Should You Eat Like A Caveman? Plus — 10 Years of Science Vs!

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

Speaker 1 And you know what's absolutely bonkers?

Speaker 1 I've been saying those words to you all for 10 years.

Speaker 1 That's right, this show that you are listening to right now, Science Versus, it's celebrating its 10th birthday this year.

Speaker 1 And so a few months ago, we invited you, our listeners, to send us some voicemails with your thoughts on the show.

Speaker 3 My name is Oliver. I am from Mexico.

Speaker 2 This is Mali from Denver, Colorado.

Speaker 4 My name is Elaine, a Brazilian biologist living in New Zealand.

Speaker 1 Just wanted to leave a message here to express my appreciation of your show.

Speaker 4 I see it's your birthday coming pretty soon and just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, science versus.

Speaker 2 I absolutely love it. I have enjoyed every single pantastic episode.
I got instantly hooked.

Speaker 4 Much like my

Speaker 5 favorite pint of ice cream, you guys, as soon as I see you, I just have to inhale.

Speaker 1 It was really amazing hearing about all the things that you'd learned from the show and how in some cases the science really shook things up for you.

Speaker 6 There is an episode of Science Versus that still haunts me to this day and it's the episode of brushing your teeth.

Speaker 6 I feel like ever since I heard that episode, I've like lost all faith in the institution of toothbrushing.

Speaker 5 I've always been a little bit blasé about microplastics, but now I have two little daughters. And the new evidence linking female hormones to microplastics really scared me a bit.

Speaker 2 I remember one episode, it was

Speaker 3 something that marked me, and that was one where you talked about a pandemic and the potential implications of a pandemic.

Speaker 9 And then, well,

Speaker 3 COVID happened.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and for a while, everyone thought we were witches, which maybe we are. Science witches.

Speaker 1 Thank you to the teacher who uses our episodes for her classroom. Just wanted to say hello to the family who listened to us while driving in the dark to a volcano in Hawaii.

Speaker 1 I wish I could have been there for real. To those who are eating more fiber and doing more journaling, thanks to our episodes.

Speaker 1 I hope it's working for you and that your poos and and your mind are feeling better.

Speaker 1 To the dad who found out his daughter had Alice in Wonderland syndrome, with the help of our episode, I'm just really happy we could help.

Speaker 1 And thank you to this listener who told us about another episode that hit in a very different way. It was our episode on cannabis.

Speaker 2 So for a long time, I personally decided that it's not really for me. I'm not going to do that.
But I always find it really difficult as it's getting more popular and more popular.

Speaker 11 For context, my mum

Speaker 2 has like a psychosis, sort of, um, that was, I guess, triggered a little bit by marijuana.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 listening to this episode made me feel really, really

Speaker 2 secure in my personal choices to not smoke pot.

Speaker 2 And so, thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Thank you to everyone who called in and who's been listening to the show.

Speaker 1 After the break, we've got some real treats for you. We're going to share some Science Versus moments that were a huge deal for us,

Speaker 1 plus something a lot of you probably haven't heard before. It's the pilot episode of Science Versus, and it's about the paleo diet.
Remember this diet?

Speaker 1 So we're going to find out if we should all be eating like cavemen. It's all coming up.

Speaker 7 This episode is brought to you by Ford Blue Cruise.

Speaker 14 There's something to be said about long drives, the playlists, the games, the snacks, the goofy stuff we do for our entertainment.

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Speaker 10 It makes me think of this trip I took with my best friend years and years ago.

Speaker 10 We were in the car for 17 hours each way across a lot of desert and we decided to keep a notebook, kind of a log for the entire drive.

Speaker 14 Every silly inside joke, every vanity license plate that made us laugh, every single weird place we stopped along the highway, like the haunted wax museum with a lot of weird weird and creepy artifacts.

Speaker 11 Everything, it all went into the notebook.

Speaker 18 And it ended up being such a cool thing because that notebook became this memento, this souvenir of that very, very long, very, very fun road trip.

Speaker 14 And I still have it.

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Speaker 10 It's not just where you're going, it's how you feel when you get there.

Speaker 10 With hands-free highway driving, Ford Blue Cruise helps you recharge and reset behind the wheel so you can be more present in your vehicle and more connected to the moments that truly matter.

