How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice

Summary

Podcast Summary: "How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Something You Should Know
• Host: Mike Carruthers | OmniCast Media
• Episode Title: How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
• Release Date: February 15, 2025

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Introduction

In the February 15, 2025 episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into two compelling topics: the pivotal role of flavor in human evolution and history, and the pervasive threat of pseudoscience in modern society. Through insightful interviews with experts Rob Dunn, an evolutionary biologist, and Dr. Joe Schwartz, director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society, the episode explores how our taste preferences have shaped humanity and the dangers posed by unfounded scientific claims.

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Section 1: How Flavor Has Guided Human History

Guest: Rob Dunn, Evolutionary Biologist and Author of Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human
Timestamp Highlights:

• [00:02–02:42] Introduction to flavor and its significance.
• [02:42–05:47] Early human taste preferences and evolution.

Key Discussions:

1. Innate Taste Preferences:

   • Rob Dunn explains that humans are born with innate preferences for certain tastes. For instance, babies are predisposed to like sweet and umami flavors, which are essential for identifying energy-rich and protein-rich foods.

2. Prenatal Flavor Learning:

   • At [12:56], Dunn shares fascinating research indicating that newborns recognize and prefer flavors they were exposed to in utero. This early learning helps humans adapt to their cultural and environmental food landscapes from birth.

3. Evolutionary Adaptations:

   • Dunn discusses how the advent of cooking was a “radical moment” in human evolution, allowing for easier digestion and enhanced flavors, which in turn supported larger brain development. He notes, “Once you could cook food, more of the calories in the food became available, more of the flavors became available, it was easier to chew.” ([15:01])

4. Cultural Variations in Taste:

   • The conversation touches on how different cultures have developed unique flavor profiles based on available ingredients and historical food practices, emphasizing the diversity and adaptability of human taste.

5. Modern Food Engineering:

   • Dunn critiques the modern food industry for manipulating flavor receptors through processed foods. He states, “A Dorito is... been engineered to kind of perfectly suit the taste receptors and to make them happy.” ([27:05]) This manipulation often leads to overconsumption and health issues.

Notable Quotes:

• Rob Dunn: “If you could cook a food two ways and one of them tasted better than the other, so long as you have a modern human brain, which has been true for at least 300,000 years, you're probably going to do what somebody would do it do today. You'd cook it the more flavorful way.” ([15:01])
• Rob Dunn: “Every species of animal out there is making decisions based on flavor.” ([24:47])

Key Takeaways:

• Flavor preferences are deeply rooted in human biology and have been critical in our survival and cultural development.
• Early flavor exposure influences lifelong taste preferences, aiding in cultural adaptation.
• Modern food practices often exploit our innate taste preferences, sometimes leading to negative health outcomes.

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Section 2: The Threat of Pseudoscience

Guest: Dr. Joe Schwartz, Director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society and Author of Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience
Timestamp Highlights:

• [02:36–19:57] (Advertisement; Skipped)
• [29:10–52:03] Transition and Introduction to Pseudoscience Discussion.
• [30:51–52:03] Detailed conversation on quackery.

Key Discussions:

1. Understanding Quackery:

   • Dr. Joe Schwartz defines quackery as the promotion of unproven and potentially harmful medical treatments, explaining that it ranges from harmless placebo remedies to dangerous practices that can lead to severe health consequences.

2. Homeopathy Explained:

   • At [31:50], Schwartz delves into homeopathy, describing it as a "very specific pseudoscientific practice" founded on the principle that substances causing symptoms in healthy individuals can cure similar symptoms in the sick when highly diluted. He emphasizes its lack of scientific validity: “Homeopathy is perhaps the most absurd of all the so-called alternative remedies.”

3. Regulatory Loopholes for Herbal Remedies:

   • Schwartz highlights the Health Supplement and Dietary Education Act of 1993, which allows for the sale of natural products without rigorous FDA approval. This regulatory gap enables the widespread availability of ineffective herbal supplements.

4. The Case of Vitamin C:

   • Discussing popular misconceptions, Schwartz recounts how Linus Pauling's advocacy for high-dose vitamin C as a cure for the common cold led to widespread belief despite scientific evidence showing minimal efficacy. “Taking large doses of vitamin C was a treatment for the common cold... it didn't do it.” ([43:55])

5. Modern Pseudoscientific Claims:

   • Schwartz addresses contemporary pseudoscientific concerns, such as the unfounded fears surrounding electromagnetic radiation from cell phones and 5G networks, stressing the importance of evidence-based assessments.

6. Detox Myths Debunked:

   • At [41:09], Schwartz dismantles the concept of detox diets and products, clarifying that the body efficiently manages toxin removal through organs like the liver and kidneys. He asserts, “There is no evidence that any of these [detox] products do anything.”

Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Joe Schwartz: “Always look for the evidence. When you hear that something is supposed to work for some condition, take a look to see where that information comes from.” ([40:47])
• Dr. Joe Schwartz: “The danger is in believing that [homeopathy] may do something that it cannot do and to use it to the exclusion of other remedies which may actually work.” ([35:52])
• Dr. Joe Schwartz: “Only the dose makes the poison. You always have to put things into context.” ([46:53])

Key Takeaways:

• Pseudoscience poses significant risks by promoting ineffective or harmful treatments, often exploiting regulatory loopholes.
• Critical evaluation of medical claims is essential, emphasizing the need for scientific evidence over anecdotal testimonials.
• Public awareness and education are crucial in combating the spread and acceptance of pseudoscientific practices.

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Conclusion

Mike Carruthers masterfully navigates two intricate subjects in this episode of Something You Should Know. Through Rob Dunn’s exploration of flavor’s evolutionary impact and Dr. Joe Schwartz’s incisive analysis of pseudoscience, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how innate tastes have shaped human history and the importance of scientific literacy in identifying and rejecting unfounded medical claims. This episode not only enlightens but also empowers individuals to make informed decisions in their daily lives.

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Notable Mentions:

• Books Discussed:
  • Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human by Rob Dunn
  • Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience by Dr. Joe Schwartz

For more detailed insights and to explore these topics further, listeners are encouraged to check out the mentioned books and follow the podcast for future episodes that continue to unveil intriguing "something you should know."

Transcript

[Mike Carruthers]

Today on Something you should know what your freezer does to ice cream and you're not gonna like it. Then why do we like certain flavors and dislike others?

[Rob Dunn]

One of the most amazing features of this to me Recent research has shown that when a baby is born, it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero.

[Mike Carruthers]

Then there are so many can clean in your dishwasher that are not dishes and most people think they can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are more people today than ever who believe in nonsense and various aspects of pseudoscience, and I've kind of tried to forge a career battling those views.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

World'S top experts, and practical advice you.

[Rob Dunn]

Can use in your life today.

[Mike Carruthers]

Something you should Know with Mike Carruthers Hi welcome to Something you should know. Depending on how old you are, you might have to confirm this with your grandmother or something. But it used to be that if you had a freezer every once in a while you would have to chip away the old ice and frost that would build up over time on the walls of the freezer. And then along came the frost free freezer, which pretty much everyone has now. But there's a problem. You see, your freezer regularly goes through a frost free cycle, which means the temperature actually warms up in there as high as 45 degrees. During that time, the frost melts and evaporates, and that prevents the frost ice from building up. The problem is that your food starts to melt, too, and then it refreezes, and that causes problems. This is a big cause of freezer burn, and it's why you get ice crystals on your ice cream. In fact, one food science professor calls frost free freezers ice cream destruction machines. What happens is, as the temperature goes up and food starts to thaw, the water from the food escapes into the air. As the temperature drops again, the water wants to re enter the food, but it can't because the food is still mostly frozen. So the water sits on top of the food and freezes into ice crystals. And this happens over and over and over again and can ruin some of the food in your freezer. One way to prevent or minimize the damage is to keep as little air space as possible between the food and the package it's in. This will help prevent the water from escaping out of the food because it will have no place to go. And that is something you should know. One of the things that makes modern humans different from other animals, it seems, is we don't just seek out food to nourish and satisfy us. We seek out really tasty, delicious food to nourish and satisfy us. From the way we prepare food and cook it and spice it, we want food to taste good. And even when it does taste good, we sometimes try to make it taste even better. So why is it that some food tastes good and other food doesn't? Why do you find some food delicious that I may find horribly distasteful? Here to talk about all this and why we find food so enjoyable, as well as how the pursuit of flavor has guided the course of history, is Rob Dunn. Rob is an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University, and he's author of a book called Delicious the Evolution of Flavor and How it Made Us Human. Hey, Rob. So even though other animals don't, you know, they don't cook or spice up their food a whole lot, I imagine that other species have taste preferences, that some of what a tiger eats tastes better than other things that that tiger might eat.

[Rob Dunn]

Every animal, at least in one way or another, seeks out delicious food. You know, the senses evolve to reward species for Finding things that were, on average, good for them. And so the frog, in some way or another, when it's eating a fly, is appreciating the fly. But. But you're right that we as humans do something a little bit different in our quest, which is that we really, we try to bring different flavors together. We cook things, we ferment things. And the version of that that we undertake is special, but it has antecedents in other species. And so if you look at chimpanzees, chimps don't mix food, not really in the sense that we do, but they do make tools to find delicious things. And so chimps in some populations in West Africa will break off sticks, they'll make them just the right length, and then they'll use them to pound into the ground to get at these bee nests that are up to nine feet underground, just so they can get that honey, not because it's nutritious or what they need, but really because it brings them pleasure. And so if you look across species, we see examples like that, where species have figured out ways of finding things that are extra tasty.

