The "Nanny Plate" debate, and the Neanderthal fat factory

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0:50Naked Scientist

0:58and medicine. I'm Chris Smith. This week, counting the calories. The UK government wants shops to help us put 100 fewer calories in our baskets to beat obesity. Now that's food for thought. Also, archaeologists uncover the world's oldest fat factory. It turns out that Neanderthals were processing bones for their grease 125 ,000 years ago. And on Mars, the Curiosity rover captures close-up images of spiderweb-like patterns on the planet's surface. So what made them? From Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education, this is The Naked Scientists.

1:43Up first this week, the UK government has unveiled plans to tackle obesity by forcing supermarkets to cut calories from our shopping baskets or face fines. But some industry leaders have slammed the move as nanny statism and overreach, warning that it could hike prices and it won't solve the crisis it set out to. We asked Cambridge University's Giles Yeo, who's author of Why Calories Don't Count, to take a look at the proposals for us. So the plan is in effect to try and make healthy food the easier choice. So, you know, for supermarkets and food purveyors and things like that. So they have put out this policy guidance, and this is I think part of the problem is just a guidance for supermarkets, you know, to sort of reduce portion size, move the foods around the aisles for a bit.

2:31I'm not entirely certain because it wasn't actually told of the food companies what they had to do. The message that's being put out there is if we can remove 100 calories from the average shopping trolley, then we will dramatically cut obesity. Another statistic on the government web page is something like 50 calories less a day means 304 ,000 kids won't become obese or something like that. Is that actually realistic to make those sorts of claims? From a physics perspective, the numbers probably do add up. When I teach the medical students, I always use this number that when we age from 20 to 50, roughly, we gain about on average 15 kilos of weight.

3:13And, you know, each kilo of a human being is probably 5000 calories. So if you actually do the maths, over 30 years, that's seven calories a day, every day for 30 years, and you suddenly gain 15 kilos. So the moment you're dealing with the 50, 100 calorie mark, actually, the numbers do add up. The problem is, what kind of calories are we talking about? Because calories only give you one piece of information. They just tell you how much food there is. It doesn't give you any nutritional density? Is there salt, sugar, fat, fiber, protein? Nothing. So I think, yes, portion sizes are one problem. The bigger problem is the food quality that we're actually having in our diet at the moment.

3:57The problem I have with it is that I think that kind of messaging is also misleading or hard for people to grasp. Because if, for instance, I was eating the number of calories that would sustain an African elephant in the day, that's about, say, 20 ,000, and I reduced the number of calories by 100, I'm still going to be morbidly obese, aren't I? So it doesn't really help. So is that part of the problem? We need to be clearer with the messaging for people. We need to be clearer with the messaging. But I think the calories is unhelpful because the supermarkets will say, well, we reduced 50 calories, but we'll do it from this versus that.

4:32What is the easiest thing to remove calories from? Rather than saying, well, look, why don't we think about how we can make this ready meal, this frozen pizza, how can we make it more healthy? How can we make this chocolate bar more healthy? That's what I want them to think about rather than just simply the calories, which is just one dimensional. So you're advocating for saying, well, if people go into the shop and at the moment, say they've got a couple of quid in their pocket and they've got to feed their family and they're going to reach for something that fits their budget, what they're reaching for at the moment is not the healthy option.

5:03You're saying, we've got to flip that round so what they do reach for the affordable option is the healthy option that has to be the case otherwise how are we going to fix obesity equitably right because at the moment if you're in the bottom 20 % socioeconomically in this country you are more than twice as likely to end up with obesity as you are right the people in the top 20 % and there's no genetic difference between rich or poor. It's an accident of birth. It's access to healthy food. And at the moment, as you say, if you've got a couple of quid, you can get a lot of chips, right? But how many, you know, how much healthy food can you buy?

