The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Wendy Zukerman talks werewolf tomatoes, overdosing on placebos, and snapping necks

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Wendy Zukerman from Gimlet's Science Vs. joins Weirdest Thing this week. The weirdest things we learned range from a man falling unconscious after taking too many placebo pills, to why the tomato's latin name means "wolf peach." 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!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on June 14th!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman 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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Our live show at Caviot in New York City is on June 14th. That's a week from Friday. It's going to be extremely fun and extremely weird, so make sure you grab a ticket. Our last two shows sold out, so you'll probably want to act fast. Tickets are only $12 if you buy. them ahead of time, and we would love to see you there. We'll post a link to the tickets in the description. And with that, enjoy this week's episode. I haven't been so excited about a name for a potential food since I took Mandarin and found out that turkey translates to fire chicken.

That's really good. 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 show those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman.

I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Wendy Zookamut. Wendy, thank you so much for joining us on this show. We are psych to have you on as a guest co-host. Wendy is the host of Science Verses over at Gimlet. Do you want to tell any of our listeners who aren't familiar what the show's about? Sure. Science Verses is about taking topics

that are in the zeitgeist, be it. DNA tests that your dad got you for Christmas or CBD that your friend keeps putting in their latte. And we kind of dive into the science of it and ask, like, is it as good as people say? Is it as dangerous as people say? So you probably learn a lot of weird science facts in the course of it. And we don't generally put them on the show because we have, we just like find this weird stuff and we're like, this is oddly semi-related to what we're actually researching right now.

Our show is just only things that are semi-related to important stuff. So we are psyched to have you on. So let's get started. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of fact or story that we picked up in the course of, you know, reading, writing, reporting, producing an amazing podcast. 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 learn. learned this week actually was. So Eleanor, why don't you start with your tease? I would like to talk about whether or not you can crack your neck and give yourself a stroke. Wow. I've scared myself

while reporting this out. As you so often do. Yes. My tease is that many people think that Americans feared the tomato for centuries. And the truth is slightly more complicated. Wow. What? I love a good tomato caper. Wendy, how about your teeth? Okay, my tease is that placebos can work even if you know they're fake. Ooh. Mysterious. Which one do we want to dive into first? Tomatoes. Okay. Tomatoes. I will start with the tomato tomato story, which first of all, when you're doing research on tomatoes, the whole tomato tomato idiom comes up way more often than it needs to. I don't think it really warrants as much discussion as the internet has given it.

So first things first, I want to start with a couple facts about the tomato that I learned along the way. Their Latin name, Lico Persicum, translates to wolf peach, which fantastic. I haven't been so excited about a name for a potential food since I took Mandarin and found out that turkey translates to fire chicken. That's really good. And also, they are a fruit like all squash, eggplants, and avococon. from a botanical standpoint, but not legally, at least in America. So in 1887, U.S. tariff laws were imposing a duty on vegetables, but not on fruits. The U.S. Supreme Court had to make a decision on the tomato, and they squashed their fruit status on May 10th, 1893.

Wow. Whoa. What was the, I mean, what was the judge like, well, I have it with my lettuce? Right. Well, the justification really was that it was functionally a vegetable because of its relative low sugar content and the way it is consumed in America. Laws. Legal proceedings, what can you do? So I was Googling tomatoes. I was actually reading the book A is for Arsenic, which is this really cool compendium of different poisons used in Agatha Christie novels. Really interesting read. And it had kind of just like a throwaway sentence about how Americans had been afraid of tomatoes for centuries. And I had definitely heard before various

anecdotes about people being disgusted by tomatoes when they were first introduced to Europeans and maybe they thought they were poisonous or considered them low class. But I wanted to learn more and it turns out it's actually pretty complicated. And the truth is not that simple and a lot of it is very apocryphal. So the tomato. It's native to South America and was used by the Aztecs in cooking. So definitely a popular food pretty much from the start of its cultivation. And Spanish colonization in the 15th century and onward, meant that it spread all over Europe and into the Caribbean, and that's actually probably how it first got into North America.