[Mike Carruthers]

Why do we have this kind of oddity in that a lot of foods that are, quote, good for us as humans are not foods that we really like, and a lot of the foods we really like are not good for us. How is that when you would think it would be the other way around?

[Rob Dunn]

Well, it's partially because good for us is dependent on our context. And so from almost all of our evolutionary history, for example, we needed more calories than we could usually get. And so in that context, you know, finding sweet things was definitely good for us. It was a ready source of calories. And so our ancestors evolved sweet taste receptors to reward us for finding sugar so that we didn't die. And so in that context, sugar was good for us. But what changed is we developed the ability to produce near infinite quantities of sugar. And then in that context, sugar is no longer good for us. And the same could be said for most of the things we really enjoy. That in the context in which we evolved, they tended to be things that were relatively rare and that we needed more of. But in our current context, that shifted. And in some ways, that's because what we've made of the world is kind of the mirror image of our tongues. And so if you look at the foods that we produce industrially at huge scale, if you look at what you can find in the processed food aisles, the grocery store, it's basically all rewards for your sweet taste. Receptor for your umami taste receptor for your salt taste receptors. And so we created this whole world of foodstuffs that supplies that pleasure, and we just made too much of it so that what we used to need is no longer what we need.

[Mike Carruthers]

Is there anything that is universally tasty that everybody likes? Or as you just said, a lot of this is learned? Or is there a food that everybody that eats it loves it?

[Rob Dunn]

All humans have the innate tendency to like sweet things. We all have sweet taste receptors. They're tuned a little bit different in different people. And so for some people, really sweet things are less appealing than they are for other people. But everybody is born liking sweet things. Everybody is born liking savory things. So umami, it's a hard to describe taste, but it's in tomato soup, it's in Parmesan cheese, it's in miso soup. It's. It's what gives some of the great taste to meat. And everybody is born instinctively liking umami. Salty tastes everybody likes. And again, that taste receptor is a little bit tuned. There are actually two salt taste receptors. One that says, ooh, that's enough salt. And the other that says, ooh, that's too much salt. And so the tuning of those is different from person to person, but everybody likes a little salt. And then you can learn through time to modulate those a little bit. And so as you get older, your preferences change, but you're born liking all of those things. And we've studied sour taste a fair bit in my lab, and all humans seem to have the propensity to learn to like sour taste. But how much you like it seems to vary person to person. And we don't understand yet how genetic that is versus how learned that is. But then whether you like the food that has those things in it really depends on what the aromas are associated with the food, and that's learned.

[Mike Carruthers]

So let's define some terms here. What is the difference between taste and flavor, and then how much of those things is actually smell?

[Rob Dunn]

So it's different in different languages, but in English, flavor is this encompassing word. And so if you talk to people who work in the senses associated with food, for them, flavor is taste. It's mouthfeel, which is the sense of touch inside the mouth. It's smell, which has two components that I can come back around to. It's the astringency. Does the food make you pucker? And it's even for some people, it's even the sort of visual presentation of the food that that also goes into this sort of overall experience of flavor. And so flavor is this encompassing thing. Taste is just the sensation triggered by your taste receptors. And so that's primarily on your tongue. It gets a little bit trickier than that. But that's more or less the main story. And that's those key senses we that's sweet, salty, umami, but it's not fully understood yet. And so scientists are discovering new senses of taste as we speak that are not fully understood. And so, for example, it's thought that humans might be able to taste calcium, but we don't know what that feels like. There's a new taste that's been proposed called kukumi, but we don't know how that's sensed. And so taste is for sure the tongue. But what the full dimensions of that experience remain to be studied. But taste is that narrow piece.

[Mike Carruthers]

It would seem that in order to survive, humans have had to basically adapt to be able to eat and to some extent, enjoy whatever they could get their hands on, because that's the only way you can survive. And as you pointed out, everybody likes salty and everybody likes sweet, but some people like more, some people like less. It seems that the human palate is very adaptable, depending on what's available.

