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- [00:00]
Cara Berry
No offense, but your brain is a terrible place to keep your big idea. It belongs in the world. But you know that already. You have a calling, a voice that says, this is what I'm meant to do. Create the website your big idea deserves with wix. Make it your own with top to bottom customization, AI to help realize your vision and built in business tools to turn your daydream into your dream job. WIX supports every stage of the business journey except one. Your decision to begin. Ready? Go to wix.com Life is a workout.
- [00:34]
Unknown Host
And Smoothie King is here to help you power through. Whether you're crushing morning miles or sprinting through back to back meetings. Give your body the energy, protein and power it needs to help you conquer your goals. Only at Smoothie King. ACAST powers the World's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hey folks. Looking for a whole new thing to be into? Well, check this and check it out. We're the Sloppy Boys and we're basically like pretty much the new classic guys. We were in a comedy group called the Birthday Boys with Bob Odenkirk and now we're an indie band and we have a podcast about the drinks of the summer like the Gator Bite or the Grape Gorilla. And we have guests that are music people like Jeff Rosenstock or Stefan from the Band Pup or comedy people like Tom Sharply or Mitch from Doughboys. Yeah, dude. We talk about TV and movies and music like Turnstile or King Giz and it's completely kind of cool.
- [01:33]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Ooh.
- [01:33]
Unknown Host
Give it a listen and check it out to see what you think. But don't forget that we're the new classic guys. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
- [01:56]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Ozempic the name is everywhere. It shows up in late night ads, in TikTok hashtags with billions of views, in casual conversations at cafes and on red carpets. Headlines call it a miracle drug for weight loss. And since it was one of our most highly requested topics to cover, let's do a deep dive. We'll talk with Dr. Emma Beckett for all the piping hot tea about the science and the culture behind this popular medication. And then it isn't just Ozempic. Drugs are repurposed all the time for various things and sometimes even for mosquito control. Yeah, we'll talk later about a prescription drug being studied to protect people from mosquito borne diseases. And if you want to learn more about how drugs can change the body and its behavior, there's a series on Discovery called Animals on Drugs. It's all about how drugs are affecting wildlife adversely, the science behind it, and the steps we can take to reduce the impact on their habitats. It goes deeper than cocaine shark. Try Florida gators on meth and bears on Eddies Edibles Forest. Galanti is hosting and it premieres July 28th at 8 on Discovery. And if you didn't hear it yet, go listen to the interview we did with Forrest a couple of episodes ago. He talks about finding venomous sharks in Australia, and we get into his obsession with tracking down new and lost wildlife. After you hear that, you'll get why he's the only person who could host animals on drugs. But now let's explore the vibrant world of color, because it may have just become even more expansive. I'm Dr. Samantha Yamin, and this is Curiosity Week weekly from Discovery. Whenever I want to have a wholesome trip out, I rack my brain to try to make up a new color. I've literally been doing this since I was a kid to no avail. I mean, can you do it? Picture something you've never seen before? The answer is probably no, unless you're one of the seven people in the world who recently saw a brand new color.
- [03:52]
Dr. Esten Rorda
I mean, it was like the holy cow moment. Wow, this is really working. And we're really eliciting a sensation of kind of a unique color.
- [04:01]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
That's Dr. Esten Rorda, now at the University of Waterloo. He was a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley when he was one of the Lucky 7 to see the new color called Olo.
- [04:12]
Dr. Esten Rorda
I mean, it was remarkably saturated. Oddly, if anything, it looked a little dimmer. And I'm not sure that could be a perceptual construct.
- [04:23]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
But OLO isn't a color you can find online or make by mixing paints on a palette. To create olo, the researchers from Brown and Berkeley made some very clever use of neuroscience. It starts with the cells in your eyes that help us see called rods and cones. But it's the cones that let us see color. In fact, three different types of them. Each type of cone has its preferred color that it responds to, whether it's blue or the reddest red. And many colors activate some combination of cones. But one of them, mcones, are super unique. There's no color in nature that makes only M cones fire. So the team thought if they could find a way to activate just mcones, maybe they'd see a new color. They weren't the first to think of it, but they were the first to build the technology to make it happen. Computer Science PhD student James Fong was the lucky one who got to operate it. Or maybe unlucky because it meant that he didn't get to see the new color for himself. The way the OZ platform works is we collect a real time live view of the retina, and this live view contains a view of the cone cells. And in this study, to achieve olo, we do that by concentrating light that ordinarily only ever looks green into the M cells. And this causes people to see this really brilliant teal color we call olo. Rhoda was among the first to try it out.