Speaker 16 One moment that I always love is when I'm driving with a friend and a song comes on the playlist that we both love, just like an absolute jam, a favorite.

Speaker 17 And without even thinking about it, we'll stop what we're doing, stop talking, mid-conversation, maybe even mid-sentence.

Speaker 10 Put the windows down and sing basically at the top of our lungs.

Speaker 16 And then when the song is done, you know, usually one of two things will happen.

Speaker 16 Either we'll play it again, rinse and repeat, do the same thing all over again, or we'll continue the conversation, pick up exactly where we left off, even if it was mid-thought, maybe even mid-sentence.

Speaker 2 And both of those options are pretty good.

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Speaker 19 Available driver assist feature.

Speaker 18 Does not replace safe driving or driver's need to control the vehicle.

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Speaker 10 Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

Speaker 15 To read the full report and for additional details, visit www.ford.com slash bluecruise.

Speaker 1 Welcome back. Today, we're taking a little trip down memory lane to talk about some of the highlights of the past decade of Science Versus.

Speaker 1 So since 2015, we've made around 250 episodes diving deep on the science of all sorts of things diseases drugs diets plus some stuff that really freaked people out before basically falling off the radar like uh 5g remember when people were afraid of that

Speaker 1 So now we're going to talk about a couple of major moments for us.

Speaker 1 And first up, the orgasm gap, which is this idea that when cis men and cis women have sex with each other, the men are way more likely to have an orgasm than the women are.

Speaker 1 We did an episode on this way back in 2020 when the show was an unruly five-year-old.

Speaker 1 It was a very fun episode, but we wanted to talk about it today because this was the first time that Science Versus did our own research for the show.

Speaker 1 We saw that there really wasn't much science around the orgasm gap for folks who are queer or trans. And so we surveyed you guys, our listeners.

Speaker 1 More than 5,000 of you responded, which was totally amazing. And then we worked with sex researchers from Queen's University in Canada to analyze what we found.
And just this year,

Speaker 1 the research got published in a peer-reviewed journal. Talk about a climax.

Speaker 1 Now we're going to play a little bit of that original orgasm gap episode. Enjoy.

Speaker 1 Okay, our first stop is to figure out what exactly is going on when we have an orgasm. And for that, we're starting with the biggest, most powerful, throbbing, veiny sex organ.

Speaker 20 Um, the brain.

Speaker 1 The brain. This is Nan Wise.
She was a clinician helping people with their sex lives for decades, but there was something missing in her understanding of sex. And so.

Speaker 20 And went back to grad school to become a neuroscientist when I turned 50.

Speaker 1 When Nan finished grad school, she set up one of the only studies we have looking at what's going on in the brain during an orgasm because she wanted to see what's firing when we're all fired up.

Speaker 1 First up, Nan got 14 women who said they were up for having an orgasm while in an MRI. But right away, Nan hit this big problem.

Speaker 20 The number one enemy in brain studies is movement.

Speaker 1 To get a clean scan in an MRI, your head needs to be perfectly still, which is a bit tough when you're having a wank.

Speaker 1 So, Nan had to invent something that the women would wear on their heads to keep it still. And after a couple of years of trial and error, she settled on the design.

Speaker 20 With what we called the Hannibal Hector happy helmet.

Speaker 2 Hannibal!

Speaker 20 And it really was a scary-looking contraction.

Speaker 1 Nan used plastic that molded to the shape of each subject's head and then cut out the eye and nose holes.

Speaker 1 It kind of looks like having your head wrapped in white construction fencing or like your Kanye on the Yeezys tour.

Speaker 1 So imagine you're lying in this MRI, head all cased up, and inside an MRI, it's loud, loud, loud.

Speaker 20 It kind of sounds like

Speaker 1 so they put in earplugs, and now, it's orgasm time.

Speaker 1 The women in the study are lying down with their head in the MRI and the lower half of their body is out of the scanner.

Speaker 1 In part of Nan's experiment, she had the women's partners touch their genitals until they came. But there were complications here, too.

Speaker 1 With the women stuck in the MRI, with the earplugs in and that loud noise, the couples couldn't talk to each other.