[Rob Dunn]

One of the most amazing features of this to me is that recent research has shown that when a baby is born, it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero. And so there are these great French studies showing that if a mother eats anise, like anise flavored candies, when she's pregnant, and you hold up a little Q tip with an anise smell on it, that the mother who ate the anise, that that baby will make like a nursing face in response to the anise smell. If the mother didn't eat the anise, the newborn baby will make a sad face in response to the anise smell. And this is true for garlic, it's true of the smell of fermented fish, it's true the smell of some cheeses. And so, you know, on the one hand, this seems like just a quirky feature of our biology, but if you think about our ancestors moving over some hill into a new climate and a new region where there are new plants, new animals, what this offered them is that in one generation, newborn babies could already be learning to love the new foods. And so you could. Babies could be primed for what the important cultural foods were already at birth. And what we can Learn to love in different cultures is really varied. And so I work with a Greenlandic colleague, and she works a lot on fermented Greenlandic foods. And a lot of those are fermented meats that are really quite stinky and I think off putting to some people. But for Greenlandic people who grow up with them, they're some of the most delicious foods anyone could ever imagine because of that amazing olfactory learning process.

[Mike Carruthers]

So I imagine that in the history of flavor and taste and food and eating, the day somebody said, you know, if we cook this, it's going to be a lot better, had to be a pretty important day.

[Rob Dunn]

If we think about our evolutionary history, there's a point about 1.9 million years ago when our brains at that point were already larger than those of other apes, but they went through this bigger transition when the brains became even bigger and teeth became smaller to sort of accommodate that big brain, jaws became weaker. And paleoanthropologists love to fight over just what happened during this period. What was it that allowed this evolutionary transition, which would then set the stage eventually for language, for building houses, for making clothing. And they disagree about almost every feature of what happened in that period, but they agree on one. Two things. One is that somehow our ancestors were able to obtain more calories because they needed more calories for those bigger brains. And they also seemed to agree that they were getting more calories by finding ways to make food easier to eat and more delicious. And that might have been through fermenting food. It might have been from being able to access more muscles. And so imagine sort of a oystery early human. It might have been from finding new ways of getting honey. But one of the main arguments is that it was through beginning to cook food, because once you could cook food, more of the calories in the food became available, more of the flavors became available, it was easier to chew. And it was this radical moment when we were remaking the world so as to make it more pleasing. And so whatever happened in that moment, I think it's a pretty amazing time.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Mike Carruthers]

So Rob, as you look throughout history at humans and what they ate because people have said, well you know we're carnivores. Oh no, we're omnivores, but primarily, has the human diet been very meaty? Has it been. Meat was just kind of a special Sunday dinner kind of thing. What generally have people eaten over the years? Meat, vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits, what?

[Rob Dunn]

Well, the short answer is they've eaten everything. And so if you look across cultures and time periods, it's really variable. And, I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about sort of humans and food, is we found ways to live successfully in many different diets. But if you kind of walk backwards through time, you know, if we think about sort of 4 million years ago, we probably had a diet that was kind of like a chimp diet. So it would have lots of leaves and fruit, would have had a little meat, you know, the occasional colobus, monkey leg. It would have had honey. And then as we began to be able to hunt more, we brought more. More meat into our diets. It's ferociously debated how much meat, but probably there were periods where humans in particular regions switched to much meatier diets. And then one of the things that happens is that in different places, humans almost certainly hunted out some of the biggest things, and so they would have switched to less meaty diets for a while. One of the things we don't understand very well is that at some point, our guts change relative to those of other species, and. And that changes which diets we do well with. And so one of the things is that our intestines get shorter, which makes it a little bit harder for us to eat diets that are just raw leaves, because we don't. We can't ferment them as well as a chimp can. Our teeth get smaller, which makes it harder for us to chew some of those things. And then the other thing that happens is that our stomachs get really, really acidic. If you look at a chimp stomach, a chimp stomach is almost neutral, as far as we understand. And the human stomach is more acidic than sauerkraut. And I actually think that that reflects a moment which might have been 100,000 years in our story, when our ancestors switched to eating more fermented meat. And so, rather, being these noble hunters, they were the ones that ran in after the lion kill, grabbed that piece of leg and hung it up and ate it for a couple of weeks as it continued to rot. And they may have used their acidic stomachs to help them keep from getting really, really sick. But it's varied, is the short answer.

[Mike Carruthers]

Do we know when? There probably isn't a when, but this Idea of not just getting the food and bringing it home and cooking it, but to really start to develop recipes to make it even better and even better and even better. Like, how did that happen? Or do we know when that happened? Or it maybe just happened?