5:42We need to reassess our priorities about where we put subsidies, about whether or not you get buy one, get one free. Where's the buy one, get one free for meat or buy one, get one free for broccoli? It's always buy one, get one free for the cheap, for the unhealthy foods. So we just need to reprioritise what we subsidise, shall we say. The trouble is that the bad for you stuff tastes good. Look, absolutely. This is part of the problem. But it is not beyond the wit of man. I think what is lacking here is the right motivation to reformulate the food so that we get certainly healthier food that is just as tasty.

6:22It just requires the right motivation. So my biggest issue with this government policy thing is that it is voluntary, that there are no guidelines. What they've said is, well, it's up to the food purveyors, the supermarkets to do what they think is right. I think that's very naive. Most of the food manufacturers, what they want to do is a fixed set of rules that are the same for everybody. And yes, they'll probably take it right to the edge of those rules, but that's fine. But at least then they'll play within the pitch and they can compete with each other. And that's the motivation they need.

6:58They need to know that if I sell this at this price for this health point, that supermarket B is going to try and beat me. And that is the only way we're going to make it more healthy, if we make it marketable to be healthy. So if you were appointed the government czar to sort this out, what would your recipe be? What would you say, my policy, this is how I'm going to tackle this, this is the strategy. What would the Giles Yeo solution be? Day one, if I were PM, I would make healthy food the default choice, not the easier choice, because that means that some people can still choose to not have it if they don't have the resources.

7:37If Mrs. Smith walking in with a couple of quid needing to feed her kids, the default has to be healthier. Then we can add all the other frippery on top, right? All this and that and labeling and what have you for the people like us who don't have the key obesity problems to begin with. So I would start equitably by making healthy food the cheapest, tastiest and default choice. So who picks up the tab then? Because at the moment, the supermarkets are selling the premium product at a premium price, not just to hit their bottom line, because it costs more. So if you're going to force the price point down on the really fancy stuff, so people will be able to afford it, and let's assume they want to buy it, who's going to pay for it?

8:17Well, someone has to pay for it. You're absolutely right. I just think we need to reprioritize. At the moment, there are certain subsidies and some foods here or there. I think if we prioritize the health of our children, and I'm not saying this is easy because a lot of these choices are politically inexpedient. But public health is an interesting thing, right? How much personal liberties are you willing to give up for the health of the greater good? This is what public health is. And so I think we just need to move resources around in order to prioritise healthy default food. If you do that, the amount of money you will save just in broader society will be staggering.

8:56That's a very interesting perspective. So you're saying that the government, the taxpayer, sends a check to Tesco so they can sell you food that you otherwise wouldn't be able to afford at a cheaper price. It's like paying farmers to grow food that it wouldn't be affordable for them to grow normally. It's a subsidy to encourage people to consume the right sort of food compared to the wrong sort of food that would otherwise end up being the cheaper option. I think so. And people say, doesn't that sound nanny statey? You sound like a communist. No. obesity is a public health problem if we believe that it's costing our NHS the workforce the economy a great deal of money to try and help people with obesity and all the related diseases we've got to put our money where our mouth is and try and sort the problem out so yes I do think that is certainly one of the solutions to consider so less a case of nanny state and more a case of nanny plate perhaps Josh Yeo there at the University of Cambridge a growing industry of unproven and often dangerous cancer, Cures, is thriving online, promoted through slick social media campaigns and disinformation.

10:01A recent BBC investigation exposed some of the figures profiting from this trade, targeting vulnerable patients and giving them false hope. The surgeon Liz Ariadon has just written a newspaper article on the topic, drawing on her perspectives both as a breast cancer doctor and a cancer survivor. I've been speaking to her. I had no idea how much cancer misinformation was online until I became a cancer patient myself. And I was exposed to the world of alternative medicine and people representing themselves as cancer coaches. You pay to see them. They help you navigate what treatments you should have, what clinics you should see.

10:38And I know it's fraudulent. And then people contacted me, giving me stories of men and women who would use these coaches and who died because they weren't getting normal treatment. and the scale of this is huge. It's like a pandemic. The people who are cancer coaches, what are their clinical, in other words, medical qualifications? So most of them don't have any. Whilst there are reputable cancer coaches who help people navigate treatment, you can often get them in NHS cancer centres. These are often people with no medical experience. Often they've been patients themselves and this is how they are making the money.