- [05:43]
Dr. Esten Rorda
You're sitting in a bite bar to hold your head still, Your eye is dilated, you're in a dark room and you see this little patch. You can see like the color from a green laser pointer. And then when I pitt it up against OLO in that situation, it really looked absolutely pale by comparison.
- [06:01]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
How we interpret colors changes depending on the context, plus how many times we've seen it. Like a kid slowly learning the difference between pink and red. But no matter how anyone describes it, OLO falls outside of known color space. It's literally a new experience beyond the usual rainbow. Being able to tune vision in this way not only gives us a better foundational understanding of how the eye works, it's opening up new ways for them to model diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, where certain cone cells stop working. I don't know about you, but I need to see this for myself. I know I'll be signing up to be a participant in their next study immediately.
- [06:43]
Unknown Host
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- [07:58]
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- [09:01]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Drugs like ozempic are nothing new. They're part of a family of drugs that have been used to treat type 2 diabetes for two decades. But Ozempic recently shot to fame for being the quote, unquote miracle weight loss drug celebrities were secretly using, overshadowing its original and intended use. Now, there's a lot to unpack on this topic, so I put a call out on my Instagram and you all had so many questions and recommended a ton of fabulous experts. One of them was Dr. Emma Beckett, who's going to help us dig deeper than just the headlines. She's a food and nutrition scientist and adjunct senior lecturer on nutrition, dietetics and Food Innovation at the University of New South Wales. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Beckett.
- [09:46]
Dr. Emma Beckett
Thank you for having me.
- [09:48]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
We are so excited to chat with you on this topic. Let's start with some basics. There's Ozempic, there's Wegovy, Zepbound. They're all types of GLP1 drugs. Can you tell us what that stands for and what this category of drug does?
- [10:04]
Dr. Emma Beckett
So GLP1 is glucagon. Like peptide, they essentially reduce appetite so they act both in the brain and in the gut, so they slow down how fast food moves through the gut and they act in the brain to make us feel more satiated, so have less appetite. These medications work so well because they have a very long half life. So if you make GLP1 naturally in your gut, it disappears quite quickly. If you get it from one of these medications, it lasts for a very long time. So that kind of smooths out the ebb and flow of those hunger cycles.
- [10:42]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Interesting. Now, we've talked about how they were originally used for managing type 2 diabetes, and now they're being repurposed and administered in different doses as weight loss drugs. Right. But it's also been shown to be associated with a decline in muscle mass as someone focused on nutrition and overall health. Is that loss of muscle mass a major concern is, is that too fast? How are, how are we thinking about all of these effects that it can have and the way it's being used now?
- [11:10]
Dr. Emma Beckett
All right, so I think there's a couple of things to unpack there. So the first thing is we often talk about this drug in the context of it was meant for diabetes and now we're using it for weight loss. But I want to be really clear that is not weird. We do that in medicine all the time. There's all kinds of drugs that started out as one thing and became another thing. Drug repurposing is a very common thing in medicine generally. And, you know, drugs like Viagra that are used for impotence treatment, they were actually originally invented for contraction of blood vessels to treat things like eye problems and heart problems. And so I really think we need to get away from this. Let's preface it with, it's actually a diabetes drug, but people are using it for weight loss. Because when we repurpose drugs into cancer treatment, we don't go, oh, well, it was originally a blood pressure drug, but now we're using it in cancer treatment. It doesn't. For me, that doesn't add anything to the conversation. The drug does.
- [12:06]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
The drug does.