[Rob Dunn]

That's a great question, and it's not been studied very well. My personal impression is that once people started cooking food, then they would have become aware that cooking it one way versus another way changed the flavors. And if you could cook a food two ways and one of them tasted better than the other, so long as you have a modern human brain, which has been true for at least 300,000 years, you're probably going to do what somebody would do it do today. You'd cook it the more flavorful way. And so I think that's pretty early. What we don't know is when people start spicing things, when people start mixing ingredients. But I think we'll start to see that in the coming years because we now have all sorts of amazing ways to study ancient food that we didn't used to have. And so I have a friend, Hannes Schrader, who he finds ancient pieces of chewing gum many, many thousands of years old, and he can find the DNA in that chewing gum and figure out what food people were chewing that's getting stuck in the chewing gum and to give a sense for which ingredients were mixed together in that moment. And so I think we're going to start to see some more pieces of that story. At the same time, we certainly know there are modern cultures where people emphasize the flavor of food much less. And so I think it's also interesting to think about, well, you know, why do some people decide to eat plain mashed potatoes and not do anything else with them? You know, why? Why is. Why does that occur? And that's harder for me to make sense of.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what's the big takeaway here? Because it certainly seems that taste and flavor, it's a pretty compelling driving force for all animals.

[Rob Dunn]

So to me, it's the recognition that every species of animal out there is making decisions based on flavor. And so if you watch the crow, you watch the house finch, you watch a mouse, they have taste receptors. They smell their food, and they choose. And to know that, yeah, each species sees a different world, but each species also tastes a different world. And that in there, in some way, sometimes conscious, sometimes not conscious, there's a reward system for finding what's good. And so that fascinates me and that we're starting to understand the genetics of that and so we can now compare the taste receptors of different species. And so we know that cats, so felids in general, so house cats, tigers, leopards, they don't have sweet taste receptors because they get all of the nutrition they need and the energy from just killing other animal species. And so their sweet taste receptor was unnecessary and it broke. And so, on the one hand, that's an interesting quirk of evolutionary history, but it also means that every time you present your cat with something you think it's going to love because it's sweet, it actually can in no way taste that sweetness. And the same is true of dogs. You know, they have different taste receptors than we do. And so the subtleties of those differences change how they experience the food we give them. And so there's this constant evolutionary part of the story that I find fascinating, too. But the biggest thing for me is there really isn't a field that studies flavor and deliciousness and evolution in a holistic way. And so, you know, for somebody who's young and just thinking, oh, maybe I'll be a biologist or an anthropologist or, you know, a molecular scientist, most of what we could discover about deliciousness has not yet been discovered. And that. That, to me, is pretty wonderful and fun.

[Mike Carruthers]

Today it seems like we have a lot of, you know, fake foods, artificial foods, you know, cheese puffs and Dorit and things. How do those kind of foods that are not in nature, how do those fit into this discussion?

[Rob Dunn]

Yeah, I mean, well, the companies that produce those things look at them with great care. And so what they've figured out is how to sort of give a super reward for our taste receptors. And so if you think about a Dorito, a Dorito has been engineered to kind of perfectly suit the taste receptors and to make them happy. And then it has a very simple smell that we learn to associate with Dorito and we learn to love. And that's not an accident. That's very intentionally produced to take advantage of how our sensory systems work. Interestingly, that also happens in nature. And so there are a lot of species that want to be eaten, and so fruits want to be eaten so that they're passed through the digestive system and then their seeds are dispersed somewhere else. But some fruits have figured out ways of triggering our taste receptors, but without giving us food. And so there's a fruit across tropical Africa that produces a molecule that hits the bottom of the sweet taste receptor, but is not sugar. And so the plant makes that molecule, it doesn't provide any sugar. And primates go and eat the fruit and eat the fruit and get almost no reward for it for it. But. But the fruit itself gets dispersed by the primates. And so in some ways the Dorito is totally unnatural. In other ways it's doing the same kind of thing that nature also does.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, there is so much to this topic of flavor and taste that I think most of us don't know. And yet we're tasting and flavoring things every day. So it's really good to understand this. I've been talking to Rob Dunn. He's an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University. And the name of his book is Delicious the Evolution of Flavor and How it Made Us Human. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Rob.

[Rob Dunn]

It's been a great pleasure. I'm gonna go eat some lunch now. Cause now I'm hungry.

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[Mike Carruthers]

You know what quackery is, right? And it's such a great word, quackery. Quackery is when people spout theories and medical cures for things that are at best unproven and possibly useless and at worst, potentially dangerous. Terms like snake oil salesman and huckster all come to mind. There's a lot of quackery in science and medicine and nutrition. And a lot of it isn't easy to spot. Today on the Internet, anyone can say anything and come off as credible. So it's important to understand how to tell truth from quackery or pseudoscience. Someone who's been at the forefront of this for a long time is Dr. Joe Schwartz. He's director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. And he's author of a book. Well, he's author of several books, but his latest book is called Quack the Threat of Pseudoscience. Hey Joe. Welcome to something you should know or welcome back.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Hi Michael.

