The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Nazis Eating $@#!, The First Pregnancy Test, Permanently Swollen Feet

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a good reason to eat fresh, steamy camel poo to injecting rats with human urine and seeing what happens. 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 Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica 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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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. No shortcuts, Nazis. You just got to dive face first into the camel poo. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. 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 share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldarelli.

And I'm Sarah Cheradosh. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of factor story that we came across in the course of reading, writing, reporting, having fantastic summer adventures. I haven't had any of those yet, but there's time. And then 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. Sarah, why don't you start with your teas? I would love to. My fact is about why Nazi physicians wanted their soldiers to eat camel poop. Gros. You never eat poop, ever, no matter what animal

it came from? I hated almost everything in that sentence. Cool. Great. Claire, what's your teeth? Your feet grow during pregnancy. Oh, no. That's not a tease. This is just what my fact is. That's crazy because my fact is also about pregnancy. Pregnancy. Neither of us are pregnant.

No. No. Full disclosure. No mom. None of us have you can experience pregnancy. No. But it is a fascinating topic. And my tease is that pregnant people may be at least,

least in part to blame for a terrible epidemic of fungus in frogs and other amphibians. Wow. What a toast at the end. Yeah, really? We did not see the amphibians coming. Nobody expects the frogs. Wow. Can we start with that one? Yes, please. Yeah, absolutely. So I was thinking a lot about pregnant people and specifically their pee because on a recent episode we talked about the history of using urine to diagnose diseases, piss prophecy, if you will, as it was often referred to. As you may remember, there was literal prophecy as well. People used urine to tell the future. And one way that we still use urine to tell the future is in determining whether your future includes a baby. So there, I made that connection.

That was well crafted. Thank you. Thank you. So I was thinking about pregnancy tests and their history. My mom is no BGYN. So discussions of pregnancy and a pregnancy test have just always been running in the background of my household chit chat. But I wanted to know like what the actual progression was of these like super out there historical pregnancy tests we hear about to the modern day equivalent. And then there are frogs. There's a twist with frogs. So if you had to guess, where would you think that the earliest record of a pregnancy test comes from? The Bible.

Hmm. Interesting guess. Not super off base, but it was ancient Egypt. Oh, interesting. So around 1350 BC, there's a papyrus document, which was recently translated, and it talks about urinating on wheat and barley. You just would take a pile of wheat seeds and a pile of barley seeds, though apparently there's been some debate about, what cereals were actually involved. But most people say wheat and barley, and you would pee on them, or rather, you know, maybe a doctor person would take your pee and put it on the seeds. And the idea was that if there was no growth, you were not pregnant. And I think by no growth, they meant like no surprisingly fast growth. Like you're looking for the seeds to sprout, like surprisingly quickly.

If the barley sprouted first, it was a boy, and if the wheat sprouted first, it was a girl. What? The original gender reveal. I really want to watch a gender reveal video where they're just like slowly watching a time lapse of sprouting barley. So the really interesting thing is that this probably did work pretty well. And for that reason, it persisted for a very long time. I was reading one article where some of the years. University of Copenhagen researchers who had translated a text about this method said that the test

actually appears in a book of German folklore from the late 1600s. So people used it. And according to at least one source, there are places in Asia Minor where it was used into the 1960s. What? The 1960s? Yep. And that is because it works pretty well. There was a 1963 study that the methodology of the study was so fun. It wasn't a huge study. I think they had something like 45 urine samples to work with, but they had mostly urine from pregnant people and then some people who weren't pregnant, including some men. And they tried to just replicate this with seeds in a petri dish. And they found, though again, small sample size, that with the people who were pregnant, 70% of the time there was this rapid sprouting of seeds. Rapid sprouting. What? Rapid sprouting.

So I did a similar experiment for my middle school science fair. It was very controversial because the words birth control were in the title. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, the words birth control were in the title on my poster board, my little trifold science fair poster board. And I still remember the first grade teacher being like, oh, we're not looking at this one, guys. And I was like, it's like they know babies exist. They don't have to know that people have sex. They probably do already.

But anyway, I used first control pills in plants to test their effects on plant growth. And the results were totally messed up because, honestly, I did not check my plants every day. I forgot to water them. There's a reason why I don't own a lot of plants. Same. Yeah. And also a reason why I did not go into botany. I prefer mushrooms.