- [12:07]
Dr. Emma Beckett
And obviously, weight and type 2 diabetes are very connected biologically. And one of the treatments for type 2 diabetes is weight loss. So this, this cycle of, oh, well, we stole it from the diabetics, I think is a. Is a strange and potentially damaging dialogue that we're all doing. It's very common to hear people talking about that in terms of the muscle loss that occurs with this kind of weight loss. Yes, it's a big problem, and it's a. Particularly a problem in women in middle age, because that's when we. We don't want to be losing that muscle mass, but it's a problem. That's a problem. Losing muscle mass as well as fat mass is a problem. In any rapid weight loss. So whether you're doing that rapid weight loss with a GLP1 medication, or whether you're doing that rapid weight loss through what people would call more traditional weight loss methods, that's going to be a problem anyway. So, on one hand, I'm kind of glad that we're all talking about muscle mass now, because it does have so many health benefits to maintain muscle mass. But if you're on one of these medications and you're not thinking about diet and exercise, then you're very likely not going to see the same health outcomes as people who are. And I think that's a really important thing to talk about, is that when these drugs are studied for weight loss, they're studied in ideal conditions, because it wouldn't be ethical to just pop people on these drugs, let them go and see what happens. But that's what's happening in the real world. In Australia, you can get these medications through telehealth and never actually see a doctor face to face. And so people are not necessarily in the real world being supported in the same way as they were in those studies when it comes to diet and exercise.
- [13:58]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Yeah. The clinical population it was perhaps intended for and who's using it and who we talk about using it the most. The waters have been very muddled. Now, you use the word food noise because there were a lot of stories of people saying that on These types of GLP1 drugs, they had less food noise in their head. So, first of all, can you tell us what. What that is and how it differs from hunger? Because I'm scratching my head a bit there. It's interesting.
- [14:27]
Dr. Emma Beckett
Yeah. It's a really hard concept to understand if you haven't experienced it. If you have experienced it, when you hear about it, you go, oh, my gosh, I feel so validated all of a sudden. So the idea of food noise is it's the distraction in your brain thinking about food. And it's different to hunger because it's doesn't go away when you eat. And so imagine you've eaten this full meal and you know you've had absolutely everything you could possibly want in that meal. You've loved the foods, there's been enough food. And then imagine as soon as you put your fork down, your brain is going, what am I eating next? Even though you know you're physically full, and that can take up a lot of space in people's brains. But that's the whole point of food noise. It doesn't go away when you've Eaten. Whether. Whether you've eaten, even if you've eaten very well.
- [15:20]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Yeah. I was wondering your take on that because you're someone who encourages people to have a healthy relationship with food. So what are your thoughts about people using a medication to manage the relationship with food instead of other strategies?
- [15:34]
Dr. Emma Beckett
So I think we should look at medications for weight loss in the same way we look at medications for mental health, so depression and anxiety. We don't just give people medications and say, see you later. We give them the medications and then we do the therapy with them. We do the cognitive behavioral therapy. We do the lifestyle interventions and all the other things we do. So I think holistically, these medications can only be successful or can only meet their full potential if we see them as a tool that's used with a suite of other tools. Because on their own, there's real risks that we actually do harm for diet. But used, used, well, they can really level the playing field for people and give them a jumping off point that says, actually, I can tackle this. It's not going to be the same for everyone. I. I tried a zempic in the early days, and I don't talk about this much because it was a blip. Like, it was a couple of months. I went, this was before the shortages. I understood the science. I'm a woman in a larger body. I'd always struggled with feeling full, and I knew that. And I thought, yeah, I'll give this a go. I was on it for a couple of months and I hated it. I didn't have any side effects. I didn't get any nausea or diarrhea or anything like that, but I was so not interested in food. And I went from someone who, yes, I ate a lot, but I ate a lot of vegetables and I ate a lot of fruit and ate a lot of whole grains. And I became someone who couldn't get excited about food. And so I was only eating the most bland of foods. I was subsisting on potato bake and white bread, and my diet had turned so bland and so not nutritious. And so for me, that was damaging my relationship with food. That was damaging my nourishment and my nutrition. And so I went, this isn't for me. So, yeah, it won't work for everyone, no matter how biologically sound the plausibility is.
- [17:42]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
I do want to touch on one other important medical benefit beyond diabetes, and that's the cardiovascular impacts it can have for people using these drugs who don't have diabetes. Can you tell us any more about that.