[Mike Carruthers]

It seems that quackery has been around for a long time. And I think people think that they know how to spot it, that they're somewhat immune to it because it's been around a long time. And we know quackery when we see it.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Just because it has been around a long time doesn't mean that we have developed an immunity to it. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are more people today than ever who believe in nonsense and various aspects of pseudoscience. And I've kind of tried to forge a career battling those views. Sometimes it is frustrating, I must admit, but it also has been a lot of fun dealing with the various aspects of quackery.

[Mike Carruthers]

So just to get specific and put a face on this, what are some of the quackery things that you have seen and you have dealt with in your career that you think are important for people to understand?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Well, of course, there are some funny ones and there are some more serious ones. The more serious one that I've had to deal with a great deal is homeopathy, which I believe is perhaps the most absurd of all the so called alternative remedies.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, and I think people have all heard that word homeopathy, but I bet most people don't really know what it means. So what is specifically what is homeopathy?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

The vast majority of people have no real idea what homeopathy is. And if they have any kind of idea, they equate it to just sort of an umbrella of all kinds of quote, natural therapies. This is not the case. Homeopathy is a very specific pseudoscientific practice that dates back about 200 years to a physician in Germany by the name of Samuel Hahnemann. Now, Hahnemann actually was, I think, a pretty good guy who was disenchanted with what he had been taught in medical school back in those days. Because, you know, what did doctors learn back then? They learned how to purge patients, they learned how to bleed patients. And he didn't see his patients really getting better with this, so he searched for better methods of treatment. And one treatment that was popular at the time because it actually had a good chance of working, was to treat patients who suffered from malaria with an extract of the bark of the cinchona tree, which grew in Peru. Today, of course, we know that that bark contains quinine, but they had no idea of it back then. And he knew that he wasn't always successful with the treatment because he didn' know exactly how much of this ground up bark to give to his patients, so experimented on himself and he started to take the bark of the cinchona tree to see how much he could stand. And it turned out that he developed a fever, the same kind of fever that he saw in his patients who suffered from malaria. And at that moment, homeopathy was born. The term actually means, like, cures, like. So Hahnemann came to the totally unscientific conclusion, based on his experiment, that a substance that in a healthy person causes a symptom will cure those symptoms in a sick person in a diluted version. Now, this, of course, goes against everything we know in biology, chemistry and physics.

[Mike Carruthers]

And yet, if you were to ask people, you know, just ask them on the street, what is homeopathy? That's not what they're going to say. I think most people believe homeopathy is kind of this umbrella term for natural or alternative medical treatments, which is unfortunate.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Because it is this one specific area for which there is no reputable scientific evidence. Unfortunately, it is still extremely popular, essentially because it is marketed as having no side effects, which of course is true, because when you're taking something that contains no active ingredient whatsoever, you are not going to get any side effects. But when you are taking a homeopathic remedy, you are getting something. You're getting a good dose of placebo. And as you know, if you believe in something strongly enough, it can help benefit your symptoms. Of course, it doesn't cure the underlying disease, it just changes your perception of the disease. And this is where the danger of homeopathy comes in, you know, because people always say, well, you know, what's the harm in homeopathy? You're. You're just taking water and nothing more than that. Well, there is no danger physically in the actual therapy. The danger is in believing that it may do something that it cannot do and to use it to the exclusion of other remedies which may actually work.

[Mike Carruthers]

I'd like to talk about herbal remedies because you could walk into a health food store and there's all kinds of herbal supplements that supposedly treat disease or prevent problems and do things. And you would think, well, if they didn't work, you would think by now people would have caught on and not buy them. But people do buy them. And also, if they didn't work, how is it that they can keep selling them if they don't do what people say they do?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