Even at the start of its introduction to Europe, there were Italian botanists talking about cooking them like eggplant, in fact calling them a new eggplant in the mid-1500s, which wasn't as wrong as it sounds because they're in the same family, but also seems like a big leap to me. So when did it get its wolf status? So its wolf status comes in when they're naming it, which I will get to in a second. Oh, no, no worries.

I like the enthusiasm. So Italian aristocrats briefly preferred them as ornamental, but they weren't afraid of them. They just valued them more for their, like, beautiful red orange fruits. They are quite beautiful. Yeah. When you think about it. Though then they rot and, like, fall on the ground. But then you just, like, paint them in a still life and reflect on the meaning of life and death.

Exactly. A full tomato life cycle. And there's some speculation that maybe Italian aristocrats thought because they hung so close to the ground that they were kind of like dirty and like not good for eating. But they definitely didn't think of them as poisonous. The British were less jazzed. The first cultivars were writing about how even though Spanish and Italian people ate them, they were definitely poisonous. Which does not surprise me. If you look at British cuisine and like anything that was like slothed, you look at British cuisine and like anything that was like slagin.

slightly tasty and nutritious. They were like, well, surely that's horrible. And so then there's this pervasive narrative that American colonists continued to be terrified of them for a long time. So the question is why. And there is a pretty straightforward answer. It has to do with botany and also with witchcraft and with werewolves. Sure. Straightforward. So tomatoes are in... So this is, could I just, so this is why they are like the deadly nightshades? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. So, yeah, they are in the Nightshade family from a botanical perspective, and that includes mandrakes and Belladonna.

Beladonna, of course, is well known for having been used to dilate pupils to make eyes look more like beautiful dead woman. That was kind of just what everything was about in the beauty world at that time. And the atropine in Belladonna that makes that pupil dilation is, you know, is also a poison. And mandrakes, many of us know them from Harry Potter. Absolutely. I didn't know they were real. Yeah. And they did believe that they screamed when you pulled them out of the ground.

Not actually true. But they do look like people. It's very freaky. So it's not surprising that. Really? Yeah. Can we Google it? Yeah.

I do want to see a mandrake photo. They look like people with lots of limbs and people would look for ones that looked more biologically male or female and sometimes even carve them to be more exaggerate. exaggerated. And so then they'd use them for various midissimo purposes or rituals that, you know, had to do with sex and... Sure. Well, okay, so I found a bunch of pictures, ye oldy pictures of mandrakes. So that, yeah, that I would say is a more... Oh, this one is pretty realistic. So obviously the face is exaggerated there, but the body is pretty much what they look like. Isn't there a Guardians of the Galaxy character that looks like that? Yeah, Grout is basically a mandrake.

This looks like, but the way it's walking, it's like, so the root system is almost like two sexy legs. Right. It's like a mandrake on the catwalk. Yeah. And this is, of course, like a very sexy mandrake. Most of them look more just like a pile of potential limbs. But anything that grows looking sort of like a person is obviously going to inspire notions of witchcraft and mandrakes did. And they also have toxins in them.

They are not great for eating. So, yeah, both associated with witchcraft and death. Though I want to say we had no trouble using Belladonna to be pretty, so I don't see why people weren't willing to risk it for pizza. But I guess that's a question for another day. Risk it all for pizza. Right. That's my motto. And the witchcraft association continued.

And this comes back to the Wolf Peach name. So. Who's such a good day. So the Greek physician, Gallen, of the Roman Empire, Galen, had described like all the edible plants he knew of and how they fit into our world and our health. He had this whole like unified theory of nutrition and balance. And it was still quite popular in these, you know, 15, 1600s among Europeans. You know, we're in trouble when someone's like, I've got a unified theory, guys. Yeah, exactly. So any new plant that didn't fit into this previous understanding,

really freaked Europeans out because it meant that it was not a unified theory. And so as you can imagine, this colonial era was really hard on a lot of physicians and botanists. And so they would often try to just like fit a plant from the new world into some existing category or look for something that this ancient Roman physician had talked about and say like, oh, this is what he meant. And they did that with the tomato. There had been a previously unidentified plant that translated to wolf something. It was probably actually Lycopersion, but then it was mistranscribed as Lycopersicon, which is wolf peach. And it was apparently some kind of, I think in his writing, he talks about it being used to like poison wolves. Yikes.

