The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Truth About Soy Boys, the Sexiest Number, the Potato King

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

The weirdest things we learned this week range from soy boy panic to a magic number found in peregrine falcon dives and Robert Pattinson's face.  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 Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- 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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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. 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 sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Perbita Saha.

And I'm Sarah Trodosh. Weirdos, welcome back. We have had a very refreshing break. I got really into TikTok, and I started recording in my pantry instead of on my belly under my desk. So that's all the news here. We are thrilled to be back in your feed. And before we get started with the show, I just have a little bit of very exciting news to tease for you. So some of your favorite weirdest thing cast and crew are working on a brand new show, which is going to be available in just a couple of weeks. And don't worry, we'll make sure you don't miss it. You will be seeing more information about it right here in the weirdest thing feed very soon. But get hype. It's going to be a twice a week show. So for everyone who just can't get enough of popular science and our amazing facts,

and witty banter you're about to have as much of it as you could ever hope for. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, going through TikToks, et cetera, and 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. Pramita, would you like to start with your teas? Yeah, I'm going to get a little mathematical this time and talk about what some scientists say is the sexiest, strongest, and most healthy number ever. Oh, damn.

Okay, all right. Sarah? Okay, my tease for today comes in the form of two headlines, both from men's health, written almost exactly a decade. apart. So the 2009 one says, is this the most dangerous food for men? There may be a hidden dark side to soy, one that has the power to undermine everything it means to be male. That's the headline? That's the headline in the deck. So the head in the deck, just to be clear, I just thought the deck was so funny that I could not share it. I'm glad you shared it. I was really concerned that it might be a headline. That would be too long. Please continue. It's terrible, but it's not that much of a run on. The

The 2019 one reads, is tofu the new king of protein? Why the soy-based food is now totally okay to eat and actually really delicious. Wow, what a journey. Yeah. I can't wait to hear more. It's been a big decade. My tease is that I want to talk about why potatoes were considered poisonous in France until 1772, even though people were eating them all over the world. And I, um, I, I want to share the story of the man who fought to redeem their reputation. Oh, the French were really missing out. Yeah, for sure. What do we want to talk about first?

I'm very intrigued by the tofu story. Sarah, if you don't mind kicking us off. I would love to talk about the soy boys as we've come to call them. Okay, so for those people who don't know, so there's this idea that's kind of floating around that eating too much soy, whatever the heck too much means, can make men grow boobs. And like, just as a quick aside, so like in this episode, when I say men, I mean like people with male janitalia slash male sex organs. Like there's no research about soy and like trans men or trans women. So like I can't really speak to any of that.

But just to clarify like trans men or men, I just don't know what the biological implications are here. And the truth is that soy doesn't really do anything. So actually it doesn't even matter. So the idea is basically this. So soy contains pretty high levels of something called isoflavones. I'm not sure how you say it, which are a chemical compound that looks really similar to estradiol, which is the main, like, quote unquote, female sex hormone in humans, although men also produce substantial amounts of it. And there's a condition called... It's almost like binary sex is made up.

What? You don't say. So there's this condition called gynecomastia, which is where men grow essentially small breasts. And that doesn't mean, like, colloquially people call a lot of things man boobs. But it specifically doesn't just mean, like, extra fat if you are a little bit overweight and you happen to carry your weight there. It has to come actually like from proliferating cells in the ductal parts of a man's chest, which are like the analogous bits. that would turn into a breast had you more female sex hormones. And it is definitely true that isoflavones can have an estrogen-like effect in certain tissues

and under very specific conditions. However, as the second men's health headline informed us, eating tofu does not actually give you man boobs. But this is like a really pervasive thing. Like you can still find plenty of people talking all over the intercourse. net in the world about how definitely you should not be eating that much soy. As far as I can tell, though, the myth started with a single case report of a 60-year-old man who had gynacomastia and he also had very elevated estrogen levels and he happened to drink

a lot of soy milk. So the authors of this case report basically state like this man's hormonal imbalances were the result of drinking soy milk and that does appear to be true for this very specific man. But the thing is that this man, this man, man drank three quarts of soy milk every day. That is three quarters of a gallon of soy milk. That is the soy boy if ever I heard of. He's perhaps the biggest soy boy to ever have lived. And in this review article that I found about like the potential feminizing effects of soy milk that don't really exist, in notes that had this man been drinking the same amount of just cows milk every day, he probably would have had hypercalcemia because he would be taking in so much calcium.