In the US this is quite easy to do because of a piece of legislation that was passed way back in 1993 called the Health Supplement and Dietary Education Act. This was legislation that made it legal to basically sell anything as long as it was A natural product. You could find it in nature, you could sell it. It did not have to go through any kind of FDA approval. And of course, most herbal remedies fall into that category because they do occur in nature. And of course, it is very easy to kind of, you know, promote herbal remedies in a blanket fashion because many of the proper medicines that we use today do originate from plants. The classic example, of course, is morphine, which is isolated from the poppy. We have digitalis that comes from plant, the foxglove. We have the Madagascar periwinkle, which gives us a cancer treatment. So there are numerous examples of drugs that are based on herbs. However, when someone suffers from congestive heart failure, they're not told to go out and graze in a field of foxglove. The active ingredient is isolated, purified, so that physicians can prescribe the proper dose. But none of that kind of thing is mentioned with the promotion of herbal remedies. And some of these are, you know, just made by taking various plants and grinding them up, putting into a capsule and selling them without any. Any significant trials. And because there's no need to carry out these trials, they can just market this through health food stores and, of course, these days, online.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what often happens when someone like you with MD after their name, you know, part of the medical establishment, when you start to say bad things about natural remedies and natural treatments to prevent disease, that you're just part of the big medical establishment along with big pharmaceutical companies that really just want to sell drugs to people and you're part of the problem, and that these remedies do work. It's just that you're trying to keep the lid on it. So that's a common response to which you say, what?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Let's start out by saying that pharmaceutical companies are not philanthropic enterprises. They are there to make money. And there certainly are skeletons in that closet. There's no question about that. We've seen drugs being marketed and overhyped, and essentially the truth is that virtually no drug works quite as well as the detailed salesmen say that it works. Nevertheless, Big pharma does a great deal of very, very sound research. They have great scientists, and the best way to make money is to sell drugs that actually work and that have minimal side effects. So they really do carry out excellent studies. Unfortunately, there is sometimes a difference between what the scientists in big pharma say and what the salespeople say. And it is not true that they try to sweep the competition under. Under the carpet. I mean, that just Is is not the case. Pharmaceutical companies do a great deal of research on, on natural products because there may be some truth in there and they will try to fish those out and, and convert them into proper products. But what I think we in the scientific community have to, to emphasize is evidence. Always look for the evidence. When you hear that something is supposed to work for some condition, take a look to see where that information comes from. Does it come from the peer reviewed scientific literature or does it come from some website that tries to sell some sort of product? That's our theme, really. Look for the evidence.

[Mike Carruthers]

If we can. I'd like to quickly run through some of the things that you talk about as quackery that other people think is useful and get your comments on them. Detoxing, that's become quite the thing to detox, to get all the toxins out of your body. What's the evidence according to science?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

The science says that there's no evidence for the kind of detoxes that you're mentioning. The body, of course, has all kinds of mechanisms to remove potential toxins. The kidneys and the liver do a very good job of that. And the skin does a very good job of preventing those toxins from getting into the bloodstream in the first place. But that doesn't really sell. What sells are products that you take orally or that you insert into the nether regions of the body that are supposed to draw out toxins. But those toxins rarely get mentioned in terms of what they actually are. Just this generalized expression that toxins are being removed from the body. And there's just no evidence that any of these products do anything. Mostly they are laxatives. And of course there will be some effect. You will see some body output when you're taking laxatives. But that has nothing to do with reducing potential toxins in the body. This is just a marketing term that has no scientific basis. For example, alkaline detoxing. This is something that is very popular. The notion that you drink alkaline water or eat alkaline foods is the miraculous way to remove toxins from the body. And this has no scientific substance whatsoever. But they claim that the body's PH can be altered by eating these foods and that cancer can only grow in an acid environment. And that by drinking alkaline water you can reduce your risk of cancer. You can make this sound very, very good with some appropriate pseudoscientific lingo. But the fact is that the PH of our blood is maintained at about 7.35 very effectively by the body, our blood is really what we call a buffered solution. And nothing that you eat or drink can significantly alter that.

[Mike Carruthers]

Something that you say is quackery is vitamin C. And I find that so interesting because taking vitamin C to prevent a cold or to fight a cold has become so popular and so believed by so many people that you wonder how that happened. And if, again, if it. If it's so useless, why do people continue to believe it if there's no evidence to support it?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Yeah, therein lies an interesting story. It all started with Linus Pauling, the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and he also won the Nobel Prize for Peace. And my career, of course, has been in chemistry. So from very early on, I basically worshiped Linus Pauling. And then he went off on this tangent, and that was vitamin C, believing that, purely based on anecdotal evidence, his own and his wife's, that taking large doses of vitamin C was a treatment for the common cold. Now, because this was coming from someone as eminent as Linus Pauling, it got a lot of publicity. He wrote a little book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold. And because, of course, Linus Pauling had introduced this idea of vitamin C, other researchers said, well, you know, this is something we really need to look at. And they did look into it. So experiments were done, and it turned out that it just didn't do it. Taking the vitamin C regularly did not prevent the cold. Of course, Pauling had an out for this. He said it was because the doses were so low, and he recommended taking much higher doses. He said he himself would take 15 grams a day. Now, vitamin C is a rather innocuous substance, but taking very high doses will give you diarrhea, which is, you know, not necessarily pleasant. But anyway, many, many studies were done on vitamin C showing that it really wasn't effective in preventing the common cold. However, there were some studies that suggested that if you took a gram of vitamin C an hour for four hours at the first sign of a scratchiness in your throat, you had a chance of averting the cold. And I think that there is something to that. Now, again, I cannot quote really strong scientific evidence for that. I have my own personal evidence. I think that that actually does something. But as you know, anecdotes and science really don't amount to much. I would really like to see someone do that particular in a rigorous fashion. But then Linus Pauling, unfortunately, went even deeper into this with his notion that vitamin C was also preventative and potentially a cure for cancer. We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it doesn't. And a number of cancer studies have been done on that.