And so it was described as like it was a poisonous Egyptian plant with a very strong. wrong-smelling yellow juice and a ribbed celery-like stock and a bunch of Italian and Spanish botanists were like, oh yeah, here it is. The elusive wolf peach. What a way to get a reputation, just like a game of telephone. Yeah, and then at the same time, there were actual witch hunts going on. And one of the things that men who were hunting witches had come up with as potential evidence was this like witches bomb. They're like broom goo that made their brooms fly or that possibly turn them into werewolves depending on who you ask.

And it always contained Mandrake and Belladonna or at least some kind of nightshade. So then like this whole wolf peach reputation for the tomato made it seem like it was really one of those dangerous witchy nightshades. Perfectly logical. That could make you fly. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a wolf's peach. It's a wolf to make. And the thing is that I don't think people are being totally irrational to be nervous because

tomatoes really do look a lot like other nightshades. I mean, most of us today see tomatoes way more than we see Mandrakes or Belladonna, but Belladonna grows with these thick vines that are very similar looking to the ones on tomatoes. And they create these like beautiful little plump cherry. fruits at the end of them, which are very deadly. And so I think it was reasonable. But while tomatoes do contain a compound called tamatine, which is technically toxic, at least has been shown to be so in lab animals, it can cause drowsiness and confusion and GI problems. Humans seem totally unbothered by any realistic quantities of it. Even the idea that the leaves and vines are dangerous

is false. You'd have to eat like a pound of them to get sick. And actually a similar compound called solanine in potatoes, which are also nightshades, is actually more dangerous. Today I learned not to eat green potatoes because it means there's more solanine in them. And I have definitely done that before. Do you remember that episode of Arthur with the green potato chip? Yeah. And they're like so freaked out about it. And I think they eat it in the end. So I think a chip, like a chip is okay. Okay. But like you don't, you don't want to eat a meal full of green potatoes. I think all of my medical decisions based on Arthur. So I'm like extremely shaken. There's a little. also this commonly cited explanation for tomato fear that acidic tomatoes leached lead off of plates

and could have caused lead poisoning. Interesting. Probably not true because they're certainly not acidic enough to give you a high enough dose of lead poisoning to kill you immediately. So it's not like people would have been like, ah, yes, the last thing he ate was a tomato. It's possible that they weren't great for people who ate off of lead plates. I was going to say, maybe fix your plates. Yeah.

The thing with the lead. Don't blame it on the tomato man. Yeah. And similarly, most of the pervasive stories about how scared colonial Americans were of tomatoes are made up. There's this one about a guy famously eating a bunch in public to prove their safety, probably made up. There's a story about George Washington's cook trying to poison him with nightshades for tomatoes. And that's also probably made up. So who was in the anti-tomato lobby?

Where's big, like, I don't know, what's the competition for, like, lettuce? It would be like, like, where's big lettuce in all this? Yeah, you know, I think to me, the really fascinating thing about the tomato fear story is that most Americans didn't believe it was poisonous. They just wanted nothing to do with it. Thomas Jefferson loved tomatoes. We talked in a previous episode about how he brought Mack and G's to the colonies. He was an adventurous eater for sure. And he, like, grew them.

He loved tomatoes and sung their praises. So it's not like Americans were in some like nightshade dark age while Spanish people enjoyed them. They knew. And they were just like, no, thank you. Like, don't trust it. Was it part of just like fear of the other? I think so. Yeah. And there were certainly pockets of America, people that had cultural ties to Spain, South and Central America and France, or just like a greater emotional distance from the witch trial era, were growing and eating tomatoes. But they didn't really take off as a national phenomenon. And it is probably because people were like, eh, you know, can we really be sure?