11:12One's a retired biochemist, one's a woman who's a chiropodist, but they have become self-called experts. They know how to cherry-bick tater to persuade patients. They charge an awful lot of money and I just think it is awful taking these vulnerable cancer patients to a place of false hope. And how do they track down their victims? Do they come and find people or do they just market their wares and people come and find them? It's very clever marketing on Facebook groups, on Instagram, on TikTok. Once you start searching for cancer natural therapies they come up and they've got glowing testimonials on the websites proving that they can cure you and a testimonial is now more seductive than a randomized controlled trial and when you've got cancer you're vulnerable you want someone who can cure you and these people are offering that and what sorts of things are they telling people to do you've got the standard diets the juicing the detox the coffee enemas by electric home resonance machines do parasite cleanses There's multiple intravenous infusions and supplements.

12:13Go to Mexico for treatments that you won't get in the UK. Up to 20 or 30 treatments at one time. There's no evidence to show they work, but they make you believe. And when the cancer comes back, they tell you it's because you didn't try hard enough. Let me get another treatment for you. Again, they're kind of doing the shopping like a bespoke shopper to tell you what to choose. And you put your faith in them and people are dying. The case of Steve Jobs seeking out alternative remedies for what killed him eventually, that was pancreatic cancer, that isn't then just a cause celebra, that isn't just a one-off.

12:46You're saying this is pretty common, that people are being seduced by alternative treatments when we know there are certain cancers that would definitely respond better to proper medical intervention. It's the tip of the iceberg. I've had 20 or 30 people reach out and tell me about people who've died through either using cancer coaches or going directly for alternative treatments. There's evidence to show that if you only have alternative therapy, you are twice as likely to die. And that number is five or six times more likely if you have breast, bowel or lung cancer. And take the case of Paloma Shemarani in the recent Panorama article.

13:21She had an 80 % chance of a cure with the lymphoma, but she died because she was persuaded to choose a juicing diet instead. How on earth is this ethical? It's not. It's not ethical at all. It's illegal to advertise cancer treatments online. I don't know how these people live with themselves, but they lull you into a sense of security. They offer control. They offer hope. And it breaks my heart. Where do you think we should start trying to deal with this then? I honestly don't know. I think social media companies have to take some response to this. It's doing harm. I think for the cancer coaches, they're not offering medical treatment.

13:56they are helping you choose it and they often have disclaimers you know check with your oncologist I'm not a doctor if it doesn't go right sue me I think it's raising awareness but also letting doctors know because I had no idea this was going on until I became a patient myself and also when they're putting ads online Meta and TikTok are getting shares of those ads. So did they come after you because you had breast cancer as a breast surgeon you you knew all about it but did they come after you? They didn't come after me I don't think they don't think they target individuals but I've seen the adverts and I've started researching this in my book and suddenly the more you look at parasite cleansers the more you see those they come up on your feed and when you see so many of them you start to think is there any truth in this?

14:38I know there's not but most people don't have the knowledge that I do and you can get succumbed and we need to find some way to stop this and to educate the public so they know to look out for the red flags of people promising they can cure you. Doctors aren't online telling you that chemo isn't a great drug to have, but it does save lives. And radiotherapy isn't great, but it does save lives. We're not doing that. These alternative providers are. One wonders whether when people are having those clinic appointments, when you get the diagnosis and you are extremely vulnerable, if people need to have some help at that point to warn them, watch out, there are some sharks in these waters.

15:15I used to say, don't Google. And it's the first thing I did when I was diagnosed. I did it when my mum was diagnosed, I think we need to say these are safe websites to go to. Let us digitally signpost you. And if you see anything online that you're even remotely thinking about, double check it with two or three reputable sources so you can tell whether it's actually true or whether it's nonsense. It really is amazing how low some people will go, isn't it? Some sage advice there from Liz O 'Ridden, surgeon, cancer survivor and author of The Cancer Roadmap. She has got actually a very compelling story of her own to tell.