- [17:55]
Dr. Emma Beckett
Yeah. So cardiovascular disease is the number one positive health outcome for people using it for weight loss and also knock on effect people who are using it for type 2 diabetes and do have weight loss. And there's probably a couple of reasons biologically why that's happening. Firstly is you're eating less. And so when you're eating less, that's less saturated fats consumed and you know, all of those things that are going to be risk factors in cardiovascular disease, less salt consumed. Losing weight in and of itself can have positive effects on cardiovascular disease, regardless of the dietary changes and health. And there's also potential that these drugs are helping reduce inflammation in the body. And inflammation is a big trigger in terms of things like atherosclerosis, when the plaque lodges in the walls of our arteries. The real disease risk comes from that oxidizing, which is an inflammatory process. So it's not just eating the fat, it's what happens to the fat once it's in our bodies.
- [18:58]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
Dr. Emma Beckett is a food and nutrition scientist and adjunct senior lecturer on nutrition, dietetics and food innovation at the University of New South Wales and the author of you are more than what you eat. Check out our ABC Australia podcast series cooked, and check her out on Instagram. Dr. Emma Beckett. That's Beckett with two T's. Thank you so much, Dr. Beckett. It was a joy to chat with you.
- [19:20]
Dr. Emma Beckett
Thank you so much for having me.
- [19:27]
Dr. Samantha Yamin
I hate mosquitoes. They must be one of the most universally despised insects of all time. They're literally irritating. And no amount of slapping, crossing, dabbing with pink cream or rubbing raw garlic that just my family seems to make them go away fast enough. Only a fraction of them harm humans, but sometimes mosquitoes are deadly. So deadly, in fact, that researchers in the UK recently released a proof of concept study showing that a prescription drug can actually turn human blood toxic to those little blood suckers. The drug is called nitisinone. It's already FDA approved to treat rare metabolic diseases. But this proof of concept study tested something new. When people take nitisinone, it blocks an enzyme that plays a key role in the disease. Now, that's fine for the people taking it, but for a mosquito, the drug blocks the enzyme in them too. And after a bite, the mosquitoes die within hours. This study was done in a lab setting, feeding mosquitoes human blood laced with realistic levels of nitisinone and even testing blood samples from patients routinely taking the medication already. They simply posed the question, does this kill mosquitoes? Well, yeah, it does. And there was no question why it matters. Mosquito borne diseases cause hundreds of millions of illnesses every year, with at least half of the world's population at risk. Over half a million people die from malaria spread by mosquitoes every year. They also spread other nasty diseases like yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, dengue fever, West Nile virus, among among others. So researchers are very interested in finding a way to protect people from mosquito borne disease. Beyond medications, scientists have also experimented with genetic modification. A few years ago in Florida, researchers released a ton of genetically engineered male mosquitoes. But despite releasing more mosquitoes, the idea was to reduce the population. These mosquitoes were genetically modified so that their female offspring wouldn't survive, ultimately shrinking the mosquito population. Figuring out how to deal with mosquitoes and other buzzy vectors of disease would be a huge win for curbing infectious diseases, but we're still a ways away from anything concrete. In the meantime, I guess I'll continue to light my citronella candles and break out the calamine lotion for Warner Bros. Discovery. Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey, our producer is Chiara Noni, our audio engineer is Nick Kharismi and head of Production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie Berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Yamin. Thanks for listening.
- [22:24]
Cara Berry
Running a business can be exhausting. Building your website shouldn't be. With wix, you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI. From site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want, and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix.
- [22:54]
Unknown Host
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [23:02]
Cara Berry
Hi, I'm Cara Berry, host of Everyone's Business But Mine. If you don't know me, think of me as your new friend and fellow busybody as I talk about everything under the pop culture sun. From the best way to detect a celebrity breakup or pregnancy to recapping your favorite reality TV shows from the Housewives Cinematic Universe wealth into Plathville, Summer House, Sister Wives and so much more. Check out Everyone's Business But Mine. Airing multiple times a week everywhere you listen to podcasts.
- [23:36]
Unknown Host
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.