They're way more hands off once you get them going. So how did you get all the birth control pills like from your mom? Yeah, she just like brought sample packs home for me. So I could just throw those in a potted plant and see what happened. So my results were mostly just like what happens to plants when Rachel forgets to water them for like three days at a time. But it is a experiment you can do to see how human hormones affect plant growth. So like we know that human hormones do affect plant growth and the increase in estrogen in, the urine of people who are pregnant probably does stimulate things to sprout faster. So again,

in this experiment, in people who were pregnant, 70% of them did have positive pregnancy test with the wheat and barley test. So not, you know, if you went to the store and bought something and it said it only had 70% accuracy, you'd probably be like, um. Excuse me. Yeah, flip a coin. But considering this was 1350 BC, really not too shabby. Though the sex determination component seemed to be totally inaccurate. But to be fair, throughout history, we've had tons of like old wives tales about how to determine the sex of a baby before they're born. And honestly, we're like pretty shabby at understanding sex as a biological concept after people are born. So it's no surprise that other than looking for genitals on an ultrasound, we have

not really figured that one out. So yeah, don't shame the Egyptians for being wrong on that is the takeaway. So yeah, this worked well enough that the ancient Greeks used it. There's mention of it in Arab medical texts. It persisted, again, at least in some places, possibly through the 20th century and definitely through the 17th century. Then we also started to have these middle-age piss prophets, which I discussed on a previous episode where I talked all about all the things you can learn from urine. The piss prophets, by the way, is my next band name. I'm just going to color right now. Great. Absolutely. It sounds like a band that would be in Harry Potter, but is too rude for J.K. Rowling to actually include in the text. But she'd tweet about it later. Yeah.

Actually, the piss profits were gay the whole time. So they did a lot of things like looking at the color of urine, which, you know, has no actual scientific basis. They did talk sometimes about a test where they mixed like wine or some other existing material with the urine of a patient. And if some kind of reaction happened, then the person was pregnant. And that may have actually worked in some circumstances because there are proteins in a pregnant person's urine that are not otherwise there. So there are probably lots of things you could mix the urine with where nothing would happen, but you could land on some combination that did do some kind of reaction.

You know, maybe it changes color, maybe it gets clumpy, whatever. Then we get into the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th century where they were like, microscopes are cool. We're into microscopes now. Surely microscopes will help. And so they're like really looking for some kind of like crystalline structure or some like microbial type movement. And they never found one because there isn't one. You can't look at the urine of a pregnant person under a microscope and be like, aha. Be like baby.

Yeah, exactly. To be fair, again, I mentioned on a previous episode. they thought that babies came just like tiny inside sperm to sperm was full of like little men. So not surprising they thought, I don't know. I don't know what they thought would be in the urine. But they thought that like all of life could just be boiled down to little squirmy things under a microscope. Most of life can, but not all. But yeah, it's not until the 1890s that we make hormones a thing.

And of course hormones are what we use to detect pregnancy now. and the pregnancy hormones were only identified in the early 1900s. And then once we get knowledge of HCG, which is very famously produced by the body when you're pregnant, it is to halt the normal flow, if you will, of bodily functions that would normally make the uterus a hostile territory. So, yeah, once we know that HCG is a thing, we can start to develop tests that specifically look for HCG. And that's when we start shooting it into animals. What kinds of animals? Amphibians? Oh, no. So the first one, which I think was in the 1920s, they actually injected urine into an immature rat or mouse. And there would be no reaction if the person wasn't pregnant. But if they were, the rat would basically go into heat, even though it was immature. And so basically the rats would get horny. And

That's how you knew that a baby was on the way. Wow. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. And this was kind of the way pregnancy test worked in one way or another for decades. How many people were doing this test? Like, was it for only the rich if they got to tell if they're, you know?

Claire, that is an excellent question. I thank you. And for as long as pregnancy tests involved animals, it was something that really was only for the rich or for people who had like a medical reason to need to know they were pregnant. For most people, even once we understood pregnancy hormones pretty well, it was still like you only went to the doctor once it was starting to become obvious to you that you were pregnant. And it was based on the physical signs that the doctor would be like, yep, there's a baby in there. It was just not practical for most people to know before there were outward physical signs.

