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

Today, we’re celebrating 10 years of Science Vs with … science! We’ll tell you all about the so-called orgasm gap, the incorrect idea that vaccines are linked to autism, and the incorrect idea that ivermectin helps with Covid-19. We’ll also cover the Paleo Diet — this was the first EVER episode of Science Vs. And you’ll hear one of the greatest moments in Science Vs history. THANK YOU for listening! Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVs10 (00:00) We’re celebrating 10 years of Science Vs! (04:10) Our peer-reviewed paper on the “orgasm gap” (10:13) Vaccines don’t cause autism (14:20) Ivermectin doesn’t help with Covid (20:54) Should you go on the paleo diet? (34:01) One of the greatest Science Vs moments of all time This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Hannah Harris Green was the lead producer on our Orgasm Gap episode. Heather Rogers was our lead producer on the Vaccines episode. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wylie, and Bobby Lord. Thank you so much to all the folks who have helped make Science Vs over the years, including Caitlin Kenney, Alex Blumberg, Matt Lieber, Kaitlyn Sawrey, Angela Stengel, Ben Watts, Nick DelRose, Diane Wu, Austin Mitchell, Annie-Rose Strasser, Martin Peralta, Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran, Joel Werner, Sinduja Srinivasan, Odelia Rubin, Disha Bhagat, RE Natowicz, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Reid, Taylor White, Rasha Aridi, Romila Karnick, Lexi Krupp, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, Catherine Anderson, Sam Bair, Bumi Hidaka, Lauren Silverman, Lily Kim, and so so many more!!! Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  And you know what's absolutely bonkers? I've been saying those words to you all for 10 years.

• 0:18Wendy Zukerman?

  That'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.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  My name is Oliver, I am from Mexico.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  This is Molly from Denver, Colorado.

• 0:39Speaker 03

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

• 0:42Speaker 02

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

• 0:46Speaker 04

  I see it's your birthday coming pretty soon, and just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, Science Versus.

• 0:53Speaker 05

  I absolutely love it. I have enjoyed every single pun-tastic episode.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  I got instantly hooked.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  Much like my favorite pint of ice cream. You guys, as soon as I see you, I just have to inhale.

• 1:07Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 1:16Speaker 06

  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 lost all faith in the institution of tooth brushing.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  I remember one episode that was something that marked me, and that was one where you talked about a pandemic and the potential implications of a pandemic in the... And then, well, Covid happened.

• 2:00Wendy Zukerman?

  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 listen to us while driving in the dark to a volcano in Hawaii. I wish I could have been there for real. To those who were eating more fibre and doing more journaling, thanks to our episodes. I hope it's working for you and that your poos in your mind are feeling better. 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.

• 2:41Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 2:50Speaker 07

  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 like a psychosis sort of that was, I guess, triggered a little bit by marijuana. And I, listening to this episode, made me feel really, really secure in my personal choices to not smoke pot. And so, thank you for that. I appreciate it.

• 3:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Thank 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.

• 4:07Wendy Zukerman?

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• 6:18Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 6:28Wendy Zukerman?

  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 gonna 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. We did an episode on this way back in 2020,

• 7:11Wendy Zukerman?

  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 analyze what we found. And just this year, the research got published in a peer-reviewed journal. Talk about a climax.

• 7:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, we're gonna play a little bit of that original orgasm gap episode. Enjoy.

• 8:06Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  The brain.

• 8:21Wendy Zukerman?

  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?

• 8:31Speaker 03

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

• 8:38Wendy Zukerman?

  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. 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.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  The number one enemy in brain studies is movement.

• 9:03Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  With what we called the Hannibal Hector happy helmet.

• 9:25Wendy Zukerman?

  The Hannibal.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  And it really was a scary looking contraction.

• 9:30Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 9:50Speaker 03

  It's loud, loud, loud.

• 9:52Wendy Zukerman?

  It kind of sounds like.

• 9:57Wendy Zukerman?

  So they put in earplugs. And now it's orgasm time.

• 10:04Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 10:12Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 10:29Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  The partner would hear, your partner is having. An orgasm. Then the participant would press a button. Orgasm was finished. And the partner would hear, stop stimulating. Your partner's orgasm is complete.

• 10:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, my gosh. So these partners have your voice in their ear while they are trying to give their partners an orgasm.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Right. So I sounded a bit like a deranged, I guess, stewardess.

• 11:10Wendy Zukerman?

  So do you think that you could orgasm in that situation?

• 11:14Speaker 03

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

• 11:55Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 12:13Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 12:35Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 13:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Back 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.

• 14:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, 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. He is on ABC News.

• 14:31Speaker 07

  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.

• 14:39Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 14:57Speaker 07

  Science takes time. I think that time

• 14:59Wendy Zukerman?

  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. This 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,

• 15:40Wendy Zukerman?