They look a lot like this stuff that's bad and they have, you know, so many associations with witchcraft. There's actually something named after this called the tomato effect, which is rejecting something that you see is working because its efficacy doesn't fit with your current understanding of the problem it's supposed to be solving. Whoa. So tomatoes finally got the reputation they deserved in the mid-1800s. The Civil War inspired a lot of large-scale canning to get food to front lines. And that meant a lot of working-class men tried canned food for the first time. And we're happy to eat it when they got home as a, you know,

cheaper way to have vegetables throughout the year. Tomatoes have a really high acidity. So they're a safe and delicious fruit or vegetable to can. And so the rest was history. You know, soup quickly followed. And now, now we love tomato. So it just took a civil war. It just took a civil war. Yeah, all we needed. To make us realize that tomatoes are delicious. But tomatoes are still like a little controversial today, right, with like people who are really concerned about inflammation.

Like you can't have nightshades if you're like on an anti-inflammatory diet. Yeah. I definitely feel like Gwyneth Paltrow has told an array of women not to have tomatoes. Oh, absolutely. Well, the whole thing with anti-inflammatory diets, so much of them is just about avoiding any potential GI disturbance. Okay. When you, like on the whole...

Right, right, because the were... They fly around in your intestines. Yeah, because the butterflies in the stomach, right? Yeah, absolutely. So Gailen said. It was in his witch category of the taxonomy. You know, on the whole 30 diet, which is this like paleo-style elimination you do for a month, legumes are not allowed because they supposedly cause inflammation.

And there's really no scientific literature behind this. but I feel that it's because they make people gassy. That makes sense. It's just like one of many things that if you eliminate it for a month, you'll be like, wow, I've never felt better. And it's just because you're not farting. But you know what? It's healthy to fart. So that's what I have to say about that.

Okay. We'll take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. Wendy, how about you go next with your fact. Okay, so my fact is about the placebo effect. I've been doing a lot of research for it for an upcoming episode. And I'll tell you a story of this woman that I met. She's lovely.

Her name is Linda. She's in her 60s. And she had irritable bowel syndrome. Really, like, devastating for her. Like, she, for people who don't know about this, you can have, like, constipation and diarrhea at the same time, which I think is all you need to know about how potentially horrible this is. It also goes, like, severe stomach pains.

It was really bad. She was telling stories about how sometimes she couldn't even leave the house. because she was running to the bathroom all the time. Nothing, nothing helped. And then several years ago, she joins this clinical trial. Classic case, sees it on the telly, like an ad on the telly. You should join this trial. The way she told the story was like, I never even watched the ads.

For some reason, I was watching this ad. I was like, stop it. Stop it. Some reason she was watching it. She's like, why don't I just call this number? Why not? She calls the number, walks into this trial at a hospital in Boston. And she joins it and she's like thinking,

I'm going to get some great treatment, you know, some exciting new stuff. And the doctor sits her down, gives her these capsules, and says they are a placebo. And I want you to take them twice a day. And I want you to tell yourself, this might help. And she was like, excuse me? Because she'd worked in the healthcare industry. She knew what a placebo was. She knew this is fake medicine.

And she was like, what? And the doctor was like, just give it a go, three weeks. Let's see what happens. It's like handing someone a pack of skittles and being like, take one a day. But tell yourself it's medicine. Exactly. That's exactly. And so she's like, what?

This is crazy. But she's kind of run out of options here. Yeah. And she really likes this doctor who was very sweet by all accounts and was like, okay, let's give this a go. So day one, still in pain, which is exactly what she's expecting. Day two, pain, day three. pain, day four, pain is gone. Wow.

Completely gone. She described it. She was like, no symptoms. It lasted for the rest of the trial, which was three weeks, or I guess like two and a half weeks. Then the trial's over, and the doctor's like, well, you have to give back your pills now. Even though they're fake.

But like the ethics of clinical trials. Pills just floating out there. No, not like, I mean, like not placebo pills, exactly. Gives back the pills. symptoms come back. Oh my gosh. Which is bonkers. And like that all could be, you know, anecdote, end of one.

But this was a trial with like some 70 people in the trial. Half of them had into a situation where they, the doctor said, you're taking placebos and you know it. The other half were just on their regular meds. And then on average, those who were told they were getting a placebo did better. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah.