Like this is just, there's too much of a good thing. So you shouldn't be drinking three quarts of anyone's milk, any kind of milk. Yeah. Just don't do it. So that amount of soy milk would result in 300 milligrams daily of isoflavones. So for comparison in Japan and China where soy consumption is like at the peak globally, the typical daily intake is like 40 milligrams. And this gentleman was taking in 300 milligrams. A soy boy pioneer.

I know, truly. I don't even know how he consumed that much, like volume-wise. That's just, that's a lot of liquid. Do you think he mixed it up at least and had like one quart of chocolate soy milk? I don't know. Do you guys know about that? It has a stupid acronym. Gowan of milk a day, the GOMAD diet.

it's so dumb. Oh, I saw it on the recent story you did about best diets ranked, and the Go Mad Diet was very much near the bottom. Well, and it's also become, I mean, the soy boy thing has definitely become very politicized because there's like this pervasive idea that all of these vegetarian, feminized, leftist boys are, you know, whatever. But even the, like, drinking a gallon of milk a day has become, has kind of been co-opted by white nationalists. I've read a few articles about how, because like some of the only populations in the world that aren't lactose intolerant are Nordic, that there is this thing among a lot of young male white supremacists that they're like, look at me, I could drink a whole gallon of milk.

And I'm like, okay. I, even if I could do that without getting diarrhea, I don't think I would want to, but like, good for you. I just, it's just beyond me why you would even want to drink a gallon of milk a day, but I also don't, people eat all meat diets and I don't understand that either. So clearly dieting is just, it's just beyond me. So it appears that this big soy boy did, in fact, experience a massive increase in estrogen levels, like probably because of, the soy milk because in the case study they did have him stop drinking it and his estrogen levels dropped back down to normal and his gynecumastia disappeared. While he had the elevated levels, his estrogen was like five to ten times greater than the average male level. So that's a big

difference. But this guy just appears to be an outlier, like all these other studies that involve more than literally a single person have shown that even really high soy consumptions, like way above the typical, like, Japanese and Chinese levels, which, like, again, are much higher than what Americans consume. Isoflavones just don't really seem to affect estrogen levels that much. So this review article basically concludes, like, this case study was probably due to really excessive intake levels. And also probably this guy had some kind of sensitivity to isoflevavones, like something else was going on biologically here. There have been other small studies and other case reports, and most of them have just not found this link. One study that involved 20 men who

were all over 40 who got like 450 or 900 milligrams of isofleavones, which is even higher than the guy drinking three quarts of soy milk a day. Three of those men developed gynaumapastia, but one of them already had it. One had like breast tenderness at baseline, suggesting that like something was going on to begin with. And then the third, it does seemed to have been induced by these very high levels of isoflavones, and when he stopped taking them, it disappeared. But 17 of the 20 men had ridiculously high intake for like a significant period of time and had no gynecumastia. Do they have any other interesting side effects? I don't think so. It was as a treatment for prostate cancer, I don't know whether that's a treatment

that's actually standard at all, or if that was like an experimental thing that didn't work. But they didn't seem to have any other issues and they certainly didn't magically grow boobs overnight and the one man who did he was okay in the end when he stopped taking it. So don't be afraid of soy. Soy is actually really good for you in a lot of ways. It is a healthy way to get your protein. And also, I think maybe part of the problem here is that gynecomasty is just way more common than people realize. So 50 to 70% of boys during puberty and 30 to 70% of men, have it to some degree. And I think probably part of the problem is that sometimes people start consuming soy

and they happen to develop gynechomastia and the two don't really have anything to do with each other. But then that gets passed down as like, well, look, I started eating soy. And look what happened to me. Don't be me. Normalized boobs. Yeah, you know what? It's really fine. And if it does happen to you, it's reversible. Like, if it's because of the soy milk, you can just stop drinking soy milk and you'd be absolutely fine.

Also, men, you also produce estrogen. 20% of your estrogen is made in your testicles. Women produce testosterone. Sex is not a binary thing. And also, if your whole sense of manhood is undermined by, like, consuming a single food item, maybe reconsider what you're basing your whole sense of self on. Like, that's a very fragile definition of manhood. and soy is certainly a part of being a man for lots of people.

