#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong

33:39You know, I'm not gonna want it. They just don't. They want you up. You know, and what's the adaptive explanation for that? Why would that be the case? Is that safer, baby? If baby's being carried and moved, it's less likely to be eaten? I think probably it has something to do with that. I mean, certainly being carried and being in close proximity, I think babies feel anxious when naturally just feel anxious when they don't have that proximity. I'm not quite as sure about why they want us to be expending the maximum amount of calories carrying them about and rocking and bouncing. But what you just hypothesized there, speculated, is that they, that's sending them signals that they're being held, that they're being cared for, you know, that could be something that's straightforward as that.

34:32There are meal on wheels as opposed to a TV dinner. And it's harder to catch the meal on wheels, especially if the wheels are mama, dad, yeah, okay. So why, what about some explanations for why toddlers might wake up at night or throw food or act out? Why might those be smart behaviors in some way? Yeah, well, toddlers wake up at night because they want to check in with, you know, my mom and dad, I think. And they don't have as much incentive to, you know, they don't have to get up and do anything in the morning. And so they're free to satisfy their whims that way. as far as throwing food and tantrums if they don't get their way, well there are a couple things.

35:25Throw throwing food, especially vegetables and new foods. I think that toddlers, once your mobile, you have this natural aversion to just putting anything in your mouth. Unlike like when you're four months old, you'll put anything in your mouth. But as you get more mobile, if you're just crawling about or totalling about the campsite, if you're willing to put everything in your mouth, that's probably not gonna be good for you. So you hand six month old a stock of broccoli, they'll eat it. You hand two year old a stock of broccoli, they're likely to throw it to the floor. And I think that makes some good adaptive sense.

36:12As far as tantrums go and just being very, very needy, I think I don't really know what the adaptive explanation is for that. But I do think that they just cognitively, they're not very empathetic yet. They can't really put themselves in another individual's position and say, well, mom is busy right now. Now she can't carry me around even though I want to be carried around. And so they just want what they want. And at one moment they might want to give you a kiss. And the next moment they want to hit you over that or something. Just because they, I don't think they've got it all figured out yet.

37:01They're still learning how to be social. I mean, they're much better at it than say it's chimpanzee would be at a similar age. but it's a long learning process and humans learning. I mean, we're the hyper -social species, right? That's how we've prevailed is we know how to get along in groups and we reciprocate with one another and it's a long lesson for kids to learn sharing. It's not an easy concept, but it takes a long time to learn it. That's why a lot of our parents, a lot of help, and taking a long time to do it is very important. That's why those things have evolved, I think. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it.

37:54For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day the same way with element in a cold glass of water. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Each grab -and -go stick pack contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium with no coloring, no sugar, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite and curbing cravings. Their orange salt in a cold glass of water is gorgeous. It's a beautiful, salty, sweet orangey nectar and it's how I've started my day every single day for as long as I can remember and I genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't.

38:36Best of all, I've got no questions asked, refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it totally risk -free. If you don't like it, you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. As an only child, you are speaking my language here. struggling to learn to share, et cetera. What do we know about breastfeeding? We know it's the best way to go and we, it has numerous advantages for baby and handmother.

39:20It helps establish a proper microbiome. It helps protect you early on in life when your own immune system is still getting up and running. protect you especially from diarrhea illnesses which used to kill a lot of babies back in you know the interditional societies. There's some evidence I don't know how solid it is but there's some papers that I've read suggesting you get four to five extra IQ points if you're breastfed for a long period of time versus just in bi -being and formula. There's some evidence that the microbiome interaction with the immune system and the nervous system can help reduce risks of developing mental angst problems, depression, and so on later in life.