Speaker 1 So the women in the scanner would have to press a button to say they've started orgasming. And Nan would then relay that to the partners who were wearing headphones.

Speaker 20 The partner would hear, your partner is having an orgasm.

Speaker 20 Then the participant would press a button, orgasm was finished.

Speaker 20 And the partner would hear, stop stimulating, your partner's orgasm is complete.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh, so these partners have your voice in their ear while they are

Speaker 1 trying to give their partners an orgasm. Right.

Speaker 20 So I sounded a bit like a deranged, I guess, stewardess.

Speaker 1 So tell me, do you think that you could orgasm in that situation?

Speaker 20 I had to. I was the test pilot for everything.
I had more orgasms in that scanner to the point that I should have frequent flyer miles.

Speaker 20 And I actually had a very funny incident when I was in the scanner using a purple dildo

Speaker 20 and it slipped out of my hands and it went flying.

Speaker 20 So after the scanner went off, I said, Houston, we have a problem.

Speaker 20 The dildo went into orbit.

Speaker 1 That was from our episode called Orgasms Come for the Science. You should definitely go back and have a listen to the rest if you haven't heard it.
It's a banger.

Speaker 1 And you can find our new scientific paper in the journal Psychology and Sexuality. We'll link to it in the citations, of course.

Speaker 1 But now we're going to shift to something that's not nearly as sexy, though it still gets our knickers in a twist,

Speaker 1 vaccines.

Speaker 1 So back in 2017, we first looked into the science of whether vaccines, and in particular, the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine or MMR causes autism.

Speaker 1 And it's something that I didn't think we'd still be talking about almost 10 years later.

Speaker 4 But this claim just won't die.

Speaker 1 In fact, earlier this month, the CDC changed its website to suggest that the evidence on vaccines and autism is still murky, which doesn't track with the science.

Speaker 1 So we're going to play a bit of our original episode about this. And just to set it up, the idea that vaccines cause autism was first championed by a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 1 He's since become a big campaigner against vaccines. But he wasn't like that in the 1990s.

Speaker 1 Back in the late 1990s, Andrew was quite different.

Speaker 1 He was a gastroenterologist working at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine in London, and his research, which connected the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism, was being published in a prestigious journal, The Lancet, and it was being taken seriously.

Speaker 1 So, let's take a close look at it.

Speaker 1 Andrew and his colleagues studied 12 kids, some of whose parents said that they had gotten autism soon after getting the vaccine.

Speaker 1 Now, specifically, Andrew was looking at the kids' guts, and he found that some of them had a bit of inflammation in there. Now from that, he thought, haha,

Speaker 1 that vaccine must have caused the inflammation, which then led to their autism.

Speaker 1 Now, even though this was a really small study, which when you think about it, it didn't really prove anything, Andrew drummed up a lot of media attention and started telling parents not to vaccinate their kids with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, also called the MMR.

Speaker 1 He is on ABC News.

Speaker 24 There is a great deal of evidence stacking up to suggest that the parents, their contention that their child regressed after MMR is indeed correct.

Speaker 1 Scientists scrambled to figure out if Andrew was right and that the measles, mumps and rubella shot could cause autism.

Speaker 1 The first studies that put Andrew's theory to the test came out about a year later. And while that's fast in the world of science, it wasn't fast enough.

Speaker 26 Science takes time. I think that time was not on our side.

Speaker 1 Daniel Salmon is a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, and he says those studies were too late for public opinion.

Speaker 26 If we would have had good, solid data sooner, I suspect that public concerns wouldn't have grown as quickly as they did, and people might have been reassured by those data.

Speaker 1 One of the first follow-up studies looked at every kid diagnosed with autism in a part of the UK. This was almost 500 kids.

Speaker 1 And it found no link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism.

Speaker 1 Soon, more and more studies would come out involving well over a million children, all showing no connection between getting the vaccine and kids getting autism.

Speaker 26 Those studies were done by different investigators, different scientists in different countries using different methods, and they were all negative.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Andrew Wakefield's original paper was retracted. It turned out that he had messed around with facts about the patient's medical histories.

Speaker 1 And by 2011, an editorial in the British Medical Journal called the paper, quote, fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically, end quote.