That was a great stump speech. Thank you. Thank you so much. I don't even particularly love Tuvu. I just feel like it's the silliest thing I've ever heard to be, like, afraid of eating soy because it will make you less of a man. Like, good God. Yeah.

Also, like, marketing is wild, you know, like, definitely, you know, in defense of individual men, We must blame masculinity as a whole. And like there's definitely been, there's so much that is, is rained down upon people about how, like, eat meat. Yeah. Anything that's not meat. I mean, in response to like all the like the impossible burger, beyond burger, beyond meat, whatever the heck they're called, like, there's been this whole push by definitely a segment of people. like honestly a segment of the media that is like these are not manly because they are not

animal flesh and like that's that's just not true like don't please don't buy into that be a man however you want to be a man yeah well i was also there's um this reminded me of a recent segment of this podcast maintenance phase which is now one of my favorite podcasts and halo top is a ice cream that is mostly air so that it has fewer calories per serving so that you can eat more of it. But it's often marketed as being like a high protein ice cream, but it doesn't actually have more protein than any other ice cream. They just point out how much protein it has, which is how much protein milk has. But, you know, there was this great conversation. Again, really recommend people check out this podcast maintenance phase about how there's a lot of food

marketing specifically toward men that implies that they are not getting nearly enough protein. And granted, I know a lot of people who are like, for example, really seriously working to build muscle, perhaps especially while on a vegetarian or vegan diet. So they have to like keep tabs on their protein intake. But the truth is that most people eat plenty of protein, especially in the standard American diet. You may even be eating way more than you need. So yeah, also this whole like obsession with where men are getting their protein and whether it's manly and pure and meaty enough is just silly because you can just not eat tofu or meat if you want probably eat some beans, fart your way toward health, you know? Yeah, your gut will be so much healthier. Your body will

thank you. Yeah, it is true. Like most people are getting probably more protein than they need. And the truth is like even if you are like, I do watch how much protein I get because like I do both Olympic lifting and power lifting. And even so, like, I do fine. Like, it doesn't require massive quantities of, like, protein powder or, like, scary meal replacement bars to get enough protein. It's just not that hard. Yeah. And your body is supposed to, I was talking to a nutritionist about this the other day. And I almost said utter day. Oh, you should have. I was talking to a nutritionist about this the other day, and your body just has a max threshold for

protein intake. So you think you're getting more protein, but really your body is just shedding it at some point. And the other tip she gave was that we tend to eat all our protein at dinner. Like we slowly consume more protein throughout the day, whereas we should be having. having like the same amount of protein at each meal or really like spreading it across the day. So we also just eat protein incorrectly. We eat incorrectly. A Western. We do eat.

I started eating cottage cheese recently for precisely that reason. That's my breakfast every morning. And like two or so years ago, Casey Johnston, who's Ask a Squoll woman, she predicted that cottage cheese was going to be like the next thing in protein. snacks and it is legit showing up in grocery stores everywhere as like high protein dairy good for you and like I'm all for it eat more cottage cheese it's great it's it is high in protein and it's good for you yeah that's interesting is it the new Greek yogurt I think it's the next Greek yogurt I feel like I can't call it because Casey called it but I'll second her call you heard it here

second folks that's really our specialty You heard it here. Second and sillier on the weirdest thing. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more weird facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about the potato papa. Are we going to have alliterative? Are we going to have cute nicknames for everyone on this episode? Yeah. The soy boy and the potato papa. A little disclaimer before I do this fact, my husband Oliver, is ad a bit that we have covered this story before. for. And I have checked and double-checked and ask people if they remember, and I do not think we have covered this before, but if anyone can find an episode where I talked about the potato man, I will send you a prize. Email me at Rachel at popsye.com because I want to prove to

my husband that this did not actually happen. Thank you. Okay. She's going to mail Oliver to you. That is your reward. And he is a prize. No, well, the problem is that he listens to so many podcasts about weird facts that I'm like, you probably heard James on no such thing as a fish say this and you just think we're the same person now. It's a high praise though. Yeah. All right. So we're going to start with a quick potato primer.