40:15And then of course for mom, moms reduce their risk of breast cancer from breastfeeding. and it was, yeah, yeah. Wow. And there's a really cool study. I, it seems to be pretty empirically sound. It was very surprising to me. It's in evolutionary medicine and public health from a couple of years ago, showing that moms who breastfeed their babies have a lower incidence of developing early dementia. Oh my God. How much is that selection? It's an amazing correlate. I was gonna say it could be a selection effect. Yeah, right, yeah. So I don't know. But yeah, multiple, multiple benefits from it. And unfortunately, we don't grow up with it.

41:02We, it's very smart, P, I have some very smart parents in my practice. And they're surprised when I tell them babies are designed to breastfeed for a couple of years. And they don't know about breastfeeding and they come in from the hospital, even if they've talked to a lactation consultant with their spreadsheets and so on, babies done this, babies had so many poops and so many voids and blah, blah, blah, and they're all uptight and milk's not coming in yet and somebody's telling them they have to supplement and it all just interferes with breastfeeding after relax. It just happens. You just, you know, there's no breastfeeding failure in traditional societies, or it's very, very rare.

41:51Everybody sees it happen. They know how to do it. But we have, I think it's less than 50 % of U .S. babies are still breastfeeding at six months. And a lot of them don't even get that far into it because they worry about the initial weight loss, or they worry about the jaundice that develops when you're getting a little bit dehydrated and breast milk's not there yet and it's not washing out, Billy Rubin and so on. And they started introducing formula and then baby says, oh, this is easier. It learns to prefer the bottle over the breast. And so more often than you might think, both baby and mom end up giving, oh, well, yes, for that one.

42:45both parties have been weaned off of breastfeeding. Yeah, right. So, yeah. That's interesting. What about C -sections? Yeah, I mean, I think C -sections obviously can be life -saving and are necessary in some circumstances, but I just think that there are some in some birthing centers, there's just a a little bit too cavalier about it. Mom's got something coming up, or the doctor's got a vacation. It's just, you're at 40 weeks now. Let's not let it go too long. Let's just do a C -section, that kind of thing. Or let's induce, same sort of thing. So mom and baby have evolved a really good communication system for when baby is supposed to come.

43:36And we're not always really good at estimating what the exact conception date is. We know that because some babies are conceived now through our official insemination. We know then when they're conceived, and we know that we're a little bit off when we're estimating using ultrasounds and when mom thinks her last period wasn't so on. So I think they're overdone, basically, it's a short answer. They're their life saving, wonderful interventions. If done appropriately and much more sparingly than they are done now, same with inductions. I just don't love to hear. You're 41 weeks and everything looks good, but maybe we should just induce you right now.

44:28Well, if everything looks good, I've always wanted to wait a few more days, you know. So have you got a perspective on epidurals? Is there any insight though? I'm not a real expert in that. What I've been told by my moms and people that have them is that can interfere a little bit with pushing and getting the baby out. And so then that increased your risk of some doctor saying out we better do a second here. that kind of thing. Is this such a thing as a pot epidural? Can you reduce down sensitivity by 50 % or something like that? Do you know if they can tolerate it? You know, that's a good question.

45:14I don't know the answer to that. You would think that would be a good idea. It's easy for me to say, you know, I don't do epidurals. But I mean, my daughter and daughter and Laura were able to do it. Yeah, I guess they're pretty tough, but probably, know tougher than the average. So to see sections interrupts lactation, I think so because again, there's this fine -tune timing mechanism between when baby should come and when nursing should start, but also mom's sore. I mean, it's a surgery and mom doesn't feel quite as good. And it's just harder for mom to get things going and be quite as committed and diligent to it when you're recovering from a surgery.

46:04I mean, I could see, you know, that if I had to do some type of childcare thing, obviously not breastfeeding, but I had just had a hernia surgery or something, I might be less reluctant to carry out my duties in that situation. So I think it probably does it or fearsome. I imagine that you have some concerns about surrogacy in that case then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't experienced too many people who've done it and I haven't run into any problems, but yeah, there certainly can be, you know, it's just sort of a mismatched kind of thing. It's a not very novel sort of thing. So we would expect there could be some problems there that crop up.