15:49Do look up Liz online if you get a moment.

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16:48music in the program is sponsored by epidemic sound perfect music for audio and video productions this is the naked scientist podcast with me chris smith still to come the spiders from mars what is behind the red planet's web-like patterns but first a remarkable archaeological discovery at the lake landscape of neumark nord near leipzig in germany has revealed that our neanderthal cousins were rendering animal bones for grease there as far back as 125 ,000 years ago at what can best be described as a fat factory. This is the earliest example of such a practice found yet. Fat mattered to these ancestors because it was a long-term way to store an energy-dense food stuff.

17:32The Neanderthals thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in some very harsh conditions, so harnessing this nutritional know-how could well have been a key ingredient in their success. The discovery, which has been published in Science Advances, dramatically reshapes our understanding of early human ingenuity and survival. Here's Lutz Kindler from the Montrepos Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution. The sites are lake basins that developed during this last interglacial, how we call it, this warm phase. And these were uncovered by lignite mining. The people were exploiting brown coal there.

18:09Usually we have only small keyholes when we look into Neumarknord so fantastic and exceptional. So when they were bringing bones to this site, what were they doing with them and why were they doing that? We found 120 ,000 bones along the margin of a former lake, together with 16 ,000 stone artifacts and hammerstones, anvils and so on, into a very small area, about 50 square meters. It's a six-yard box of a football field in England, this small area. 120 ,000 bones. They're coming from 172 different animals. For example, owl, ox, horses, or red deer. And these bones were smashed into tiny, tiny pieces.

19:11And these fragments were used to extract bone grease by boiling them in hot water. And the reason for this is to get the fat out of the bones, because this is a very essential macronutrient that humans need and Neanderthals too. Does the bone grease rendering process leave some particular footprint or fingerprint on the bone that tells you that's what they had done to it? So you know that is what the purpose was of bringing the bones there to do that to them? So this heavy fragmentation of bones from Neanderthal sites is not so unusual. But usually we can't tell if it's done by Neanderthals or by some other kind of actions.

19:56But here in Neumark Nord, we are very sure that it is Neanderthals who did this. For example, we know that certain types of damages on very small fragmented bones are produced during bone grease rendering fragmentation. This we know from experiments. And these same damages we also find on the bones at Neumark Nord. On the other hand, unfortunately, it's not possible to find chemical signatures of boiling bones. So if you treat them with low temperature, 80 to 100 degrees, this is not possible because we can't discriminate these signatures from preservation in the soils. That can also happen to the same signatures on a timescale of 120 ,000 years.

20:45And during this process, so what would you do? Put lots of bone fragments in a big pot of water and heat that up so the grease presumably floats to the top? And what, does it then condense into a lake of lard that you then scrape up? Is that how they did this? Exactly. This is how it is described in the ethno-historic record, which means observations of hunter-gatherers during the last several hundred years. They did it in the same way. And so we imagine that it also happened at Neumark Nord. What's the significance of having found this? What does this tell us about Neanderthal behavior? And perhaps also the other question, which is, I mean, we learned recently from Andrea Manica, when we interviewed him about anatomically modern humans trying and failing many times to leave Africa.

21:33Neanderthals had already succeeded. Is it things like this that enabled them to flourish in the environments that they did when they did so early compared to our direct ancestors who were less successful initially? Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than 200 ,000 years so they could do quite well in these changing landscapes of the Ice Age, in warm phases, cold phases, and so on and so on. So they are really successful humans. What we know from Neanderthals is they hunted a lot. So we know how they acquired food, but we have no much information about how they prepared food and how they deal with food.