The things that rich people used to get doctors to do, just like, come to my house, take a sample of my bodily fluids and inject it into a rodent. And then we're going to see what happens. Yeah. And it would also, it would take weeks, right, because it had to be like shipped off to somewhere where they had horny rats. I'm sorry, immature rats that would become horny rats. So honestly, like, using life for the rats.

Sorry, Sarah, what was your question? What a confusing time for the rats. Oh, yeah. I mean, they were just like, puberty is a confusing time no matter how it happens. Oh, so true. So if you're a little baby rat and you get injected with urine and then suddenly it's all just happening, your body is changing. You're like, I'm not ready for this. You're feeling things you don't understand all of this to identify pregnancy.

So, yeah, we moved on from the horny rat test, as I will call it, to. a wider variety of animal tests because not all animals exhibit the same like this kickstarts you into heat and you start acting like an adult ready to have sex, which is weird to think about. But anyway, that's how pregnancy tests were for a while. And so not all animals have this reaction and some animals react in a different way that you can only test by cutting them open. So that's where the next wave of tests in like the 1930s. came from where researchers had figured out that the HCG in pregnant people's urine would induce ovulation in rabbits, frogs, toads, and rats. And so usually it would take a few animals to get

results right. So this would involve injecting the animal and then dissecting them to see if there had been changes in their reproductive system that showed that they were ovulating. It's not super great because there's another hormone in humans that can also do this. And it also just like it required killing lab animals that had to be like bought and kept and housed until such time as they were used for a test and killed. Maybe you needed multiple to get a confident result. So again, expensive, took weeks, really was only for people who either had a medical reason to confirm pregnancy early on or who were just rich and we're like, I need to. I need to. I. And special. And so that's where the phrase the rabbit died came from, which is a euphemism for people saying they're pregnant. Have you guys never heard this before? Is that a thing? I've never heard of that. Wow, I'm going to use that. Oh, yeah. The rabbit has died. I think it was. It was usually delivered more like, well, the rabbit died. But the truth is the rabbit died whether you were pregnant or not. Oh, no. I know.

Okay, so then this guy named Not a Joke, Lancelot Hogben. Oh, God. Lansalot Hogben. So he developed a test using frogs. And this was like the height of this kind of animal pregnancy test because since frogs lay eggs, you didn't need to kill and dissect them to know they were ovulating. They would just lay eggs. The ovulation had an outward signal.

So you would just inject the frog. They would either lay eggs all of a sudden or not. And that meant you could reuse them. So that lowered test costs and also lowered the number of dead frogs. And it only took 12 hours. Wow. Which at the time was such speed. It was like instantaneous back then.

Yeah. And so you still had to like go to the doctor and they would collect the urine and then send it to a lab that could do the test. But the test itself took only 12 hours. So now you're talking like maybe. be waiting a week to find out if you're pregnant versus the weeks it took with the sundry rabbits and such. According to a few research papers, this is where the twist comes in, that when this improvement happened, which is around the 60s, it led to a huge uptake in the number of African clawed frogs that were imported because they're good lab animals. You know, frogs aren't often

and used in labs in the same way that rats are. I mean, yes, they're common lab animals, but we mostly use rodents. And so the African-cloud frog is in the amphibian world, a pretty ideal lab resident. And so in the 60s and into the early 70s, there was this surge in bringing them in, you know, thousands of frogs being sent to various research labs.

And, yeah, according to that research, this species of fungus, which is batra coquitium dendrobatitis. It showed up in the U.S. and it killed tons of species of frogs. Poor frogs. Just so some rich people could know whether they were pregnant slightly sooner. Exactly. And it wasn't until like, you know, the late 60s that scientists were able to just get rid of animals in the process. They figured out that if you mixed certain HCG antibodies with pregnant people's urine that it would clump up because of the way the antibodies interact with the HCG hormone that's already in the urine. This still was something you had to go to the doctor for, but it was something that the doctor could do in their own

office. So you still had to make an appointment. It wasn't something you could do in the privacy of your home, but you could have it on demand. So that's when it became way more common for people to actually get pregnancy tests. It still wasn't super common because people were used to not having them. You know, life went on without people confirming pregnancies until there were outward physical signs. Most people wouldn't even think to go to the doctor before that time. But, you know, this is also around the time that more women are starting to think about, birth control and family planning and maybe have careers. And so there's more reason for people who are pregnant to go to the doctor and try to confirm it. And now there is a way that doesn't cost a ton of money and take weeks. So that's great.