46:53childbirth, child rearing in the modern world certainly seems to have become very medicalized. I wonder whether this over medicalization could contribute to fertility decline in some way. Yeah, I think so. Like I said, people come in with their spreadsheets and I have to tell them, forget about counting the number of diapers and all of those things and people, you know, they come in with... Yeah, they've had C -sections, they've had... Yeah, it's been over -medicalized and it's just a much more stressful kind of thing than it is most likely in a more natural setting. I think midwives often get people to relax.

47:47There's also a home birth trend, which I see the reasons for it and when it works, it works, but it's also more risky, because things do go wrong. And modern medicine, again, like previous podcast with Peter, we're good at fast -daths, That's where good at avoiding those. If something goes wrong, you want to be there. You want an obstetrician there who has a scalpel on hand if you need it. Yeah. So anyway, yeah. What have you come to believe about the current demographic transition, these declining birth rights that we're seeing? Yeah. Well, that's sort of what my early interest was as a graduate student.

48:39When I went off, I went to Penn State, worked with an anthropologist named Napoleon Shagnon, and he was very much into evolution. He was a cultural anthropologist who was becoming an evolution anthropologist. And I followed him in an Northwestern my second year and I had to figure out something to do. So I would go into the library and I got interested in demographic transition. and there was not a really good explanation in my mind for why people in modern settings had decided all of sudden, you know, they switched from, we want to have as many babies as we can to, we want to have just a couple or in some cases say, says none.

49:25And the prevailing ideas out there, the prevailing theory was coming from economists and economic -minded demographers and their thought was, well, in traditional settings, after you pay this little upfront cost, kids become assets, they make you wealthy, basically. And especially they take care of you and things like that. And so there's no reason to limit reproduction in traditional settings, but because they lived in modern settings and they probably had kids, they knew kids were expensive in modern settings. and so they were arguing that we would limit the consumption of children, expensive goods, just likely we would limit the consumption of all other expensive goods.

50:12But that didn't make sense to me from an evolutionary point of view. First, I didn't trust their data because they would go into these traditional societies and ask Hunter, gathers, why do you want to have so many children? and then that would be like asking, you know, why do you, why do you breathe? And so I think I thought they probably teased out the answer they wanted, but, you know, I have no way of knowing that. So, but what really troubled me was it didn't make sense from an evolutionary point of view that we had kids in order to eventually economically to exploit them. Again, going back to this idea that we had life spans, maximum life spans as long as the other apes, and then they gradually increased and doubled because we were doing things useful for our children.

51:04That sort of idea didn't jive with the idea that once they became 20 or 30 and we were 50 or 60 that we were just going to kick back and let them take care of us. I always felt that it was going to be the other way around, and that's my early work contributed to the grandmother hypothesis and that is contributed to what we now consider to be the right explanation for why life's man's double. But this notion that wealth flows switched as modernization occurred, and that's what made us not want children, didn't make full sense to me. Now, it does make sense that children, of course, became more expensive as we left traditional settings and stuff, but they were always expensive.

51:59They never really gave us more than we gave them, except in terms of life satisfaction, maybe. but so that my explanation is just that that we don't have kinship networks anymore that help spread out the costs of rearing children, cost concentrated on mom and dad, mom and dad say you know this is hard work, we love these kids but we're only gonna have one or only gonna have two and some people look around and say oh my friends over there are struggling, I'm not having any. So I think it has a lot to do with the demise of extended kinship networks and that help in the concentration of care responsibilities on the decision makers.

52:47I've spent a lot of time thinking about this much to the internet's distaste. But one thing that I don't think it's talked about sufficiently is the sort of mimetic desire to have children to that, oh wow, my next or neighbor, they just had kids and or my sister just had her first boy and she seems really happy and that's a good, maybe maybe I should think about the, you know, fewer children, big get fewer children, big get fewer people seeing children, etc., etc. And yeah, it's the vicious other side of the blade of being a hyper -social species, as you said, ultra -social species. So moving on to, we've talked a lot about sort of development, child rearing, the most sort of psychological and social side of stuff.