Speaker 1 That was from our 2017 episode, Vaccines, Are They Safe?

Speaker 1 And it's been really interesting for us thinking back over the past 10 years and

Speaker 1 just really thinking about how the fight against dodgy information online has just gotten so big with the rise of social media and new media like podcasts.

Speaker 1 It's just brought this onslaught of garbage that, in many cases, seems to have this glow of science around it.

Speaker 1 And part of what we're trying to do on the show is to, of course, help you understand what's real and what's not, but also to show you where some of the misinformation that you're seeing is coming from and why it's so easy for even really smart people to get sucked in.

Speaker 1 And as we were looking back on all of our episodes, one stood out as being a really clear example of that.

Speaker 1 It's our episode on ivermectin, which is this drug that's been used for a long time to treat stuff like parasitic worms and scabies.

Speaker 1 But some doctors got really excited that it could also help folks with COVID. And one of those doctors was Dr.
Pierre Corey.

Speaker 1 He became a big believer in ivermectin, talked it up in places like the US Senate and on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Speaker 1 But it turned out that lots of this hype was based on early studies, some of which ended up being a bit dodgy, possibly even fraudulent.

Speaker 1 And when we got better studies later on with thousands of people, we found out that ivermectin did not work for COVID.

Speaker 1 But when I talked about all of this with Dr. Pierre Corey for our episode, he just couldn't believe that newer science telling us ivermectin didn't work.

Speaker 1 And so what would you need to see to not believe that ivermectin works here?

Speaker 23 Oh, I love that question. I would have to unsee the hundreds of patients that I saw over the past year.
So that would be the short answer to your question.

Speaker 23 So I'd have to pretend that I didn't treat them. The studies are overwhelming.

Speaker 1 Right. So nothing.
So nothing, nothing. Like, I guess I understand.
I don't understand.

Speaker 23 I don't understand like how you can ask me. So the reason, actually, I'll tell you why you're asking that question because

Speaker 23 you are in a world where ivermectin is unproven. So, you might get this wrong, Dr.
Corey. And so, what would it take for you to admit that you're wrong?

Speaker 23 And I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for that. I don't know about being wrong.
I know it's effective. You don't, I don't know.
I don't know. I'm done with that question.
I think I answered it.

Speaker 23 To get me to believe that it doesn't work, to get me to believe it doesn't work is just an empty exercise. I can't pretend that you can do do that.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 We spoke for almost two hours.

Speaker 23 Okay. Here's the deal.

Speaker 23 And now I'm just going to speak plainly, and I really don't care what you or your listeners think. Okay.

Speaker 23 You could just write me off as a completely biased clinician so committed to ivermectin, he can't see anymore. I'm fine with that.
And you know what?

Speaker 23 Conclude that it doesn't work and make sure that no one else uses it. That's exactly what they want to have happen.
This is a war on repurposed drugs.

Speaker 1 But what if it's not? What if it's not? Like, what if, what if you remove, what if you remove the conspiracy?

Speaker 23 I won't do it anymore. So, Winnie, can I just say that this is where probably our conversation will end? Because I can no longer pretend that's the case.
And there's no way you can ask me to do that.

Speaker 23 And let's just leave it as

Speaker 23 this subject should be undetermined. So Dr.
Corey thinks everything's a conspiracy and he's refusing to look at high quality data that shows it doesn't work.

Speaker 23 So either I've lost my mind as a conspiracy theorist, or you're a victim of propaganda. There's the only two conclusions.
And

Speaker 23 it's my opinion that

Speaker 23 you're an unfortunate victim of relentless propaganda as well as the doctors you talk to.

Speaker 1 And what's my opinion?

Speaker 23 That I'm someone who's lost in conspiracy theory. And that's fine.

Speaker 23 You are thinking that this is all a mass delusion, that everyone's a little enthusiastic and they decided to study it and their biases led to some false conclusion that it worked.

Speaker 23 And that's a really cute story, but it's just not true.

Speaker 1 After chatting with Pierre Corey, me and the Science Versus team actually looked at all of this again to see, did we miss something?

Speaker 1 Had we been taken for a ride?

