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

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. And you know what's absolutely bonkers? I've been saying those words to you all for 10 years.

0:18That's right. This show that you are listening to right now, Science Versus, it's celebrating its 10th birthday this year. And so a few months ago, we invited you, our listeners to send us some voicemails with your thoughts on the show. My name is Oliver. I am from Mexico. This is Mallee from Denver, Colorado. My name is Elaine, a Brazilian biologist living in New Zealand. Just wanted to leave a message here to express my appreciation of your show. I see it's your birthday coming pretty soon. And just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, science versus. I absolutely love it. I have enjoyed every single pun-tastic episode.

0:57I got instantly hooked. Much like my favorite pint of ice cream, you guys, as soon as I see you, I just have to inhale. 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. There is an episode of Science Versus that still haunts me to this day, and it's the episode of brushing your teeth. I feel like ever since I heard that episode, I've like lost all faith in the institution of toothbrushing. 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.

1:39I remember one episode, it was something that marked me. And that was one where you talked about a pandemic and the potential implications of a pandemic. And then, well, COVID happened. Yeah, and for a while, everyone thought we were witches, which maybe we are science witches. 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. I wish I could have been there for real. to those who are eating more fibre and doing more journaling. Thanks to our episodes. I hope it's working for you and that your poos and your mind are feeling better.

2:32To 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. 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. 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. For context, my mum has a psychosis that was, I guess, triggered a little bit by marijuana. and listening to this episode made me feel really, really secure in my personal choices to not smoke pot.

3:22And so thank you for that. I appreciate it.

3:29Thank you to everyone who called in and who's been listening to the show. After the break, we've got some real treats for you. We're going to share some Science vs. moments that were a huge deal for us, plus something a lot of you probably haven't heard before. It's the pilot episode of Science vs. and it's about the paleo diet. Remember this diet? So we're going to find out if we should all be eating like cavemen. It's all coming up.

4:07Welcome back to the show.

4:30back today. We're taking a little trip down memory lane to talk about some of the highlights of the past decade of Science Versus. 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 5G. Remember when people were afraid of that? So now we're going to talk about a couple of major moments for us. 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.

5:19We did an episode on this way back in 2020 when the show was an unruly five-year-old. 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. 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. 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 analyse what we found. And just this year, the research got published in a peer-reviewed journal.

6:04Talk about a climax. Now we're going to play a little bit of that original orgasm gap episode. Enjoy.

6:17Okay, 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. Um, the brain. 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? And went back to grad school to become a neuroscientist when I turned 50. 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.

7:01First 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. The number one enemy in brain studies is movement. 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. 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. With what we called the Hannibal Hector happy helmet. The Hannibal! And it really was a scary-looking contraction. Nan used plastic that moulded to the shape of each subject's head and then cut out the eye and nose holes.

7:48It kind of looks like having your head wrapped in white construction fencing or like your Kanye on the Yeezus tour. So imagine you're lying in this MRI, head all cased up, and inside an MRI... It's loud, loud, loud. It kind of sounds like...

8:08So they put in earplugs. And now it's orgasm time. 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. In part of Nan's experiment, she had the women's partners touch their genitals until they came. But there were complications here too. With the women stuck in the MRI with the earplugs in and that loud noise. The couples couldn't talk to each other. 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. The partner would hear, your partner is having an orgasm.

8:54Then the participant would press a button, orgasm was finished. And the partner would hear, stop stimulating, your partner's orgasm is complete. Oh, my gosh. So these partners have your voice in their ear while they are trying to give their partners an orgasm. Right. So I sounded a bit like a deranged, I guess, stewardess. So tell me, do you think that you could orgasm in that situation? 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. And I actually had a very funny incident when I was in the scanner using a purple dildo and it slipped out of my hands and it went flying.

9:51So after the scanner went off, I said, Houston, we have a problem. The dildo went into orbit.

10:06That 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. And you can find our new scientific paper in the journal Psychology and Sexuality. We'll link to it in the citations, of course. But now we're going to shift to something that's not nearly as sexy, though it still gets our knickers in a twist, vaccines. 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. And it's something that I didn't think we'd still be talking about almost 10 years later.

10:53But this claim just won't die. 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. 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. He's since become a big campaigner against vaccines. But he wasn't like that in the 1990s.

11:32Back in the late 1990s, Andrew was quite different. 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. So let's take a close look at it. Andrew and his colleagues studied 12 kids, some of whose parents said that they had gotten autism soon after getting the vaccine. Now specifically, Andrew was looking at the kids' guts and he found that some of them had a bit of inflammation in there.

12:14Now, from that, he thought, ha-ha, that vaccine must have caused the inflammation, which then led to their autism. 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. Here he is on ABC News. 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. Scientists scrambled to figure out if Andrew was right and that the measles, mumps and rubella shot could cause autism.

12:58The 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. Science takes time. I think the time was not on our side. Daniel Salmon is a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. And he says those studies were too late for public opinion. 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. One of the first follow-up studies looked at every kid diagnosed with autism in a part of the UK.