53:36If we get into the more medical elements of the pediatrics, what are some examples of medical missteps that could have been avoided if we'd had some evolutionary thinking? Well, the big one that I worked on has to do with food allergies, childhood food allergies. Back in the 90s and it was officially codified by the American pediatric society in 2000 or 2001, I think it was that you delay, delay, delay when it comes to the introduction of the eight or nine most allergenic foods. And I mean, first And so while that evolution aside, that just never made sense from an immunological point of view, I don't know how they came up with that idea.

54:31Because once the immune system is able to cause destruction, which starts in utero, and is present in a big way even shortly after birth, you have to have proper tolerance mechanism. It's not like you can wait till you're three years old to learn not to attack your own liver. So, why is a thought waiting till you're three years old to introduce peanuts is really beyond me? But the evolutionary angle there, if they had been more attuned to how we lived during the place to scene before that, we were immobile pretty much as a species. we didn't, you know, we grew up in and died in the same ecosystem basically, generation after generation.

55:24So what that meant was that while mom was, while you were inside mom and she was eating, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When you were, she was breastfeeding, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When you first started eating foods yourself, you were getting exposed to food antigens. And those food antigens were the very same ones that you were gonna get exposed to for the rest of your life. And so they eventually learned not through thinking about it theoretically in any way, but just by going, oh my goodness, food allergies are soaring and oh look, they're not allergic to peanuts in Israel because they feed children early on, And they called them bombers, which are peanut butter containing biscuits.

56:15And so people started looking, well, maybe we made a mistake here. Maybe we should introduce things early. And so they eventually did some studies and found out that that was true. But if you thought about the way people always ate, you would be introduced to all the foods you would ever eat all the allergens, all the antigens that you would ever encounter early on in your immune system would learn to tolerate them. And so it never made sense to say, let's not introduce things until you're older. So I think evolution, mind in this could have helped us to avoid that problem. But I mean, I think there are others.

57:06I think evolution, mind in this can help us to understand what's a healthy diet can contribute to that. I know from listening to you, you're interested in that. It turns out there's a really cool study that was done with fruit flies by Michael Rose and his group Grant Rottledge, a grad student or a fellow who worked with him. What they did was they changed up the diet that the fruit flies had evolved to eat. They had been eating for thousands of generations. They had been eating apple rot. And then they brought them from that area, which I think was on the east coast to Michael Rose's lab in UC Irvine.

58:01And they didn't have rotten apples, I guess, so they fed them bananas, doused in high -fruptose corn syrup. And what they found was that after about 40 generations, flies had adapted to that new diet to accommodate it really well while they were young. But even after a hundred generations, they hadn't adapted to accommodate that new diet what they were old. And the most parsimonious explanation for that is that number one selection is most powerful early in life. And number two, most genes have their effects confined to certain ages so that if a mutation comes along, that allows was a young fly to better digest a banana, or a permutation comes along that allows an old fly to better digest the banana.

58:58Potent selection would accumulate for the young fly. Week selection would not accumulate for the old fly. Is this why kids tolerate modern diets better than grandparents do? Exactly. That's right. So, beyond a certain age, you know, maybe 50 or so, maybe earlier, you should lay off the pancakes and don't know, like that. I mean, nobody should be eating too much of that stuff, but you can certainly, kids can do it. They can tolerate it much. They can tolerate a grain -heavy diet much better than, say, somebody, my age. That's so interesting because of that. Yeah. Yeah, you can apply that also that line of reasoning to infectious disease and I did that in an article shortly after the pandemic got going.

59:49Crowd diseases, you know, came on board once we started settling down and living in crowds, moving indoors and so on. Things like, you know, infowens and tuberculosis and all those sorts of illnesses. And so as long as those diseases had certain commonalities like they relied on crowding and maybe aerosol breathing and aerosolized virus, that kind of thing, young immune system should evolve more quickly to be able to adapt to those crow diseases than old immune systems would. And there's an evolutionary biologist that I've talked to who works with fruit flies who's interested in maybe trying to test that idea.

