, I lost seven pounds. Isn't that amazing? And everyone was like, that's because you have meat diarrhea.

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