So potatoes, which actually aren't in the same genus or even the same family as sweet potatoes, which managed to surprise me. they were domesticated in what's now Peru at least 7,000 years ago. There are now more than 5,000 cultivars or varieties of potato, and they reign as the world's fourth largest food crop after corn, wheat, and rice. So prolific potatoes. And like many New World plants, they first spread around the world due to European colonization, and that was around the 16th century. And at first, colonizer seemed to, to have seen the potato as a food fit only for the indigenous people they were subjugating,

and perhaps for animals back home. And this totally reminded me of the tomato, aka Weirwolf Peach episode from a couple of seasons back. So folks should definitely go check that one out if they've never heard it. Both potatoes and tomatoes are in the nightshade family, and they are often, at the time around the 16th century, they were seen as very deadly and witchy because that family also includes the deadly night shades like Belladonna and Mandrake. And also there was this idea that things dug out of the dirt were like dirty, which I guess is fair or satanic, which is less fair. But I mean, I understand the train of thought, I guess.

Though I will say that apparently in China, like as soon as potatoes were introduced, the royal family was like, delicious, we're down, which seems like the right reaction to have. That's the correct take to potatoes. Yeah. But in Europe, the people were much more skeptical. But then in a few parts of Europe, peasants started to adopt potatoes to eat during times when wheat was scarce. Like, you know, we don't have exact narratives of how this happened. But you can imagine people who were growing these for livestock when there was literally no other food being like, well, we'll try to eat these.

And then being like, oh, damn. potatoes. Delish. And so King Frederick the Great of Prussia, he saw potatoes as a great way to protect his country from famine because, you know, he was catching wind of the fact that, you know, peasants around Europe were eating them. And so he actually mandated their cultivation in 1756 with the cartuffle beffle or potato order, which is why... Sorry, say that again. I had to ask Oliver how to say this and then say, how would you say it badly? Because I've had letters I'm not going to pronouncing.

But cartofal-beffle. I love that. Yeah, so some people actually called King Frederick the Great the Cartofelconic or Potato King. Oh, my God. What an honor. Yeah. And if I was going to be the king of something, I would want it to be potatoes. So this set off a chain of events that would change Antoine, Augustine, Parmentier's life forever.

He was a French pharmacist, and he was held in Prussia for some length of time as a prisoner during the Seven Years' War. He was an army pharmacist. They did just like go looking for a pharmacist to arrest. And he was reportedly fed nothing or almost nothing but potato mash the whole time. Now, again, you know, Prussia was very pro-pottoeatio, especially. for the common folk. So he didn't forget that those tubers saved his life. They nourished him, that they got him safely through the Seven Years' War and back to France.

But when he returned to Paris in 1763, potatoes weren't just, like, not in fashion there. They were actually illegal to grow as human food. So some botanists apparently thought they caused leprosy, which was probably due to the belief that, like, plants grew to look like ailments they might cause or treat. So looking at this like lumpy mass of dirt, dirty starch, they were like, that can't be good. That's got to do bad things to your body. And also there was this general thought that because they grew in the dirt, I mean, again, I talked about how there was this distrust of nightshades, the distrust of food that came out of the dirt. Again, thinking it must be like devilish, closer to hell, you know, higher the hair,

closer to God, lower the potato, the closer to Satan, that kind of thinking. But yeah, it wasn't until 1772, and largely, thanks to arguments by Parmentier, that France declared potatoes to be edible, again, long after many people had been eating them, thousands of years after people had started eating them, in fact. But that's Europe for you, I guess. Just takes them a little while to catch up. Yeah. And even and even after this declaration, he still faced pushback. Some say he was actually forbidden from planting potatoes in his lab's kind of test garden on religious grounds, like some kind of religious entity owned the land. And they were like, you're not putting any demon spuds in our dirt. And he did work on other ways of feeding the masses during his lifetime,

because that was really his schick. As a pharmacist and a nutritionist, he was always looking for ways to more efficiently feed people. Because at this time, like, famines were just a fact of life. Like, there would be bad weather for a year, and most of the peasants would die. And that was just, like, accepted. And Parmentier was one man saying, what if we didn't just accept that? And we got better at making foods that could actually feed people.

So he did things like working on more efficient. ways to produce bread and cheese. He studied grain storage and alternative flowers like chestnut flour. But he never stopped championing the potato. He developed a recipe for potato bread. He wrote essays, like a lot of essays and scientific papers in favor of the potato. There's a story that he actually planted a field of potatoes. And when nobody wanted them, he decided to have the army guard it during the day. and then leave it unattended at night to encourage looting. Ooh, sneaky.