1:00:40But it's a little more complicated with immunology than it is with infection than it is with diet because we have an adaptation, a very potent adaptation, immunologically that helps us when we get a little bit older to fight diseases and that's immune system memory. So very, very young children often don't do as well within them. Oh, of course, because they have an acquired memory. You've accumulated all of the different blueprints of all of the different pathogens. Exactly. But when you're talking about a brand new virus, it's just jumped into the population. No, no one has any memory. doesn't count anymore.

1:01:26And then you should expect the young to have to, again, they have to be commonalities. And there are four other coronaviruses out there that passed through over the last 10 ,000 years. You would expect young people to have evolved adaptations to deal with those infections to a better extent than old people, just as you would expect it for death for diet. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product.

1:02:08Shopify powers 10 % of all e -commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Allo and Utonic. And that is why I've partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they're best in class. The checkout is 36 % better on average compared with other leading commerce platforms and with shop pay, you can boost your conversions by up to 50%. You can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify by going to the link in the description below and signing up for a $1 per month trial period or by heading to shopify .com slash modern wisdom or lowercase.

1:02:42That's shopify .com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. What about obesity in kids? Are there some evolutionary insights that you've come to believe with regards to that? Yeah, I mean, obviously it's just a terrible problem in our society. Yeah, and like you said, it can start early. and I mean, I think largely comes from a mismatch. We used to have to work harder for our foods and exert ourselves and calorie dense foods were not as available. So we developed a taste for those. And now that we don't have to work hard to get the calories and we still have the taste for them, many people overdo it.

1:03:36And they get their kids on that wagon quickly too, where they're over -consuming. And then there's also just foods that nobody's had time to adapt to, there's stuff in the center aisle, a grocery store, you know, the trans fat, laden, things and all that, that people sold the pops and those kinds of things that people bring into their house. And so it's a daunting problem though. You can explain it to people. It's easy to get. It's not easy to understand that mismatch. But getting people to be more active and avoid some of those foods is just a hard thing. I dread it when I've got a 10 -year -old can't hop up on the exam table.

1:04:33He already weighs 130 pounds and his parent sits down on the bench in the room and they weigh 300 pounds. I mean, what can I do? If I could take the kid home with me, maybe I'd have a chance, but it's a really, really hard problem to solve. But I think it's just So such an important thing. I mean, especially, I mean, it's a problem in kids, but it's especially a problem in, as people get older. And I don't know what the number is, but so many of our health counter dollars get spent keeping people who've abused themselves for five, six decades alive or trying to keep them partially alive at least.

1:05:30And I mean, I think most of our health calendar dollars get spent trying to keep somebody alive for the last three months of their lives. And that kind of thing is sweet. That's all right. I think so. And if it's not that I'm against helping people when they're older, but if people would help themselves when they were younger and avoid some of these problems, all those healthcare dollars could be shifted to young people. And, you know, daycares could be better. And the mom stuck at home with three kids and no help. I mean, we could reallocate a lot of these things as a society. If people were just more responsible.

1:06:12But it's a tough problem. It's not just responsibility, right? It's hypernormal stimuli, calorie dense foods, why not adapting for the salty, sweetie. After so fluffy, crunchy, you know, all of the design. Yeah, it's true. Yep. We're up against all of that and trying to get people to change. When it comes to medication, do you think, oh, we may be overusing medication in some ways for issues that might be biologically meaningful? Are we stepping into important processes that wouldn't have obviously been intervened with, uncessarily? I mean, I think so. I think antibiotics are wonderful inventions in life -saving, but they're certainly overused.