22:19And this bone grease rendering site tells us something about storage of food items so that you don't have to live from hand to mouth. This is a typical idea we have about Neanderthals. No, it was different. They know that they need food for winter, that they have to have provisions. And all this comes along now with the evidence for bone grease rendering at the site. because with the fat you can also produce something that is known in North America as Pimikan or in Southern Africa as Biltong, that you mix it with meat and then you can store this food item for over a year. And this, of course, has also some social implication, how to organize work, how to divide labor in processing meals and food items and how to share it with your comrades.

23:10So this is a very social thing that we learned from this. And the basic behavior that we see now in Neumark North of Neandertals, so how they organize their living is not so different from what we know from all recent hunter-gatherers. They organize in the same way, maybe with different technology, also maybe with a different social organization. But these similarities, I think, are very, very important because we are not so unique as modern humans as we always think. we still have to survive another 100 ,000 years, also to reach the 200 ,000 years timescale for our being on the Earth. Great story that, isn't it?

23:52Lutz Kindler there. What is something else ancient now, but not on Earth? There are spider webs on Mars, but they're not made by any spiders from Mars that would have made David Bowie famous. These are strange interlocking networks of lines that were first seen from space, and now the Curiosity rover has trundled over to take a closer look and has revealed their true identity. The heaps of material that were piled up billions of years ago by flowing water and glued together by dissolved minerals making them tough enough to stand the test of time. But where water once flowed, life might also have lurked, which is why Curiosity is taking a keen interest.

24:32Our very own Ziggy Stardust, and that's Richard Hollingham at the Space Muffins, has the story as well as some other illuminating insights into the funding situation at nasa at the moment curiosity has been investigating these spiders webs on mars and there are no spiders on mars i'm sad to say well no spiders we yet despite what david bowie said now i'm disappointed despite what david bowie says there might be we just haven't found them yet these were seen first by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter back in 2006. It's one of these orbiting spacecraft and Curiosity has essentially gone in to have a closer look.

25:10They're not actually called spider's webs, they're called boxwork formations. I've been reading a little bit about these. They're essentially formed very much like stalactites or stalagmites on Earth created by water and that is the key because that's what Curiosity's been doing. It's been going to interesting places, roving around very slowly and looking at these places where there was once water because, you know, we now know that Mars was once a wet planet, flowing rivers, lakes, seas. I mean, that's just extraordinary. Now it's just this red, dusty desert. And of course, if water once flowed, that's an ingredient for life was there once life and is there still life on mars that's the reason then that it's homing in on those formations because they indicate this was once wet water essential ingredient for life curiosity is part of its mission is to look for molecules linked to life ergo that's a really good place to go and investigate absolutely it's also been looking at shores where you see these formations that could only have been carved by water you know water once flowed through there but what's happened since the water's gone from mars it's just been whipped up by this wind over eons over thousands millions of years into these much more spider-like formations but just be able to see that this was formed by water i think is just extraordinary because you've just got to imagine millions of years back the thing that's extraordinary though to my mind isn't so much those formations it's curiosity itself i remember 13 years ago i think we even spoke to you about the whole way that this car sized rover was coming down on the surface of mars and it was going to trundle around doing this kind of thing it is still going i mean that is a triumph of engineering if ever i saw one yeah absolutely it's not small this is the size of a car something the size of a mini six-wheeled rover it's got a nuclear battery on board which i think is one of the keys really to its longevity so it's not got solar panels a lot of the other rovers have not lasted so long their solar panels have degraded they got covered in dust they've kind of died whereas this is just carrying on trundling along and there's not this one there's curiosity there's also perseverance trundling around mars these two extraordinary rovers are avatars, if you like, on Mars, giving us these extraordinary images, investigating these areas where there might once have been life, where there was certainly water.

27:53Absolutely phenomenal engineering achievement. What does the future hold for them, though? Because I wanted to ask you this, because obviously you're very in tune with what's happening politically in America, science budgets and so on. What does the future hold? How are they funded? And are they going to carry on for another 12-15 years? I have never seen so much concern amongst the scientific community and the space science community, not just in the United States, but across the world. So the White House budget proposes a 25 % cut in the NASA budget, which equates to a 50 % cut in the NASA science budget.