And at the time, so the guy who set this up, his name's Ted Capchek, he's at Harvard. And at the time when he wanted to do this experiment, everyone was just told him like, this is mad. This is silly. Ted, don't do this. I would have said this is silly, Ted. A hundred percent, right? And a little, like, cruel on the surface to be like, thanks so much for coming out here.

I really don't have anything to offer you, but a mind experiment. Exactly. And so he said that when he went down to write the paper, because he got these results that looked promising. and it was kind of the first clinical trial of its kind. He just, he said he didn't know what to write. Like, he didn't know how to explain this because everything we know about the placebo effect

is either that it's just like the natural course of the disease getting better or it's that, you know, your expectation is that that's what's making you feel better. Like, that's what I always thought the placebo was. Like, it's just, you know, you take incense or essential oils or CBD or whatever it is and you just think it's going to make you better. And so then it just like kicked off this trend. of research with other people repeating it and finding that it works for like weird conditions like fatigue from cancer you know and like other things so this has now been repeated like nine

times this idea that even if you know it's a placebo it can work and now we're just left with this so how totally and you know you're in trouble when a scientist when you're chatting to a scientist and then they just use an analogy to explain it and you're like this is great for radio but you don't really know the mechanism so the you The analogy he gave me, which I did love, was, and he was, he, he, and totally acknowledge, he's like, we don't, we don't really know, but this is what I think. He said, it's like watching Robio and Juliette, and you know it's fake, but if it's a good performance, you might start to cry, and your body, like, feels it. And so, even though they knew it was fake, their body

just, like, felt better. But that's, that's where it leaves us. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, I remember when I was little, if I would like scrape my elbow or whatever, my dad would like kiss it and be like, it'll be better in three to five days. And that was like his like scientific take on making boo-boos better. And I just like, that's what this reminds me of. It's like a little bit of time and a little bit of belief and like maybe things do get better. But that's crazy that like it came back like the second, but she turned the pills it. Yeah, because my dad used to whenever I had like a sore throat, which I think of now I have a cold right now.

and I would be like, Dad, it hurts when I swallow, and he would just say, don't swallow. The only solution. The only solution. Okay, so the wildest story, though, that I read about the placebo effect. It might be Linders, but it might also be this guy. So it was a case report written in the literature, because I was telling people and they're like, nah. But I'm like, but science. It's written in the science.

Okay, so this guy is enrolled in a placebo control trial for antidepressants. and he is taking these pills every day so like, you know, half in the group get the proper antidepressants, half of them get a placebo. And he's taking the pills every day and then one day he has a fight with his girlfriend and he overdoses on the pills

and he just like takes the whole bottle and his heart rate goes through the roof, he collapses, his girlfriend calls the hospital and he gets put into hospital and they're like, oh, you know, crap, we think he's overdosed, when he's overdosed. And then they call out what trial he was a part of they like break the blinding and they realize that he was in the placebo arm.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. And then within 15 minutes of telling him like, hey buddy, hey buddy. Like, you're just taking placebos. He was better. Like he was revived. Oh, my God. Heart rate back to normal, like breathing normally.

Wow. That's like that episode of freaks and geeks where they order an alcohol free keg. And everyone gets really drunk. Yes. Oh, my God. And they're like, whoa, this is crazy. Oh my God. No, but he did, this whole episode has then gotten me down this like path of the history of the placebo effect,

which now I am inspired after the tomato story. Do you know you made me say tomato? I never say tomato. I was like, anyone in Australian listening is going to be like, what happened to her? So now it has gotten me on this path that I started reading about like the history of the placebo effect and blah, blah, blah. And it turns out some like academics in like the 30s and 50s started wondering this. But they started thinking just to kind of take a story. to a different trade, they started wondering, like, why did all of these smart researchers and

doctors in the, like, ye oldy times use all these, like, weird, stupid medicines? Like, Hippocrates was into, like, frog sperm. And, you know, bloodletting, I didn't realize, I thought that was, like, a thing of the 16th, but it didn't be going on for 3,000 years, bloodletting, until relatively recently, scientists were like, I don't know about this, like, maybe no. And so it got these doctors thinking, like, why did all of these clever people do these dumb things for so long? Is the history of medicine actually the history of the placebo effect? Hmm.