1:06:54That leads to the evolution of resistance and stuff. The big category that I think is overused is psychotropic medications, putting teenagers on multiple antidepressants and ADHD medicines and so on. I'm always happier to start with changing behaviors, modifying behaviors, start with some counseling, start with some explanation, explaining to kids that it's natural and okay to feel anxious. Have you heard about the smoke detector principle? of course, yeah, that it's better to think there's a fire in the not -be -one than it is for that to be a fire and you not go off. Right, right. So anxiety sort of operates that way.

1:07:46We get anxious and there's just so many things out there now to get anxious over. We have to learn to deal with it rather than take a pill to try to eliminate it. So I think there's a lot of overuse and of course the SSRIs that are used so commonly don't probably work as well as sustained exercise does. over the long run. But it's a lot easier to take a pill. People often choose the easier way. There's a lot of pressure from the television and other media telling you to take this anti -depressant. If that doesn't work, maybe another one will make you happier. I think it's overused and I think having an evolutionary perspective can, which includes something like the Smoke to Test Your Principle can help us to sort of pull back on some of those things.

1:08:44And of course, these old people we talked about who are unhappy because they aren't taking care of their grandkids and their SSRIs. Well, move closer to your grandkids. I think that'll work better. I would love someone to do a study, pay for older people to move closer to their grandkids and give the other group SSRIs and see which ones happier. Yeah, it's really interesting, I think, considering how modern interventions that are well -meaning and help and are needed in many contexts. I think a lot of the time it's the over -prescription. In the same way as it's not bad that we have cheesecake.

1:09:28I'm really, really grateful for the inventor of cheesecake and for the Earl of Sandwich and his invention of the sandwich. But it's the over -application of these technologies and these foods that cause the issue. What would, I'm interested?

1:09:52What would an Well, you would allow parents, mothers to be in contact with their babies more. And they're doing that to some extent. You would be introducing breast milk as early as you can. You would be... I mean, I saw... I don't know how common it is, but when I was a resident in the NICU, I saw babies who were induced or made to come early, who then had breathing difficulties and ended up in the ICU and on ECMO of all things because of super -airers like that. And so I think just trying to being less cavalier about in induction and C -sections would help change the complexion of NICUs, but just allowing more parental contact, you know, they have.

1:11:01And I think there's moving towards that. There's good information that they're trying to. The problem is, it comes slower than I would expect, because they have to wait for a study to show it over and over again before they, you know, they, before they'll intervene in a way that's, and that makes sense if it's dangerous intervention, but if it's an intervention like let mom hold her baby more, it doesn't seem like it's that dangerous to me. We might not have to, and it might make sense from an evolutionary perspective. We might not have to wait for six multi -center studies to be done in order to conclude that that's a good idea.

1:11:42So again, when it's a dangerous or a sinterment, potentially dangerous intervention. You want to have all these multi -sunderstudies done, but doctors, in my opinion, for good reasons, are a little bit leery of theory. Nobody wants their doctor that's dreaming up a treatment for them in the shower the morning before, that's just kind of a wild speculation. evidence is a good thing, but it can be it can be overgun too. Doctors just, yeah, medical students, they're just they're just not taught theory the same way graduate students are in other other scientific disciplines. And of course, I'm partial to evolutionary theory and I really I wish that it made its way into the licensing exams and it made it into the pre -med programs and all that.

1:12:44I was thinking about when I got into medical school, I had already had a PhD and I was teaching at University of Michigan and they let me in, which was great, but they said I had to go take an organic chemistry course. So I went to the local community college and took that And I've never really had to know any organic chemistry in anything I've ever done as a pediatrician. But if rather than that, or in at least in addition to that, I'd love to see pre -med programs include evolutionary biology courses. And I'd love to see continuing medical education include more evolutionary biology. and I'd really love to see more evolutionary biology.