Yeah, and King Frederick of Prussia, the Potato King, is also rumored to have done this exact same thing. But that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't true. You know, as I've said, Parmentier discovered his love of the potato in Prussia. Both men loved their potatoes. Maybe he was just inspired. Or maybe the fact that both men are said to have done this means it's apocryphal and it never happened.

but I want to believe it did. So that's my story. In the 1785 edition of Bon Jo dinier, that wasn't said correctly, but I said it with gusto, that's what counts. It sounded correct to me. I don't speak any French, though. That's an encyclopedia for gardeners, and it said there is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has been shown as the potato.

the poor should be quite content with this food stuff. And that's kind of where the first level of success for the potato was. You know, as was the case with their use in Prussia, even once French people got around the idea of them being edible and not being like of Satan, they still really thought of them as. Like, it's just something so that the peasants don't starve, you know? But our potato prince was not satisfied.

side with that take on the potato. He also presented potato blossoms for King Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette to wear at court, which they did. And he held these really lavish banquets for guests, including Ben Franklin, like really high profile events where potatoes were featured prominently. So he really was adamant that these become just like a health food that everybody ate. He also had his portrait painted where he's staring lovingly at, he's holding a stalk of corn, a sprig of wheat, and a bunch of potato flowers. And, yes, I love that. I'll post it on popside.com because it really is like this man, his favorite thing was just like sturdy crops, you know. It's like that old British man who like grows the giant

vegetables and there's those photos of him like looking at his squashes just like, I wish more people looked at me the way that man looks at his squashes. I do. I wish more people looked at me the way Pomerantier looked at potato flowers. So he was pretty successful. By the time the French Revolution kicked in in the late 1780s, he had the full support of the French royal family for helping to stave off famine with the magic of potatoes. And that support transferred to powerful members of the new French Republic, who championed the potato as a you know, good and practical staple of wholesome French households. Parmentier did briefly lose his property and status during the Revolution because, you know,

he was a friend of the royal family, but he did quite well under Napoleon. After all, he had dedicated his life to finding better ways to feed the poor, and that expertise was very much needed and valued by the Republic, and he eventually got the Legion of Honor. There are a few streets named after him, several potato-based dishes named after him, Googling Parmentia potatoes actually got me a lot more recipes than research articles. So his grave is often ringed with potatoes left by grateful visitors. So, you know, is this man responsible for the popularity of the potato worldwide?

No, the potato had been eaten for thousands of years before he came along. And plenty of peasants around the world were like, yeah, this stuff is good. We ate it because it was literally that or not. die, but, like, it was good, so we kept eating it. But, you know, I still love the story of Parmentier, who took his experience as a prisoner of war, eating potato mush, and said, I can do something with this. It's funny because now, like, the French have all the fussyest ways of preparing potatoes. Oh, my gosh, yes. Like, they really did a full 180 on that where they were like, It's for demons, and then it's only for poor people who obviously don't deserve anything tasty to like, actually, we're going to put a metric ton of cheese and butter in this and make it absolutely delicious and fancy.

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, one thing I'll put on popsight.com slash weird when we post our article about this episode, we have a couple of pieces and a video about the idea of whether you could eat only potatoes. and it is like one of the most complete foods. It's a good, wholesome addition to any diet. But if you ate enough of it to actually, like, get all the vitamins and minerals you needed, you would be eating a lot of starch, and that would be bad for you for other reasons. So we don't recommend going on an all potato diet, just like we don't recommend going on an all soy diet.

But, you know, the next time you're hungry, consider the humble potato. Potatoes, like regular potatoes get such a bad rabbit. everyone's like, I swap sweet potatoes in from my regular potatoes. And I just think, you know what? Regular potatoes are good too. They're perfectly nutritious. Are they slightly less nutritious than sweet potatoes? Maybe. But like, yeah. Also, they're just a totally different thing. I knew they weren't like closely related. But when I realized how not related they are, I was like, nobody should talk about swapping sweet potatoes in for potatoes. It's a different animal. Yeah, I had no idea. I figured they were like pretty close.

Oh, yeah, not even in the same family, just in the same order, which is just like flowering plants. Like, they're not closely really good at all. Flowering plants. They're both like in, they grow under the ground. That's really all they have in common. Also, in my research, like a lot of articles claimed that people had referred to potatoes as the devil's apple. And I say, great. That sounds delicious.