Which I thought was just such a good. It's such a humbling, you know, as someone who is like constantly kind of crapping on the various, you know, nonsense that pops up in the internet and, like, uses scientific rigor to fix it. I was like, that is a humbling thought. Yeah. Wow. Was she able to get any more fake placebo pills? Linda. Yeah.

So in the end, she didn't get those fake placebo pills for ages, which just shows how weird they are because I was like, why didn't you just go to the store and get some tic-tacks? Right. But, like, it was something about, Ted described it as something about, like, you need the scenario of the doctors.

They don't know what's the key ingredient. Yeah. But eventually she went back to the doctor, and he was like, here's a new pack. And then she got better again. And then eventually she didn't need them anymore. Wow. Yeah. And I don't think everyone in that trial had such an extreme reaction. Sure. I was reading, like, I think it was a New York Times article, right, where they were talking about, like, the component of how people respond to care, right? And that Ted being a really nice doctor

could potentially be one of the key components in it. Although he was just as nice. We thought this too, but him and this other doctor that he worked with, they were just as nice to everyone. Okay. Okay. They had like a script that they had to say and he was like, we were nice to everyone. Seems like a nice guy. But like it could have been something subconsciously that they were doing different. Yeah. They were double blinded, I think. Or that like patients, different patients respond differently to that.

Right? Because like I feel like, for example, like my boyfriend does not like to be cared for. Like it does not appeal to him at all. Whereas if I am sick, I would like everybody to be very delicate and like nice to me. And I feel like I would totally be like, Great. Thank you for this placebo. Like, I feel affirmed. Well, there is research that shows different people respond to the, like, our bigger responders. Okay. And even in the 50s when they first started asking these questions around, like, why is the history of medicine filled with rubbish, we should start doing these placebo control trials.

Even back then, they were finding that there were placebo responders. Wow. That's what they described them as, which all the researchers I spoke to were at pains to say, this does not mean you're silly. this does not me, this has nothing to do with intelligence. It's just like some personal trait. I must be a little bit of a responder because if I have a headache, I just like pop a pill and within seconds feel better. Totally.

And like taking action too feels nice. At least for me, I'm like I did something. Yes. Yeah, like even when I took my cold and flu, because I was like, got to be on for this interview guys, I was like literally within a second, I was like, cold and flu acid, duh. Wow. Okay, well, I can't wait for the placebo episode. Oh, thanks. Fascinating. We're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with Eleanor's fact. Okay, and we're back. Eleanor. Tell us our last fact. Indeed. So it seems to happen all the time. Someone pops their neck or has their neck popped by a chiropractor and then they have a stroke.

Right. Seems to happen all the time. We've all heard of this. And the most recent case... I definitely seen it on the internet. Exactly. The most recent case was a 28-year-old guy from Oklahoma who was stretching his neck. apparently, like, using his hand to apply some pressure. And he heard a pop and was admitted to the ER an hour later with a major stroke. And he was instantly famous, of course, but at what cost? And then back in April, a whole month prior, a 23-year-old woman went viral after, quote-unquote, stretching her neck. And then 15 minutes later, she realized she was partially paralyzed. And this case, I have to say, is really disturbing.

She was watching a movie in bed one night and turned her head. capo a stroke. And reading these accounts, it kind of made me feel like I should be wearing a neck brace 24-7 all the time around the clock. Just not making any sudden movement. No, just like always consciously turning my entire abdomen in order to look at others. I'm just going through all the times of my life where I've like stretched my neck, cracked my neck.

I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad. I've definitely like very aggressively cracked my neck too. Totally. And so these lies. These are extremely real. And so in both horrifying cases, what happened was the, the. The individuals ruptured one of their vertebral arteries, which are two pathways that run at the back of the neck. And they're different and less famous than the carotid arteries, which are known for getting slashed in horror films and are in the front of your neck.