  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 patients' medical histories. And by 2011, an editorial in the British Medical Journal called the paper, quote, fatally flawed, both scientifically and ethically, end quote.

• 16:23Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 17:08Wendy Zukerman?

  you're seeing is coming from and why it's so easy for even really smart people to get sucked in. And as we were 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 Corry. He became a big believer in ivermectin, talked it up in places like the US Senate and on Joe Rogan's podcast.

• 17:53Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 18:15Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 18:32Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 18:38Speaker 07

  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.

• 18:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, so nothing? So nothing? Nothing? Like, I guess I-

• 18:52Speaker 07

  I don't understand.

• 18:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Because there are-

• 18:54Speaker 07

  I don't understand, like, how you can ask me- So the rea- Actually, 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 Corry. And so what would it take for you to admit that you're wrong?

• 19:13Speaker 07

  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. There's- To get me to believe that it doesn't work, to get me to believe it does work is just an empty exercise. I can't pretend that you can do that.

• 19:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 19:33Wendy Zukerman?

  We spoke for almost two hours.

• 19:37Speaker 07

  Okay, here's the deal. And now I'm just gonna 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 who's so committed to ivermectin, he can't see anymore. I'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.

• 20:00Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 20:07Speaker 07

  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. 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 it's my opinion, it's my opinion that you are, you're an unfortunate victim of relentless propaganda as well as the doctors you talk to. And what's my opinion? That I'm, that I'm someone who's lost in conspiracy theory. And that's fine. You, you're thinking that this is all a mass delusion, that everyone was a little enthusiastic

• 20:52Speaker 07

  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.

• 21:03Wendy Zukerman?

  After chatting with Pierre-Cory, 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.

• 21:47Wendy Zukerman?

  And the thing is, I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain any of this. Because 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 realise, 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 vs. ...

• 22:32Wendy Zukerman?

  That's from our episode, I've Imectin: The Story of a Wonder Drug. After the break, should you go on the paleo diet? We go way back in the Science vs. Time Machine to our pilot episode. Plus, stick around for one of our all-time favourite moments from 10 years of Science vs.

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• 24:41Speaker 03

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• 25:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Here's to the 10th anniversary of Science vs. 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 vs. 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 gonna play it for you now.

• 25:43Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 26:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome to Science vs., the show where... We pit fact against fad. I'm Wendy Zukerman and today we're dissecting the paleo diet.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough. A eureka discovery.

• 26:22Speaker 07

  Significant breakthrough.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Uncovering the sinister secrets.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Dietists across the world.

• 26:33Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 26:43Speaker 07

  Now followers say they are shedding drastic amounts of weight and are warding off debilitating diseases.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:59Wendy Zukerman?

  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. But 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 stew processed foods. Unnecessary sugar and sweetness. 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.

• 27:45Wendy Zukerman?

  And also no legumes. So this means no cheese, no chickpeas, no pluck paneer for you, none of that. And that's all fine, but then there's science.

• 27:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Officially, the Paleolithic period begins around 2.5 million years ago. 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? So I would assume they would have eaten quite a lot of plant foods, probably.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Fruits, seeds, they turned increasingly to animal source foods.

• 28:29Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  So 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.

• 28:54Wendy Zukerman?

  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?

• 29:03Speaker 05

  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.

• 29:11Wendy Zukerman?

  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. 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. They're getting their apples maybe from the Middle East, their avocados from Mexico, barramundi from Northern Australia. I mean, this is a travelling, travelling caveman.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  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. 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."

• 30:08Wendy Zukerman?

  But when I put this to Daryl Edwards, our paleo advocate, he actually had a pretty convincing answer, I thought. Did they eat broccoli 50,000 years ago? Probably not. It was probably a wild, varied...

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Of the modern day broccoli plant. But we do know the classification that will mimic the paleo lifestyle.

• 30:27Wendy Zukerman?

  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. She even says.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Plus, the paleo diet excludes potatoes. No, you laugh?

• 31:03Speaker 05

  Well, I just laughed because of the enormous amounts of potatoes that are consumed in the Andes and Highland, New Guinea and so on. I mean, they would be quite shocked if they knew they couldn't have the yam or the sweet potato or the solenaceous potato.

• 31:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Other things that are no-no's, grains are another one.

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Well, I'm, 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.

• 31:36Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 31:47Speaker 03

  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. We can go back just a few generations and realise 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 and 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. So just going back a few generations, in my opinion, would be good enough for most people.

• 32:22Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 32:41Wendy Zukerman?

  Which takes us to our next question. 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. Like dairy. It's a no-no, because 2 million years ago, we hadn't domesticated cows yet. My calcium I get from sardines, with the bones, a great source of calcium.

• 33:06Speaker 05

  I also get them from leafy greens.

• 33:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Huh, so do you need to eat dairy to get enough calcium for healthy bones?