That's kind of wild. It's been a very vast shift where now, today, I feel like who has not taken a drugstore pregnancy test just to make sure? Absolutely. For sure. Yeah, home test didn't even exist until 1976. And the first one looked like some kids science fair project. It had like dropers. Oh, no. You had like multiple containers to, because it was a, it was a color reaction. the same way. We have Pionistic pregnancy tests now. You know, the indicator on the paper is reacting by a change of color. And so it was that same kind of reaction, but you had to like combine everything.

Yeah, yeah. It was basically like setting up a little lab essay on your bathroom counter. But it was considered revolutionary. And it really was because it meant that you could go to the store, buy a test, take it without anyone knowing, and confirm whether or not you were pregnant. and there were a lot of doctors who thought that was a huge mistake in kind of the same way that there are a lot of physicians and bioethicists who talk about people getting genetic results on like 23 and me and not understanding them and maybe doing foolish things because they're now freaked out that they have a gene that says they're more likely to get breast cancer or something like that. It's a little different because 23 and me genuinely does have its potential pitfalls. A gene test is not a diagnosis. But there were a lot of doctors who were like, no, this is really dangerous.

Women are going to get false negatives. They're going to get false positives. They're going to do it wrong. They're going to make rash decisions because no doctor is there to like counsel them about the fact that they're pregnant. It's going to encourage them to forego medical care entirely. Obviously, we did fine. and life has carried on. And the home test got a lot easier to take, a lot cheaper, and a lot more effective.

And now you have some that are effective even before you miss a period. So that's pretty amazing when you think about where we started, waiting for barley to grow. One more fun fact is that the first available test, the predictor test, which was $10 in the 1970s. In 2015, the original prototype and the first consumer version of the test, went up for auction and it sold for almost $12,000. Oh, my God. Wow. Who would want that, though?

I mean, it's like, it's cool, but it's like, I don't know. I think it was not. Unused. With urine. Urine not included. Like in the box. Yeah. But I assume it was some collector of like medical memorabilia.

But, you know, historical curiosities. So, yeah, that's my fact. Just a little turn through the history of the rabbit dying. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. All right, we're back. And Sarah, to break up the pregnancy facts, why don't you tell us about Nazi camel poop? Oh, I would love to.

All right, so it's the early 1940s. The Nazi army is fighting the front in North Africa. It's hot. They're tired. I don't want to try to make you feel too bad for the Nazis, but they're pooping uncontrollably. Oh, God. Because. Everyone's been there.

Okay. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Yep. So there's a lot of pooping because a lot of them have dysentery, which is more common than most people might realize during war. Like, I read this fact, which blew my mind, that World War I was the first major conflict where battlefield deaths exceeded the disease deaths, which is crazy.

Yeah, because before World War I, like, you only got killed in the battlefield. Everything was so gentlemanly. You know, you like lined up and rose and, you know, shot at each, politely shot at each other with things that had terrible aim. So most of the deaths were people who got close enough to stab you with a bayonet, and then it would get infected and you would die. So, yeah, once we had explosives in war and also just once we stopped following rules. Yeah.

And also, you got to live in close corners with a bunch of other dudes. And yeah, you got trench foot. And also you just like spread diseases because you probably didn't poop far enough away from the thing. And anyway, people pooping everywhere. To me, to be people pooping. To be clear, I don't think any kind of war is good. The gentlemanly war was not good because it was gentlemanly. But boy, did it kill way less people.

So it had that going for it. Except for dysentery. And dysentery kills a lot of people. Dissentary, by the way, if you don't know, because I didn't before I looked it up, is not one disease. It's just kind of an umbrella term for really... Oh, I thought it was caused by one specific bacteria or something. So there is a Shigella dysenteree, but it's confusingly not the only bacterium that causes

dysentery. Dysentery is just like this person has severe bloody, pussy diarrhea, is what dysentery is. Lots of bowel movements. Yeah, and it kills you, like mostly the bacteria don't kill you, mostly dehydration kills you. Sure. As with most pooping diseases. Yes, unfortunately. Which I don't think enough.