But clearly, they're quite important. I did have a picture ready. So these two back there, those are the vertebral arteries. So they're running. Yeah, alongside your vertebral column. Really lovely. Important. Take a moment to appreciate them.

And when they or any other artery are ruptured, which is basically, just the medical word for ripping open. Your blood tends to clot in that place to heal the wound, of course. But the thing is, is that that clot then can move towards your brain. And that is when you have a stroke. Very upsetting. But similarly, I crack my neck all the time, like all the time. Fingers, any joint, really, that will crack. Why not go for it? And so I wanted to know what the actual risk was here. And ideally prove to myself that I could continue popping my neck and also turning left and right. Living in the world.

Exactly, without risking imminent stroke. So I think the first question that comes up is like what happens when you pop something. And it sounds quite catastrophic. My mother will scream at me if I like pop one of my fingers in front of her. But it's really anticlimactic. Basically your joints are surrounded in fluid. And so when you crack your fingers or your neck or what have you, these tiny little air bubbles form in that fluid. And then they rapidly collapse.

And that's that popping sound. So there have been a bunch of studies. on finger cracking specifically trying to figure out if it's the formation or the burst of the bubble that makes the noise. Do we know? I think we don't know. Okay. If I remember correctly, there have been two studies on it and they were both like too close to call it.

Maybe both. That's really wild. That's so cool. Yeah. So just this, you know, fluid bunching up basically. But why is it so annoying? The sound? Yes.

That's a great question. We have to explore that in an entire dedicated episode to how many sounds I hate. I think a whole series. Just why is the sound killing me? And so, yeah, with like finger cracking, people always say that that causes arthritis. Like, that's how you get people to stop cracking their fingers in front of you is to threaten them with the disease. But it's totally not true. There's that guy who just did it on one hand for like his whole life.

Yes. The most dedicated scientist I've ever heard of. But, yeah, didn't get arthritis on the cracking hand. only cracked one hand for literally, I think, like, 30 or 40 years and then kept the other one uncracked. And then was like, I don't have arthritis in either hand. Like, sucks to suck. But, you know, the neck is rather more fragile, more, you know, important, dare I say it, than your fingers. So some people have fortunately studied this.

And here's what they found. Manipulating your neck in really any way puts you at an increased risk of stroke or ischemic attack. And depending on how you're built, that manipulation can literally range from, as I said, like turning your head to maybe look at an oncoming car or something, or allowing your chiropractor to just let it rip. One paper I read put it this way. It should be stressed that although cervical spinal manipulation, i.e. chiropractic work, has been implicated in prior research as a possible causative event. There are many others, including sneezing, violent coughing, turning the head while driving,

kneeling at prayer, yoga, and sexual intercourse. They didn't mention my favorite, which is that tons of people have strokes when they're getting their haircut, because when you lean back into the shampoo bowl, you're literally twerking your neck enough to potentially cause your artery to tear. So anyway, we're all feeling fragile right now in this room. It should be said. But the risk is fortunately extremely small. Our bodies are pretty hardy, and they usually stand up to a few neck pops. It seems that the risk of a stroke from an arterial tear from any source is about one in a hundred thousand. And I was talking to my own doctor about this, and I was asking him, you know, what he thought about, like, chiropractors and neck popping and all of this stuff. And he was saying that, you know, if you're, like, at a neurology conference and you ask people, have you seen someone who had a stroke after going to the chiropractor? Like, 100% of neurologists raise their hand. But if you're, like, talking to a room of chiropractors, like, very few raised their hand because they're doing tons of manipulations every day. And, like, the odds of these two things being connected is, like, one in a million or one in two million, just, like, pretty small. And so people then outside of chiropractic offices are probably popping their necks, like, billions of times every day. And, like, they're not all, like, falling down from strokes, which is, you know, bad math and bad science.

But my point is that the risk is not zero, but it probably shouldn't be your number one fear, although it has become mine. And there's even this phenomenon that's called spontaneous cervical dissection, which is where your artery rips for literally no reason, like, not even turning your head. You're just sitting there. And then your artery is like, never mind. We're not going to do this anymore. And it could be bad luck. It could also be related to diseases affecting tissues. We're not really sure.

