989 On: Health

I’m tempted to call metabolism a kind of magic, because when you really think about it, how can my system take the calories, nutrients, and minerals in... an apple and break that down into something the body can use for fuel, and also to repair and build new structures in my body?

Clean eating, at its heart, seems to be a collection of varying dieting rules that sound like a mixture of common sense and avoidance of the latest health boogiemen.

Kidney stone disease occurs when minerals in urine collect and combine in the kidney... and over time, building up like a jawbreaker in reverse, into larger and larger stones. These stones typically form in the kidney itself, and many smaller stones are passed without symptoms. Other, larger stones can form, causing great pain, blood in the urine, nausea, and vomiting. Sound effects in this episode courtesy of "Disney's Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, A.wav" by InspectorJ of Freesound.org

Today we describe and discuss three interesting studies/news articles. We have not spent the many hours of research that our typical episodes require, so prepare yourself or an ‘off the cuff’ discussion.

In the end, my final conclusions are... I would not avoid any bug-related foods in the future, but I really didn’t find any reason to be proactive and add bugs to my diet.

I want to set your mind at ease - we’re not trying to convince you that you personally need to be eating insects - we’re not trying to convert you. But it does seem like the role of insects in our diets will be expanding - so it’s something your kids or grand-kids might see as normal.

Alcohol cannot magically give you the ability to speak Dutch, or any other language for that matter - - but according to research, it can help ease your anxiety as a foreign-language student, and let the words flow more freely.

Common medicines: some of this stuff might be common knowledge, but a lot of it is pretty surprising, once you get into the details. I suppose we should start out with an important definition: what is ‘a medicine’...

If you’re a woman, pregnancy can have huge impacts on your life, but it also changes your body in many ways, some simple, others so complex, we’re still making new discoveries even in this age when doctors already seem to know it all. One of these new revelations is the possibility that the blood of a woman who was once pregnant might be more likely to kill a man if he were to get a transfusion of her blood.

Halloween wasn’t always about candy. Historically, it was about the end of the harvest season, the beginning of winter, and as a way to mark this darker part of the year, a recognition, and celebration of the dead - everything from the Christian All Hallow’s Eve to the Gaelic Samhain to the Mexican holiday Dia de Muertos.

If you were under the impression that only modern times are irreverent, it only takes a little toe-dip into the pool of historical documents to prove that humans of the past were just as wacky, neurotic, and naughty as we are today. Our modern word for 'humor' is from the medicine of the ancient Greeks, who believed that humours were bodily fluids responsible for health and emotion, and it was important that these fluids be properly balanced.

Some 21st Century food production methods are diverging from the norm, and defined by what they are, but more importantly, defined by what they’re not - and what they’re not is industrial agriculture in the modern sense.

So there’s this article, see? It’s about violets and describes an interesting property of their scent.

First we explore Saliva Therapy, which is said to have surprising healing properties... but risks as well! As a second topic, we explore ASMR, also known as Autonomous Meridian Sensory Response - basically, it's that head and neck tingling you sometimes get when a sound, smell, or touch really triggers a wave of euphoric nerve energy.

The Vagus is the longest nerve in the body, and it emerges from the human brain, from the medulla oblongata specifically. The Vagus nerve has a lot of important functions, including muscles of the mouth and throat, but it also has a big role in heart rate and blood pressure, and even has some impacts on insulin and blood sugar.

Unlike most of our topics on random disorders and diseases, this is one that the average person is likely to have had at least a little experience with. Alcohol has been around for a long time, and was probably one of the first drugs that humanity discovered on the long road to civilization. We’ve touched on alcohol before, in the episode on fermented foods, and as as we mentioned back then, there are even some theories that indicate that one of the incentives to quit the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and start farming full time was to have a steady supply of alcohol.

Aerotoxic syndrome describes symptoms which are the result of contaminated air that you would breathe while on an airplane. The process of keeping airplane air circulating is somewhat unusual - they don’t fly around with a giant tank of fresh air to use throughout the flight. Instead, the air comes from the engines.

Scope of practice describes what health professionals can do in their professional practice and is defined by state boards of medicine, boards of nursing, and so on - often with the guidance or instruction (via statute) of the state’s legislature. In other words, it is the collections of things a practitioner can do according to law.

There have already been many instances of super heat waves, such as in India in 2015, with highs up to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, and temperatures up to 129 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded in a city in Iran.

The word cult has its origins in Latin, cultus, meaning “care”, and while it did originally imply a religious connection, it has evolved in modern usage - in fact, the word culture embodies the most accurate portrayal in modern English.