People realize that you just lose so much fluid through your. poop that you shrivel and die, which is horrifying. Yeah, if you can just get on like a saline drip, you're fine. I mean, you don't have a fun time. Thaline drip in your backpack as you're going to war. So yeah, the Nazis are suffering from dysentery. Really probably everyone is suffering from dysentery, but we're going to focus on the Nazis. And the situation was so bad that the medical corps got called in to see if they could figure out a solution. And the medical corps get down there and they realize that, you know, the local people, they don't seem to be poop. uncontrollably. And when they do get dysentery, they don't seem to have it for like a week,

which was the norm. And so they start following around the Bedouins. That's the like northern African nomadic tribes. So they follow the Bedouins around who were sick, which I'm sure was a little disconcerting to them. And they realize they being the Nazis that when the Bedouins get sick, they start following their camels around. And then when the camels pooped, the infected person would eat the poop. No. And that seemed clear. I would not fool you on this. How did that start? I don't doubt that it works. I don't know. As with a lot of strange medical procedures, I'm not sure who the first person was who ate camel poop. But what a visionary. Oh, incredible, because it worked. Like, just all of the better when people were like, yeah, this is how you cure the pooping disease.

Yeah, duh, you just eat the poop. You just eat other poop. And the nats. And the nats. doctors were like, well, this is wild. Like, there must be something in the poop. And so they asked the bedouins, the better ones were like, well, we don't know. All we can tell you is that it must be fresh enough to be warm. If it's cold and stale, that doesn't cure the diarrhea. And I just, I shudder to think at how many people ate like old poop and they kept having diarrhea.

But like with that, like, I can see them being like, oh, we'll just like dry it. We'll let it dry out and like then just like, you know, maybe crumble it on top of a onto your sal. It's up some strudel. Like a crunchy topping, but no, it doesn't work. It has to be warm and fresh. No shortcuts, Nazis. You just got to dive face first into the camel poo.

Yeah, so the doctors then start following the camels around too, which apparently kind of pissed off the Bedouins because they were like, these Nazis keep taking the poop and like they're not eating it. What are they doing? So the Nazis, they took back to their lab. And in the lab, they discovered that there were. was a species of bacteria in there, bacillus subtilus. And that bacterium seemed to be killing all of the other bacteria. I thought this was going to be like a probiotic thing. Or like you eat

the poop from the camel and then the camel's good bacteria, help your bacteria. But it is not that. It's that this bacterium produces an antibiotic, essentially. And so you, if you eat fresh camel poop, you get infected with this other bacterium, which conveniently wipes out all the other bacteria. And then you kind of start over from square one. But at least you don't have diarrhea anymore. It's like the original fecal transplant. Yeah. Better ones invented fecal transplants. Gosh, what are we with them credit? That is how I found this fact because I wrote about fecal transfans last week. And this fact was just sitting there in the Wikipedia article. And I was like, how have we not heard about this? Wow. So yeah. So, yeah.

So the Germans, they started culturing the, because they didn't want to eat poop if they didn't have to. Well, too bad. I know. I think they should have sort of had to, but they just cultured the bexilus subtlis in like a big broth. And then if you got dysentery, you got the broth. And later they made it into like a powder. I'm not sure if the powder was like a nice topping or if you ate it as a pill or what. But it stopped the dysentery outbreaks, which I think is just amazing that camel poop contains this.

I was actually kind of hoping that this was maybe still how we treated dysentery. If only they had had camels on the Oregon Trail. Right. That's what I've been thinking about the whole time. How many times I've died of dysentery while from the Oregon Trail. If only they had camels. Yeah. I guess I suppose I'm not sure whether any other animal has this bacteria in it or if no one wanted to eat the poop of other animals.

And so we never knew. It's the only way to find out. Wait, so what is our cure for dysentery now? just antibiotics? I mean now, yes. I mean, now it's, yeah, so in the U.S. dysentery is super uncommon, but it's still, it's still quite common in places with the don't have safe drinking water. So now we like, we either treat it with like better antibiotics or some forms of it don't really respond to antibiotics. And in that case, you like treat the symptoms. Like you keep them, as I just said, on a saline drip. And it's a terrible time for you. But like, as long as you

can stay hydrated, you're mostly fine. You'll get through it. Yeah. It sounds awful, though. I did find out that B. Subtilis had like a second life outside of dysentery, which is that in May 1943, a seven-year-old girl named Margaret Tracy, Tracy, I'm not quite sure how you say it, got hit by an ice truck, which was still a thing in 1943. And she had a really terrible break in her leg, and it got infected. And she had to go to Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia. And the bacteriologist Balbina Johnson, who like got assigned to look at this infection. And she was, infection, took samples from that wound, and she looked at them under the microscope, and she noticed that there was, like, this microbe that was eating the other bacteria, and it was B-subtilus.