1:13:31Undergraduous, decide to go to medical school. That would be a real upboon to the discipline. I'm all for it. I'm super all for it. I think all parents need to read a... In fact, all single people need to read a behavioral genetics book as well. If you're intending on having kids at some point, I think all of the dating advice in the world and all of the child rearing books in the world could be replaced with Blueprint by Robert Ploman, maybe. Look, if you want to have a family at some point, it is made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with, and it's a single most important decision in a child's happiness.

1:14:11You can't out -educate bad genetics, a bad, you know what I mean, like a difficult genetic suboptimal in your choice. So you mentioned that evolutionary theory, you're a fan, I'm a fan. What are the risks and are there risks in misapplying evolutionary theory to social or medical contexts?

1:14:36Yeah, if it's badly applied, I mean, there's this whole, it's been a ways back now of of social Darwinism and so on where so people can misunderstand and think that it's all about calling the weak and sick from the population and doing things like I did an interview years ago for one of the science magazines where the interviewer, a real nice woman, wanted me to make clear that as a Darwinian pediatrician I was in favor of taking care of the week and the sick also, you know, because she thought Darwinism implied that, you know, some people might think that that's not the case. So I mean, I think done poorly, social Darwinism can creep in.

1:15:28Evolutionary biologists, if you hang around in those circles, you often hear them say evolution is, or the theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. And it is, it's up to you. But in a little sense in evolutionary medicine, we kind of violate that in the sense that we'll say things like we might prescribe letting that fever go because fever is an involved adaptation that helps you to fight your illness. So we're being, I mean, we're not forcing you or anybody's hand, but we're giving advice that says avoid the trans fats, let the fever go left, you know, those kinds of things. So we're being a little bit prescriptive, I guess.

1:16:13I, uh, I have a friend who is very forward thinking around his health, early 30s guy. And he, he actively seeks out illnesses that cause, uh, fever. And this is because of some evidence that he's looked at that suggests that, uh, getting a fever and raising your body temperature internally, is good, is protective against cancer growth, because it burns that through. Whereas, immediately you have a fever and what are you doing? I'll regulate with air conditioning. I'll take something to bring down the temperature, I'll go in and see the doctor, so on and so forth. Yeah, it's funny, the problems that are caused by being able to fix problems.

1:17:03You know? Right. Right. Now you're right. Yep. And without recognizing that some of them are defenses, if it's normatively bad, feeling sick with a fever is normatively bad, and so doctors exist to fix things and make you feel better. And so we tell you to take, you know, the old saying, not in pediatrics, but the old saying for adults, let's take two aspirin and call me in the morning, right? And we don't give aspirin to kids, but the idea is the same. We often tell them, take your ibuprofen or your acetaminophen, you'll feel better. And there are roles for those things. It's not like you can never use them, but it's, yeah, like you said, fixing things often and makes things worse.

1:17:56Paul Turk, ladies and gentlemen, Paul, you're awesome. I think an evolutionary perspective on child rearing was desperately needed. And I'm really glad that Rob introduced me to your work. I think it's so great. Where should people go? They were gonna wanna keep up to date with the stuff that you do and get a hold of the book. Yeah, I mean, the books available on Amazon is called Bringing Up Baby and Evolutionary View of Pediatrics. they can go to my website, anybody who wants to ask me a question about their child. They can call my office. How amazing. I'm always interested to talk to people about evolution and child rearing.

1:18:44I'm fortunate to have so many wonderful parents in my practice who sometimes I feel like I might be boring them with some of those very nice and nice. And then they come back to me and they say, wow, that's really cool. And I ran into a woman in the grocery store the other day who read my book and she says, I didn't know you were so funny. I try to put a few jokes or you know, or take people's interests and so on. So yeah, so it's been exciting for me to write the book and to have people like you and Rob notice it. I'm very grateful for being able to talk to you. I've been watching your podcast.

1:19:27My son has been a big fan for a long time. Yep. Yep. Well, I promise you that you haven't bored anyone today, Paul. And if your son is a fan of the show that suggests even more about the quality of the genetics, I'm sorry. I'm very good. I really appreciate you Paul until next time. Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. Okay. Take care.