Speaker 1 And what's clear is that ivermectin is not a blockbuster drug for COVID. Whatever is going on with ivermectin, it's not saving bucketloads of really sick people.
If it was,

Speaker 1 we'd see it clearly in the data, and we don't.

Speaker 1 And you know, there are more trials coming along, so we'll wait and see what they say.

Speaker 1 But for now, the best data we have tells us that ivermectin really isn't doing much here.

Speaker 1 And the thing is,

Speaker 1 I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain any of this

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 1 I've heard this story before

Speaker 1 many times that science gets excited about a drug, there's a flurry of research, and what comes out is that we realize, nah, it doesn't work.

Speaker 1 Grab a beer with anyone studying cancer or Alzheimer's, and they'll tell you a story like that.

Speaker 1 In fact,

Speaker 1 it's kind of the story I've come to expect.

Speaker 1 That is

Speaker 1 science versus

Speaker 1 That's from our episode, Ivermectin: The Story of a Wonder Drug. After the break, should you go on the paleo diet? We go way back in the science versus time machine to our pilot episode.

Speaker 1 Plus, stick around for one of our all-time favorite moments from 10 years of science versus

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Speaker 1 Welcome back. Here's to the 10th anniversary of Science Versus.
Thank you so much for listening. I know I've said that a few times in this episode, but I really do appreciate it.

Speaker 1 So on this show over the years, we've covered a lot of diets from keto to veganism to fasting, fears around ultra-processed foods and seed oils.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting because the very first episode of Science Versus was a diet episode. As I mentioned, it was about the paleo diet.

Speaker 1 which is this idea that we should all be eating like our cave-dwelling ancestors. And so we're going to play it for you now.

Speaker 1 This episode was published with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which is where Science Versus started. And so I just want to thank the ABC so much for letting us publish it today.

Speaker 1 And thank you for letting me start Science Versus. I wouldn't be on this journey without you.
So thanks to the ABC. All right, let's jump in.
Here's where it all began.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Science Versus, the show where we pit fact against fad. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and today we're dissecting the paleo diet.

Speaker 25 Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough a Eureka Discovery

Speaker 25 uncovering a sinister secret. Dietists across the world first.

Speaker 1 This is the idea that if you eat like our ancestors did in Paleolithic times, you can lose weight, stave off illness, and live at the peak of health.

Speaker 32 The followers say they are shedding drastic amounts of weight and are warding off debilitating diseases.

Speaker 33 The caveman diet is the most googled diet on the planet.

Speaker 18 We need to eat the way nature intended us to eat.

Speaker 34 The paleo diet is described by some as a fad, a marketing ploy, and a.

Speaker 25 It's offering a different paradigm from what is considered the norm. So it's going to get shut down a little bit.

Speaker 1 Amidst the cave madness, we're about to find out if this diet is healthy and whether we should all be on it. But first, what even is the paleo diet?

Speaker 35 Well, Well, the original prescription by Dr. Lauren Cordane, who wrote the paleo diet, said that our diet should consist of lean meats, fish, beefy greens, nuts, berries.

Speaker 1 That's Daryl Edwards. He's a paleo advocate and author of the book Paleo Fitness.

Speaker 35 And we should eschew processed foods, unnecessary sugar and sweeteners, and avoid anti-nutrients.

Speaker 1 Anti-nutrients.

Speaker 21 We'll get to those a little later.

Speaker 1 Now, also, paleo fans completely cut out dairy because paleo people didn't have cows.

Speaker 35 I don't eat any dairy at all.

Speaker 1 And also no legumes. So this means no cheese, no chickpeas, no palak pania for you, none of that.
And that's all fine. But then there's science.

Speaker 1 Officially, the Paleolithic period begins around 2.5 million years ago.

Speaker 1 No, T-Rex was dead long before this. Okay, and it goes until around 10,000 years ago.
Really before we figured out agriculture. So what were our early ancestors eating back then?

Speaker 22 So I would assume they would have eaten quite a lot of plant foods, probably fruits, seeds. They turned increasingly to animal source foods.

Speaker 1 This is Catherine Milton. She's a professor at the University of California in Berkeley.
And when it comes to knowing what our ancestors ate, She's one of the best in the business.