And so she and another colleague developed it into an antibiotic, which is called Bacetracin. Oh, yeah. I've had that on my wounds. Yeah. So for those who don't know, it's the active ingredient in neosporin and a number of, like, prescription, topical antibiotics. So it's the same thing that cures dysentery, just in your antibiotic ointment. Isn't it great that we don't have to cover ourselves in camel poop? Oh, thank God. Yeah. It really, this made me think about like all the old, you know, we do, people back at the day did this gross thing to cure diseases, but like, you know, bacteria. Maybe it was all bacteria the whole time. And also you do what you got to do to survive. It's like, yeah, I mean,

the Bedouins have been eating camel poop for probably centuries. And they've been fine. They don't, they don't have dysentery. That's for sure. A lot to think about there. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with Claire's fact. Okay, we're back. And Claire, you have a fact about pregnancy feat. Yeah, I do. I also have a weird pregnancy fact.

So my mom's birthday was the other day. I feel like I bring my mom up a lot in these episodes. I think it's nice. She's weird. Yeah. So I bought her a pair of shoes for her birthday. She really wanted. I was deciding between size.

five and size five and a half. And the lady at the store was like, well, these run small. So get her six. And I was like, I don't think those are going to fit. But whatever. So I give them to her and she's like, oh yeah, no, I'm a size six. And I was like, no, I'm pretty sure you said your whole life, you're a five. And she's like, no, I mean, I was a five and then I got pregnant and then I was a six. And I was like, what? And she was like, yeah, Claire, everyone knows that your feet grow during pregnancy, stop looking so confused. And I was like, that's not something. That's, that's. common knowledge. I don't know where you're coming from, but this is definitely a weird health fact that no one knows about. So I'm going to investigate. No one in the history of the world.

Right. This is absurd. You're wrong. But it turns out she's definitely correct. So when I PubMed researched this, there's like first tons of anecdotal evidence from new moms, old moms, who are like, yeah, my feet are totally different now. It's a big conversation topic on the bump and a lot of other, what do they call those, like forums? Forums. Yes, thank you. But then there's also some really good science studies. So there's one in particular that really tried to figure out the mechanism behind this. So first, yes, like most people have some sort of like foot issues during pregnancy.

And then a lot of times they find that their feet grow either one size, or like half a size longer, and then they also get slightly wider. So we have that to look forward to. Like, I know swelling is common, but I never heard size change. Right. So they used to think, like, oh, it's just swelling, but then once you have your kid, then this swelling will go down, everything will go away. But what a lot of these women found was that, no, like, permanently changed the size

of their feet. So the researchers kind of looked at all of the things that could affect this and came up with their plausible reasons for this. And this is what they had. That the increase in body mass in combination with this seven to tenfold increase in a hormone called relaxing. Yeah. Relaxing.

Thank you for relaxing. It's one of the things where I'm like, it can't really be called that, though, right? This is exactly what I wrote. I was like, I've never heard of this hormone. This can't be real. And then I looked at it. And yes, like a parent and dad, I had never heard of this. Had you either of you heard of relaxing?

No. I mean, some more relaxing. I had because I wrote that article about. whether you can strength train while you're pregnant. And one of the concerns for a long time is that your joints relax from the stupidly named Relaxin and that like you can have some kind of injury from being unexpectedly flexible suddenly. But it's like it's a little controversial. Like it's not really clear whether that's true.

But yeah, relaxin. I didn't know that it affected your feet though. Yeah. Okay. So just wait and listen. So yes, as Sarah said, relaxin is a hormone produced by your ovaries and the placenta. and it has important effects during pregnancy. In preparation for childbirth, it relaxes the ligaments in the pelvis and softens and widens the cervix,

obviously getting you ready to give birth to a giant baby. So your body can just warp in horrific ways? Correct. So essentially, the researchers think that it's this combo of relaxing, which is relaxing your muscles, your ligaments, not just in the areas that you need to give birth, but also in every area your body. Like relaxin is a systemic hormone. So it's going to affect all your ligaments.