13:37This was almost 500 kids. And it found no link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. 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. Those studies were done by different investigators, different scientists, in different countries, using different methods, and they were all negative. Meanwhile, Andrew Wakefield's original paper was retracted. It turned out that he had messed around with facts about the patient's medical histories and by 2011, an editorial in the British Medical Journal called the paper, quote, That was from our 2017 episode, Vaccines Are They Safe?

14:39And it's been really interesting for us thinking back over the past 10 years and 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. It's just brought this onslaught of garbage that in many cases seems to have this glow of science around it. 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.

15:28And as we were looking looking back on all of our episodes, one stood out as being a really clear example of that. 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. But some doctors got really excited that it could also help folks with COVID. And one of those doctors was Dr. Pierre Corey. He became a big believer in ivermectin talked it up in places like the US Senate and on Joe Rogan's podcast. 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.

16:15And when we got better studies later on with thousands of people, we found out that ivermectin did not work for COVID. 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.

16:43And so what would you need to see to not believe that ivermectin works here? 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. So I'd have to pretend that I didn't treat them. The studies are overwhelming. Right. So nothing. So nothing? Nothing. Like, I guess I don't understand. I don't understand, like, how you can ask me. So I'll tell you why you're asking that question. Because 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?

17:24And I'm sorry, I don't have an answer. 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. 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 that. Right. We spoke for almost two hours. Okay. Here's the deal. And now I'm just going to speak plainly and I really don't care what you or your listeners think, okay? You can just write me off as a completely biased clinician so committed to ivermectin, he can't see anymore.

18:01I'm fine with that. And you know what? 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. But what if it's not? What if it's not? Like, what if you remove the conspiracy? I won't do it anymore. So, Wendy, 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. And let's just leave it as 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.

18:40So either I've lost my mind as a conspiracy theorist or you're a victim of propaganda. There's the only two conclusions. And it's my opinion that you're an unfortunate victim of relentless propaganda, as well as the doctors you talk to. And what's my opinion? That I'm someone who's lost in conspiracy theory. And that's fine. 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. And that's a really cute story, but it's just not true.

19:14After chatting with Pierre-Corey, me and the Science Versus team actually looked at all of this again to see, did we miss something? Had we been taken for a ride? And what's clear is that ivermectin is not a blockbuster drug for COVID. Whatever is going on with ivermectin, it's not saving bucket loads of really sick people. If it was, we'd see it clearly in the data, and we don't. And, you know, there are more trials coming along, so we'll wait and see what they say. But for now, the best data we have tells us that ivermectin really isn't doing much here. And the thing is, I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain any of this.

20:05Because I've heard this story before, 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. Grab a beer with anyone studying cancer or Alzheimer's, and they'll tell you a story like that. In fact, it's kind of the story I've come to expect. That is Science Versus.

20:43That'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. Plus, stick around for one of our all-time favorite moments from 10 years of Science Versus.

21:13Welcome 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. 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. 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, 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. This episode was published with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which is where Science Versus started.

22:01And so I just want to thank the ABC so much for letting us publish it today. 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.

22:21Welcome to Science Versus, the show where we pit fact against fad. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and today we're dissecting the paleo diet. Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough. A eureka discovery. Significant breakthrough. Uncovering the sinister secrets. Dietists across the world. World first.

22:44This 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. Now followers say they are shedding drastic amounts of weight and are warding off debilitating diseases. The caveman diet is the most Googled diet on the planet. We need to eat the way nature intended us to eat. The paleo diet is described by some as a fad, a marketing ploy. It's offering a different paradigm from what is considered the norm. So it's going to get shot down a little bit. Amidst the cave madness, we're about to find out if this diet is healthy and whether we should all be on it.

23:21But first, what even is the paleo diet? Well, the original prescription by Dr Lauren Cordain, who wrote the paleo diet, said that our diet should consist of lean meats, fish, leafy greens, nuts, berries. That's Daryl Edwards. He's a paleo advocate and author of the book Paleo Fitness. And we should eschew processed foods, unnecessary sugar and sweeteners, and avoid anti-nutrients. Anti-nutrients. We'll get to those a little later. Now, also, paleo fans completely cut out dairy because paleo people didn't have cows. I don't eat any dairy at all. And also no legumes. So this means no cheese, no chickpeas, no palak paneer for you, none of that.

24:04And that's all fine. But then there's science. Officially, the Paleolithic period begins around 2.5 million years ago. No, T-Rex was dead long before this. OK, and it goes until around 10 ,000 years ago. Really, before we figured out agriculture. So what were our early ancestors eating back then? So I would assume they would have eaten quite a lot of plant foods, probably fruits, seeds. They turned increasingly to animal source foods. 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.

24:50So I went to Brazil and over 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. She's also studied non-human primates to get an idea about what our monkey cousins were eating. So what does our primatologist think of the paleo diet? 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. Because people were eating what was around them. So if you lived near the ocean, you'd be eating lots of fish. If you lived in the Andes Mountains, you might have been eating cashews.