Speaker 22 So I went to Brazil and over

Speaker 22 about 15 year period I was able to work with seven different indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon who had been very little contacted by outsiders.

Speaker 1 She's also studied non-human primates to get an idea about what our monkey cousins were eating.

Speaker 1 So what does our primatologist think of the paleo diet?

Speaker 22 Well, the thing is I honestly don't know what people mean when they talk about the paleo diet because there were hundreds of different paleo diets.

Speaker 1 Because people were eating what was around them. So if you lived lived near the ocean, you'd be eating lots of fish.
If you lived in the Andes Mountains, you might have been eating cashews.

Speaker 1 And this means that when people say they're going paleo, they're not eating a diet that resembles what one person living in Paleolithic times would have eaten.

Speaker 1 They're getting their apples maybe from the Middle East, their avocados from Mexico, barramundi from northern Australia. I mean this is a traveling, traveling caveman.

Speaker 22 But the thing you have to understand is that if someone is a hunter-gatherer, which is what our ostensibly paleo ancestors were, that means they are eating only wild plant foods and wild animal foods.

Speaker 22 So it would be, I would think, extremely difficult for anyone, you know, with a normal job or anything in the United States to fancy that they were eating anything remotely similar to a, quote, any of the, quote, paleolithic diets.

Speaker 1 But when I put this to Darryl Edwards, our paleo advocate, he actually had a pretty convincing answer, I thought.

Speaker 35 Did they eat broccoli 50,000 years ago?

Speaker 2 Probably not.

Speaker 35 It was probably a wild variant of the modern-day broccoli plant, but we do know the classification that will mimic the paleo lifestyle.

Speaker 1 But Catherine is quite adamant that any food you get today is so far removed from what cave people would have been eating that you should really just forget this idea that you're eating paleo at all.

Speaker 22 She even says, The paleo diet just seemed to me to be very counter our primate heritage, very counter our digestive physiology, and unlikely to provide us with much other than the fact that staying away from processed materials is probably a very good idea.

Speaker 1 Plus, the paleo diet excludes potatoes.

Speaker 22 You laugh? Well, I just laugh because of the enormous amounts of potatoes that are consumed in the Andes and highland New Guinea and so on.

Speaker 22 I mean, they would be quite shocked if they knew they couldn't have the yam or the sweet potato or

Speaker 22 the solanaceous potato.

Speaker 1 Other things that are no-nos,

Speaker 1 grains are another one.

Speaker 22 Well, I'm, well, you know what they say, take away the grains and 80% of the world's population will be gone within a few weeks. So, you know, it's kind of ludicrous, really.

Speaker 1 Conclusion. This so-called paleo diet is not paleolithic.
And you know what? Even Darrell Edwards, who wrote the book Paleo Fitness, acknowledges this.

Speaker 35 Paleolithic or the paleo is just a label that best describes what we're aiming for. But we don't have to go that far back.

Speaker 35 We can go back just a few generations and realize that some of the foods that have been very recently introduced to us, I mean, even in the last 20, 30 years, there have been a lot of foods, a lot of artificial sweetness and preservatives and the like that we have no idea what they're, or we do have a great idea as to what they're doing to our health today.

Speaker 35 So just going back a few generations, in my opinion, would be good enough for most people.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure that you can sneak out of this so easily though, because the thrust behind this paleo diet argues that humans take tens of thousands of years to evolve so that they can eat certain foods.

Speaker 1 And if it's okay to just go back a few generations, then that's a different philosophy, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Which takes us to our next question.

Speaker 1 Is this so-called paleo diet even healthy? Because while the elimination of some processed foods is a good thing, there are other foods that are excluded from this diet.

Speaker 1 Like dairy. It's a no-no because two million years ago, we hadn't domesticated cows yet.

Speaker 35 My calcium I get from sardines with the bones, a great source of calcium. I also get them from leafy greens.

Speaker 1 Huh. So do you need to eat dairy to get enough calcium for healthy bones?

Speaker 22 Well, how does a gorilla gorilla get dairy?

Speaker 1 Here's Catherine Milton again.

Speaker 22 Because wild plants have, many wild plants have very high concentrations of calcium and they're able to get all of the calcium that they require from their wild plant diets.