I would love one. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Prabita, you have a very sexy number for us. Yeah, so one of my few 2021 resolutions was to talk more about math. I just feel like as a journalist, I don't do it enough. I thought you meant just in your life. Well, also, yeah, also in my life.

Sorry, yeah, not just on popsye.com, but in, whenever I'm on a Zoom party, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, it's a very fascinating field that seems to explain a lot of things, but also not explain a lot of things that happen in the world. But one of the best parts is, of course, mathematicians debating each other. And one of the great math debates that I've always been interested in but never invested in is that of the golden ratio and how it relates to perfection, specifically with the human body.

So just a little background on the golden ratio. Do either of you know much about it? I know about it from two sources. One, Donald Duck's Mathematical land. Yep, that's my number one source for information about the golden ratio. Okay, common ground. Two, my evangelical upbringing where the golden ratio is frequently tossed around as proof of God's existence.

I see. Yeah. I prefer Donald's Mathematic land. Yeah, so that, it's interesting to know that churches are still sharing that explanation of the golden ratio. That's definitely where its origins kind of came from. Before it was called the Golden Ration. So back in ancient Greek times, it was called the divine proportion, of course, because it was supposed to be a God-manifested pattern in the world. But, yeah, mathematicians were obsessed with it.

Euclid wrote a whole chapter about it in his very famous book, Elements. And essentially, so let me explain what the golden ratio it is. it's surprisingly simple. You take any object and split it into two parts, not two equal parts. And the larger part, if you take the proportion of that against the smaller part, it should be equal to the proportion of the whole object against the larger part. And the proportion that comes out is 1.618 endless, endless numbers. It's a rational number, kind of like. pie, so it never ends. Non-ending decimal. So everyone from mathematicians to astrophysicists, to surgeons and doctors, they say that the golden ratio exists in pretty much everything in the universe. So that includes the shell of a nautilus and how the spiral grows around itself

to the way that a peregrine falcon dives toward its prey, to the spiral arms of a forming galaxy. But the really interesting, superficial, contentious way that the golden ratio has been applied in modern times has been plastic surgery. So like I said, because the golden ratio seems to pop up so much in nature, people think there's a reason for that. and whether, you know, there's a religious rationale for that, or there might be a more

biological evolutionary perk. So a lot of scientists have studied it in the means of, does it make architecture stronger? Does it make an animal's physiology more efficient? Some folks think that it's even found in our red blood cells, and you can find the perfect ratio in how, much volume that a red blood cell has. Like, there has to be some benefit to it, right? Because it shows up in so many places. And how some plastic surgeons think that applies to human faces is that it's just having a human face that follows the golden ratio is the most perfect, like, objectively beautiful face. So I didn't realize that it was, being used in this way until I saw a story last year, I think, trumpeting that Robert Pattinson,

the actor who plays, I guess he's going to play the new Batman. Oh my God, I forgot that he's going to be the new Batman. He's in the lighthouse. He's Edward Cullen. He's the love of my life. Okay. I also like to think of him as, FK Twigs'

X because she's way cooler. But yeah, so I saw this headline saying that Robert Pattinson was mathematically the most beautiful human being because his face follows the golden

ratio most perfectly. There are several ways that people look at this. The most basic way is kind of just splitting the face into thirds. as you kind of, like if you think of like a facial scanner, as you go from the forehead down to the chin, you split it into thirds. So from the forehead to the eye line, then the eye line to the top of the

lips and then top of the lips to the chin. And in these parts, if you find the golden ratio, boom, beautiful human being. So I was looking around for, I mean, It was some, you know, like celebrity plastic surgeon who was making this claim about Robert Pattinson. And, you know, I personally can think of many more beautiful people than Robert Pattinson. So I had to investigate. And I actually found a lot of, like, medical research that links the golden ratio to the human body. And I ended up talking to a neurosurgeon at. John Hopkins, his name was Raphael Tamargo, and he published a study that went into the human brain

and measured the distances between lobes and found what he thinks is the same proportions in brain lobes. And then they also compare the human brain to primates and then less related mammals. So you're kind of looking at it from like a super developed brain to less developed brain. And as you get less developed, then you start to lose that golden ratio. So again, it's trying to hint at this point that, okay, having the golden ratio means like very smart organism. Yay. So it could all just be coincidental. They did. didn't really do much other than map things out. But it is weird that it shows up over and over again.