And in addition, you have this increased body weight that's steadily increasing each month. And so it's putting increased pressure on your feet. And so that will decrease the arch in your foot. In addition, relaxin is relaxing those ligaments that keep the arch up. So the arch kind of relaxes and goes down. And that's sort of what makes your foot longer. And then in a similar fashion, it's also relaxing the ligaments that keep it tight together, so it's widening a bit. So you're just panicking your foot, basically.

Yeah, you are. Exactly. And that's like similar but different in people who have never run before and then start training for a race or just running for fun or whatever. Their arches will actually increase and it will make their feet smaller so they could actually decrease a foot size. Like if you have flat feet and you do start running, you could see an arch. So they found that to be the case. But then their next question was, okay, does this cause permanent changes? And that's something that they still are not completely sure.

But all of the anecdotal evidence suggests an anecdotal evidence, i.e., my mother type people, are like, yeah, obviously I still have size six feet. I don't know why this is a question. But I think it's just that researchers haven't really studied pregnancy or the effects of it. And also, I mean, there are so many worse things that could happen post-pregnancy than having your feet grow a half an inch or a half a size or a full size that they haven't really paid any attention to it. In fact, the researchers wrote, quote-unquote, we are aware of only one case report. They have clearly not talked to my mother because she would be another case. report. Yeah, I can totally imagine the scientific establishment being like, what a frivolous question. Right. Like, why are you so concerned about your feet or that can't be correct?

Right. Which is just really irritating because there just hasn't been enough research on basically anyone who's not a white man. Correct. That was going to be my big point at the end is that we have so many things that happen during pregnancy that we don't know about, like why certain diseases arise during pregnancy and then disappear after and various things like that that probably have to do with hormones that we don't pay attention to that are having these like underlying mechanisms that are doing weird things to our bodies. So we never think about relaxing, affecting our feet. Now, how many more things do we have that could be affecting us during pregnancy. And so going back to Rachel's fact that it took us so long to come up with a way to figure

out that we're pregnant, there's just, pregnancy is just such, this such unknown thing and we should be better at studying it. Yeah. I feel like most of the research that comes on our desk about pregnancy is about like what you shouldn't do while you're pregnant. And Sarah, you had a great story about this, right? That was like, we all do things that are not part of like an ideally healthy lifestyle. But as soon as somebody's pregnant, it becomes okay to be like, you know that thing you're doing raises the risk of the precious unborn inside you being affected and you are a vessel. Yeah. It suddenly becomes like so okay to just publicly shame people for their choices. Like when I was writing about pregnancy, like I'm talking to Keanu Welch, the CrossFit

She was talking about how she is in incredible shape. She eats healthy, like she is an elite athlete and also like has multiple specialists who she sees to make sure that she is like training and eating healthy for her baby. She was like, yeah, on Instagram people still feel that it's okay to be like, you're eating red meat. Don't you know that that is terrible for your child? How dare you? She's like, you know what?

If I want to have a burger, like it's fine. It'll be all right. The baby will be fine. Yeah, and you know what, people who said that, it sucks to suck because her baby's super cute. So cute. And she's still super strong. So everyone's fine. Jokes on you.

Also, before we close, I forgot one last fun fact about pregnancy feat is that it is most profound during your first kid, but you still can grow with each additional kid. Oh, no. Imagine, like, replacing your whole shoe collection after your first kid. Right. That's what some of these women have done. Like if you read some of the forums, they're like, I've grown two shoe sizes for like three children. I don't know if it's that profound in everybody, but pregnancy is wild. Let me just say, the more I learn about pregnancy, that more I impressed I am with the people who go through it.

Right. Yeah, it is amazing what the body can do. It is amazing how little we know about it. It's amazing that the species goes on. Yeah. It is truly incredible. Cool. Okay.

Well, what was the weirdest thing? we learned this week. I'm going to have to go with Nazis eating shit. Yeah, Sam, all the way. That's a much better way to put it than I did. It's always a great fact. Yeah, that feels good. I feel like it's been a while since I was here, come back and win it. I feel, I feel positive about this. Thank you guys. A champion. A champion. What a homecoming. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at Popside.threadlist.com. Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including

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