Speaker 1 So you might be able to keep your bones strong on a diet without dairy if you track what you're eating.

Speaker 1 Another potential issue with the paleo diet is

Speaker 1 how much meat you're eating. Here's Daryl Edwards.

Speaker 35 So I'll definitely always have some animal protein on a daily basis. And in terms of the amount, it might be 100 grams of steak.
It's not excessive amounts of meat or fish.

Speaker 1 It might not be excessive, but according to the most recent guidelines from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, that's still too much meat.

Speaker 1 These days they're recommending about 65 grams of red meat per day maximum, or instead, 100 grams of fish. That's about one medium-sized meatball.
And what happens if you go overboard?

Speaker 33 The strongest evidence is a relationship between red meat and increased risk of colorectal cancer.

Speaker 1 That's Jonathan Hallett from the Collaboration for Evidence Research and Impact in Public Health at Curtin University in Perth.

Speaker 33 But also links with lung and renal cancer and potentially pancreatic cancers.

Speaker 1 Jonathan says that the potential overconsumption of meat is particularly troubling given that the paleo diet says you're not allowed to have processed grains, including whole wheat bread.

Speaker 33 Whole grains in particular are packaged with bran and fibre, and we know that there's evidence for that around preventing the formation of small blood clots.

Speaker 33 It helps lower cholesterol, moves waste through the digestive tract.

Speaker 33 So if you're both consuming large amounts of, say, red meat, which we know has a link to colorectal cancer, and then you're not consuming whole grains, which we know is linked to preventing colorectal cancer, you know, what is that actually going to do?

Speaker 1 Well, apparently, increase your risk of colorectal cancer.

Speaker 1 Our final question on the paleo diet is about these so-called anti-nutrients. Now, these are often found in plants as a defense against predators.

Speaker 1 And according to Darrell, avoid anti-nutrients where possible. And this is why you shouldn't eat potatoes, legumes, and wheat, because they're chock full of these anti-nutrients.

Speaker 1 He says that in the worst case, it can kill you, but more likely...

Speaker 35 You might incur some slight sickness or you may have suffer illness over a longer period of time.

Speaker 1 But there's no human studies that have demonstrated that well, and the founder of the paleo movement, Dr. Lauren Cordain, even admits that on his website.

Speaker 1 Plus, anti-nutrients aren't necessarily anti-your health.

Speaker 1 Dora Maranova, who's a professor at Curtin University in Perth and works with Jonathan Hallett, told me via email that, quote, In the scientific literature, there have been calls for more than a decade to stop the use of the term anti-nutrients, or change it, because of the benefits these substances have.

Speaker 1 The term is misleading. End quote.
So, some of these anti-nutrients, for example, have been found to have antioxidant and anti-cancer qualities.

Speaker 1 Even in the paleo-loving world, this issue legumes large. Chris Cresser, who's the author of Your Personal Paleo Code, for example, reckons it's okay to eat legumes.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 so when it comes to science versus the paleo diet, does it stack up?

Speaker 1 Well, although the diet isn't paleo and it's littered with these frustrating pseudoscience-y words or science words used badly, It's understandable that people are moving towards these sorts of diets, particularly when conventional medicine isn't giving them satisfying responses.

Speaker 1 So take our paleo advocate Daryl Edwards, for example. Now, he found the paleo way of life because he was in really bad shape.

Speaker 1 He'd pretty much eaten chocolate bars and microwave spaghetti for a decade and then just found he was in really poor health.

Speaker 35 So I was at an elevated risk of heart disease. I was pre-diabetic and the doctor's remedy for that was for me to undergo a medication program, which is going to be for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 So instead of going on the meds, he searched for a different lifestyle and found the paleo diet. And now he says he's very healthy and no longer pre-diabetic.

Speaker 1 But based on the science, he probably didn't need to go paleo.

Speaker 21 So, the message for today:

Speaker 1 don't say you're on the paleo diet. Sure, reduce your consumption of processed foods and excess sugars.
But when it comes to science versus paleo, it's science one,

Speaker 1 paleo diets

Speaker 1 nil.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 Season one, episode one of science vs. It It was published in May 28th, 2015.