Anyway, pretty scary. But one example from the literature that illustrates the challenges of characterizing the risks of like popping yourself into a stroke comes from the early 2000s when this Canadian doctor looked at strokes and ischemic attacks and younger adults, which, by the way, in context, is anyone under the age of 60. And they've divided them into two groups. It was like people who had arterial dissection, so this tear in their arteries. and then everyone else. And then they further divided that group to see who had actually been seeing a chiropractor in the 30 days prior to their attack. And while this is based on memory and therefore faulty, they found that about like 3% of people who had had the dissection, that tear, recall seeing a chiropractor in the month before their stroke. And they concluded that compared to people with other types of stroke, the risk of arterial dissection was raised sixfold with chiropractic work. But much more recent research also in Canada has problematized.

those results because they found a similar correlation in terms of people having seen chiropractors and then had strokes, but they also found new evidence that makes like drawing a causative relationship there really questionable. Specifically, they found out that people who had this phenomenon were much older than previously described. And so these kinds of strokes that we've been talking about with the arterial tears in your, you know, the back arteries are associated with younger people. But they were saying, actually, these happen in much older people more prominently. and that those people who had them had a cardiovascular comorbidity, which means that they'd been seeing a doctor for other issues with their heart or arteries or whatever for a long time before they went to a chiropractor with a headache. And so this is what I think is so interesting, is that while we have very little research to show this relationship, whether it's correlational only or whether it's actually causative, it seems that a lot of people are going to chiropractors because their neck hurts, but they're actually already having like an ischemic attack kind of underway.

And so it has nothing to do with the popping. It's just that you, for whatever reason, are having some sort of, you know, neck pain that's coming from this cardiovascular issue. And then you go to a doctor or you pop your own neck. And you're like, oh, this will fix it. And then it turns out that actually you were stroking. Yeah. So my conclusion is that I think, you know, I'm going to keep popping my neck. Got to live your life.

Yeah, you have to live your life. And admirably doctors have been since, you know, some of this research has been done. much more conscious about, like, diagnosing people with cardiovascular issues and referring them to the emergency room instead of just performing chiropractor work on them. Like, they now are much more conscious about being like, you know, what are your other symptoms in addition to this random searing neck pain? Right. And being like, okay, maybe let's send you to the ER instead of just popping your neck. And the chiropractors have also been, like, changing the way they pop to reduce the intensity. So if you have a good chiropractor, you're probably seeing somebody who is fairly conscious of the fact that you just shouldn't torque your neck.

Let it rip. Yeah, exactly. So you have to be careful. Basically being alive is way worse for you than I ever imagined. But popping your neck and getting a stroke is probably not that statistically scary, and we can all chill out. It's still going to be my new thing for like, so like I broke my leg roller skating like a year and a half go. And there were lots of people who were like, are you sure you want to keep having a hobby that like might make you break your leg again? And I was like, you know, you could break your leg walking down the subway stairs.

So my new thing is going to be I could rupture my arteries and have a stroke just popping my neck. So like, Carpe fucking Diem. Do whatever I want. I think the science supports that. Yeah. Oh, I do like that as a conclusion because I was just like syndicate literally myself. Even though I knew the numbers.

You go, what was it one in 100,000? I was like, that could be lower. Yeah. It's like still one in 100. thousand too many. Wow. So what do we think the weirdest thing we learned this week was? For me, it's that I could die of a stroke at literally any second.

Though also that second story about the placebo effect is especially wild. The guy's pretty weird. Although the fact that Americans were afraid of tomatoes for a very long time, pretty weird. And for no good reason. Does that make me a tiebreaker? I guess so. Wow, I loved it all. My blood pressure is so high right now.

But also, I think it's a three-way win. We all just won. Because you can't break the tie because that ignores that I said you won. Oh, wow. Okay, well, cheers. Yeah. I thought this is America. The world all win.

Yes. America is full of winners. Three of them are right here. Well, I'll drink to that. 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, tote bags, and mugs at

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