• 33:13Speaker 05

  Well, how does a gorilla get dairy?

• 33:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Here's Catherine Milton again.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:28Wendy Zukerman?

  So you might be able to keep your bones strong on a diet without dairy, if you track what you're eating. Another potential issue with the paleo diet is how much meat you're eating. Here's Daryl Edwards. 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. 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. These days, they're recommending about 65 grams of red meat per day maximum, or instead, 100 grams of fish.

• 34:11Wendy Zukerman?

  That's about one medium-sized meatball. And what happens if you go overboard?

• 34:16Speaker 04

  The strongest evidence is the relationship between red meat and increased risk of colorectal cancer.

• 34:20Wendy Zukerman?

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

• 34:27Speaker 04

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

• 34:31Wendy Zukerman?

  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.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Whole grains in particular are packaged with bran and fibre.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  And we know that there's evidence for that around preventing the formation of small blood clots, it helps lower cholesterol, moves waste through the digestive tract. 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?

• 35:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, apparently increase your risk of colorectal cancer. Our final question on the paleo diet is about these so-called anti-nutrients. Now, these are often found in plants as a defence against predators, and according to Daryl- 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. He says that in the worst case, it can kill you, but more likely- You might incur some slight sickness, or you may have suffered illness over a longer period of time. 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.

• 35:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Plus, anti-nutrients aren't necessarily anti-your health. 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. The term is misleading." End quote. So some of these anti-nutrients, for example, have been found to have antioxidant and anti-cancer qualities. 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

• 36:34Wendy Zukerman?

  okay to eat legumes.

• 36:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay. So when it comes to science versus the paleo diet, does it stack up? 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. So take our paleo advocate, Daryl Edwards, for example. Now, he found the paleo way of life because he was in really bad shape. He'd pretty much eaten chocolate bars and microwave spaghetti for a decade and then just found he was in really poor health. So I was at elevated risk of heart disease. I was prediabetic.

• 37:24Wendy Zukerman?

  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. 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 prediabetic. But based on the science, he probably didn't need to go paleo. So, the message for today? 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, paleo diet, nil.

• 38:09Wendy Zukerman?

  There you go. Season one, episode one of Science vs. It was published in May 28, 2015. 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. 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.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  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. This scientist we talked to, Dr. Chris Pepinneff, had just the ticket for how we were going to do this.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  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 the shark is going to be the star of the musical. And the shark starts singing, you know, Defying Gravity and whatever it is.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Do you have any songs ready to go?

• 39:29Speaker 06

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

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Rose?

• 39:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Should we help him out a little?

• 39:42Wendy Zukerman?

  I think so.

• 39:49Wendy Zukerman?

  I know you people are scared of me. But I'm not the one to blame.

• 39:57Wendy Zukerman?

  You saw Jaws as a child. And now you think I'm mean.

• 40:04Wendy Zukerman?

  But I need to eat sometimes. And even if you're on the beach,

• 40:13Wendy Zukerman?

  I'll choose a seal for food. Roll back my eyes and freeze. Or I might try to bite a manatee. But human flesh, it's just not my cup of tea. So I won't pull you down. Sharky. I find that hard to believe. Don't find out. Haven't you been listening to anything? You really don't want to eat humans. No. I just want to bite a manatee. Or maybe a seal. But human flesh, it's really just not what I'm into.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  That's Science vs Sharks.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  All right, so we're back to our...

• 41:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Indeed.

• 41:11Speaker 03

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

• 41:30Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Merrill Hawn, Michelle Dang, Rose Frimler, and Akendi Foster-Keez. 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 Boomi Hidaka. Music written by Boomi Hidaka. Peter Leonard, Emma Munga, So Wiley, and Bobby Lord. Thank you so much to all of the folks who have helped make Science vs over the years, including Caitlin Kenny, Alex Blumberg, Matt Lieber, Caitlin Sorey, Angela Stengel, Ben Watts, Nick Del Rose, Diane Wu, Austin Mitchell, Annie Rose Strasser,

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Martin Peralta, Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran, Joel Werner, Sinduja Srinivasan, Odelia Rubin, Disha Bhagat, Ari Natavich, Courtney Gilbert, Rose Reid, Taylor White, Rasha Aridi, Ravila Karnick, Lexi Croft, Emma Munga, Peter Leonard, Catherine Anderson, Sam Behr, Boomi Hidaka, Lauren Silverman, Lily Kim, and so, so many more. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you for listening.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Wendy, you and the team have been so, so joyous in your creation and explanation of science. And I can't wait for the next 10 years.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Thanks for giving me a tooth brushing existential crisis every morning. And happy 10 years.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for making this place we call World a little bit more informed and thus a better place. Thank you. Goodbye. Adios.

• 43:08Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

• 43:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day

• 43:30Speaker 03

  and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com. Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.