Speaker 1 We hope you had fun on this trip down memory lane. We really did.
I'm going to say it one more time. Thank you so much for listening to the show.
We would not be here without you.

Speaker 1 And so finally, we're going to play you out with perhaps one of our greatest podcasting achievements. Is it the awards we've won? No.
Is it the scientific papers we've published? No.

Speaker 1 It's from an episode we made several years back on sharks. And in this episode, we talked about how sharks have gotten a lot of bad press and they really need a glow-up.

Speaker 1 This scientist we talked to, Dr. Chris Pepper Neff,

Speaker 1 had just the ticket for how we were going to do this.

Speaker 36 Sharks have been demonized. And when I do my musical, Flaws the Musical, it's going to be, you know, like wicked.
It's going to be like wicked. And

Speaker 36 you know, the shark is gonna be the star of the musical. And the shark starts singing,

Speaker 36 you know,

Speaker 36 defying gravity and

Speaker 2 whatever it is.

Speaker 21 Do you have any songs ready to go?

Speaker 36 Oh, I'm working on them. I've already bought flawsthemusical.com.

Speaker 1 Rose?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Should we help him out a little? I think so.

Speaker 1 I know you people are scared of me,

Speaker 1 but I'm not the one to blame.

Speaker 1 You saw jaws as a child, and now you think I'm aim.

Speaker 1 But I need to eat sometimes,

Speaker 12 and even if you're on the beach,

Speaker 31 I'll choose a a seal for food.

Speaker 31 Roll back my eyes

Speaker 31 and

Speaker 31 breathe.

Speaker 31 Or I might try

Speaker 31 to fight

Speaker 31 a manity.

Speaker 31 But human flesh, it's just not my cup of tea.

Speaker 4 So I won't pull you down.

Speaker 20 Sharky, I find that hard to believe.

Speaker 1 Don't Finda, haven't you been listening to anything?

Speaker 12 Really don't want to eat humans.

Speaker 12 No,

Speaker 6 I just want to fight humanity.

Speaker 1 Or maybe a seal.

Speaker 4 But human flesh.

Speaker 1 It's really just not what I'm into.

Speaker 1 So I won't pull you down.

Speaker 10 That's science versus sharks.

Speaker 1 All right. So we're back to our.

Speaker 1 Indeed.

Speaker 1 If you ever want to get in touch, we love hearing from you. We are on Instagram, science underscore VS.
I'm on TikTok at Wendy Zuckerman. You can also email us.
There's details in the show notes.

Speaker 1 This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Meryl Horde, Michelle Dang, Rose Fribler, and Aketty Foster Keys.

Speaker 1 Hannah Harris-Green helped produce our Orgasm Gap episode. Heather Rogers was the lead producer on the vaccines episode.
We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka.

Speaker 1 Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wiley, and Bobby Lorde.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much to all of the folks who have helped make Science Versus over the years, including Caitlin Kenney, Alex Bloomberg, Matt Lieber, Caitlin Sori, Angela Stengel, Ben Watts, Nick Del Rose, Diane Wu, Austin Mitchell, Annie Rose Strausser, Martin Peralta, Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran, Joel Werner, Sindhuja Srinivasan, Odelia Rubin, Disha Bagat, Ari Natavich, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Reed, Taylor White, Rasha Aridi, Ramilla Karnick, Lexi Krapp, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, Catherine Anderson, Sam Baer, Bumi Hidaka, Lauren Silverman, Lily Kim, and so, so many more.

Speaker 1 Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you for listening.

Speaker 37 Wendy, you and the team have been so,

Speaker 37 so joyous in your creation and explanation of science, and I can't wait for the next 10 years.

Speaker 6 Thanks for giving me a toothbrushing existential crisis every morning, and happy 10 years.

Speaker 3 Thanks for making this place we call world a little bit more informed and thus a better place. Thank you.
Goodbye.

Speaker 26 Adios.

Speaker 1 I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.

Speaker 8 The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robin Ince, and I've sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels.

Speaker 2 And what else?

Speaker 8 It was fascinating, though. The eels.
But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit.

Speaker 38 Brain-computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud science of the North Pole, and eels. Did I mention the eels?

Speaker 8 Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sagasso C?

Speaker 38 Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.