So I did ask to Margo about kind of the more cosmetic benefit of the golden ratio. And he was pretty adamant that human beauty follows this pattern as well. He actually said no question about it. He noted that there are, it's not just, you know, finding the ratio on people's faces, but also looking at it from the psychological perspective, like actually surveying people and comparing those results to faces that follow the golden ratio. And he says over and over again, you see that people are more attracted to the human, form that follows the golden ratio. I am curious. So I was looking to see if there were any

new findings about celebrities who are mathematically ideal and take it with a great of salt because it's from the sun, which is like a UK kind of pretty shady media outlet. But they They had like this year's golden ratio listings. And it was Megan Markle and Kim Kardashian, which is interesting because one of the questions I had was whether this was very Eurocentric, just based on all the people who'd been studying it and all the people they'd been studying it on, it seemed like it. the findings on Kim Kardashian did point out that she's had a lot of cosmetic surgery herself. So it's possible that, you know, her face has been shaped toward that proportion.

The other point to make when it comes to faces is that I guess if you do, if you are closer to the golden ratio, that means you have like the ideal upside down triangle face shape. which I don't know about you too but I know when I was like younger I would take all those like face shape quizzes and I think my face is just like a circle like a Scantron circle pretty much I don't know what that means about beauty yeah I guess upside down triangle

just means you have like high cheekbones and then like a pointy chin face I think yes I think they're Oh, I don't know. Or maybe that's evolved. The triangle is not the whole face. Triangle is the cheekbone to the chin. I don't, you know.

They're all kind of garbage, though, right? I know this will confuse listeners. They are all garbage. You just talked about growing up as an evangelical. But as a Jew, I just have to say. Just really turning our listeners around. As a Jew, I just have to say, the discussions of face shape, I'm always like, I just have to assume I've been eligible or that this is going to.

go badly for me. So, but good for our pets, I guess. Yes, good for him. Obviously, one of the role of Batman. Yeah, but I mean, you can go out there and read about golden ratio theories and conspiracies and ideas for weeks and weeks. I did also talk to a mathematician Eve Torrance. And she loves the golden ratio as just a number and the ways that it's popped up in history and in nature. But she thinks that the issue, like she said the plastic surgery stuff is bunk. And she thinks that the issue is that, yeah, the number exists, but the way we as humans have been trying to apply it to things. that's the problem because we don't know. Every way we've studied it, it confirms its presence, but we don't know the purpose of it.

And when we try and apply it to things, then, yeah, that might not be the intention of why this number comes up naturally. So, yeah, think of that before you try and change who you are to conform to it. I've always felt like the golden ratio was a little bit like pe hacking or like if you want to find it, you can find it. I'd like people want to find it. And so they do. I'd like, it's mostly harmless. So who really cares? But for the record, I don't think Robert patents it is the most attractive human.

Just throwing that out there. Jess has given me a skeptical look. I'm so sorry. Oh, wow. Well, yeah. Yeah. No, all I was going to say is I could take him or leave him. I mean, I'd take Megan Markle over Robert Pattinson for sure.

Same, same. Not that this is turning into a gossip podcast. I'm just putting it out there. That's my preference. Yeah, and it does, I agree. Like, when you look at how the proportion is found, like that again, it's surprisingly simple, even though it's an irrational weird number. Like the cosmetic thing is somewhat nefarious, but then when you, like that brain study was

pretty surprising to me because the takeaway for some people is going to be that it's just another way to prop up why like human supremacy almost. and people can just misuse this natural pattern to explain, like, their own beliefs, pretty much. And I guess that gets back to the divine proportion idea. I mean, historically, humans have found so many different things attractive. Like, I'm just always very wary of studies that say such and such thing is a universally attractive feature, just because like that just, it just changes so rapidly with humans. I mean, today it is fashionable.

Well, this is changing a little bit, but like for sure in the 90s and early 2000s, like being super stick skinny was considered the height of sexiness for women. And that is slowly changing. And certainly it was not always the case. It used to be attractive for you to be a little plump because you were rich and had the food and you didn't have to work out in the fields. there's a woman who doesn't need a potato well what was the weirdest thing we learned this week

for me it was the redemption of the soy boy I was going to say that it was potato man specifically it was that potatoes and sweet potatoes aren't that closely related that is actually the weirdest fact to me yeah I agree with potato man slash his potato king. Just because I really have that portrait that I can't, I haven't even seen yet, but it's just seared into my brain.

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