[Mike Carruthers]

Since you're really at the forefront of all of this, what is it you're hearing now in this fight against quackery? What are you hearing now being touted that you think needs to be explained?

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Well, I think exposure to electromagnetic radiation is something that comes up repeatedly now. People worried about cell phones, people worried about 5G networks having some effect on their health, and there is just no evidence for that whatsoever. With radiation, as with chemicals, dosage is always important. Now, one of the tenets that we constantly refer to is that only the dose makes the poison. And you always have to put things into context. If you ask a question, for example, is aspirin toxic? Well, there's no real answer to that. If you take an aspirin tablet and you lick it, there will be no effect. If you have a headache and you take two aspirin tablets, your headache will probably resolve. If you take a whole bottle of aspirin tablets, you will go away, not the headache. So dosage is important in every context. We have to take a look at how we are exposed. For example, oral exposure is not the same thing as inhalation. It's not the same thing as dermal exposure. And then, of course, we also have to deal with. With numbers. We have to deal with amounts. How much are we exposed to? Science revolves around numbers. Whenever a scientist ask a question about toxicity always comes down to how much is there? What have we been exposed to? And this is something that you don't see in the quack world. It's always a yes or no. They don't bring numbers into the game. This will cure you. Never mind what the efficacy is.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, what you said earlier about the evidence, I think is so important. It's all about the evidence. If you're going to say something is true or something will work to cure some disease, you've got to be able to prove it. And if you can't prove it, then people should be skeptical. Joe Schwartz has been my guest. He is an MD and director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. And the name of his book is Quack Quack the Threat of Pseudoscience. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And the show notes are the descriptions just below this podcast, most likely wherever you're listening. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for coming on.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

I appreciate that very much. Thank you.

[Mike Carruthers]

You probably have a dishwasher in your kitchen and if you do, you should know there are things you can wash in there besides the dishes. For example those glass globes from light fixtures. Your lights will be much brighter after a cycle through the dishwasher. Just make sure to skip the heated dry cycle. Shower heads and faucet handles, put them on the top rack and run the pots and pan cycle and it will brighten the handles and unclog the shower head holes. Plastic hair brushes, combs and accessories residue from hair products build up on these items over time. So get rid of all the hair first. Then put them in a mesh bag or a dishwasher basket on the top rack and run them through the regular cycle. Baseball caps, Put them on the top rack and use Borax instead of dishwasher detergent. And every once in a while it's a good idea to run your pet's bowls and toys through the dishwasher as it will help prevent the growth of bacteria. And that is something you should know. Here's a challenge for you. Write a review of this podcast in 10 words or less and then post it on the platform that you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tunein, Castbox, wherever and there it will be. Your words and your name for everyone to see. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

[Mike Carruthers]

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the League, Veep, or my non eligible for Academy.

[Rob Dunn]

Award role in Twisters. We love movies and we come at.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Them from different perspectives.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, like Amy thinks that Joe Pesci.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Was miscast in Goodfellas and I don't.

[Mike Carruthers]

He's too old.

[Rob Dunn]

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated. It is.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk.

[Rob Dunn]

About good movies, critical hits, fan favorites.

[Mike Carruthers]

Must sees, and in case you missed.

[Rob Dunn]

Ems, we're talking Parasite, the Home Alone.

[Dr. Joe Schwartz]

From Grease to the Dark Knight.

[Rob Dunn]

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

[Mike Carruthers]

And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Ganja and Hess.

[Rob Dunn]

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

[Mike Carruthers]

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your.

[Rob Dunn]

Podcasts, and don't forget to hit the follow button.

[Mike Carruthers]

Ladies and gentlemen.

[Rob Dunn]

What are you doing? What do you mean? Just keep it simple. I'm making the promo. Just keep it simple. Just say, hey, we're the Brav Bros. Two guys to talk about Bravo. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we're the Brav Bros. No. Oh, dude, stop with the voice. Just keep it simple. I've seen promos on tv, dude. This is how you get the fans engaged. This is how you get listeners. We're trying to get listeners here. If we just say, oh, we're two dudes that talk about Bravo, people are gonna get tired of it already.

[Mike Carruthers]

We need some oomph.

[Rob Dunn]

All right, then, fine. Let's try to do it with your voice. Brav Bros. Good job.