Pod Insights Gastropod Why Are Kids Dipping Cookies in Ranch, Are Food Comas Real, and What's Inside the Mummy's Stomach? About this episode Just in time for the holidays, Ask Gastropod is back with a plate full of listener questions for your listening delight! You came to us with mysteries both large and small, both ancient and eternal, and, honestly, all totally fascinating. Such as: What is up with ranch dressing, and how did a bottled salad dressing invented by a plumber and owned by a cleaning products company become *the* flavor of America? What did Europe's oldest human mummy, found frozen in the Alps, eat before his mountain trek—and why could no one find his stomach for twenty years? And, in news you can use this holiday season, why does a “food coma” make you drowsy and slow after a big holiday meal? We’ve got the answers to all of these fabulous listener queries in our latest installment, featuring murder in the Alps, a bathtub full of ranch, and more sea slugs than you might expect. Enjoy!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 Hi, my name is Josh Gosiliski. I'm from Chattanooga, Tennessee. And I have a question for you about ranch, ranch dressing. I'm curious about why it's so popular and where it comes from.
0:16 Speaker 01 So, hi, I'm Laura, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. And my question for Gastropod is, what is a food coma? And is there anything I can do about it, once I have one, other than taking a nap?
0:32 Nicola Twilley? Gastropod listeners are a curious bunch, and we say that in the fondest possible way.
0:38 Cynthia Graber? Because we ourselves are endlessly curious. That's why we launched Gastropod. We love hearing your questions, too. And this episode, we're here with some answers.
0:47 Nicola Twilley? Gastropod is, of course, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Nicola Twilley.
0:52 Cynthia Graber? And I'm Cynthia Graber. And our end of the year gift to you is the answer to some of the mysteries that have been keeping you up at night. Like, why is everyone dipping everything in ranch dressing these days? And also, what is ranch?
1:05 Nicola Twilley? Plus, some seasonally appropriate science. What's actually going on biologically when you eat too much at a holiday meal and fall asleep drooling on the couch?
1:15 Cynthia Graber? And finally, another seasonally appropriate topic. It's not quite a snowman, it's an ice mummy. Or rather, a Tsai the Iceman. We've got the story of what's in his stomach, what that tells us, and why it took scientists two full decades to find his stomach in the first place.
1:30 Nicola Twilley? But before we dive headfirst down these fascinating rabbit holes, we've got a request for you. Gastropod is just me, Cynthia, and our producer Claudia. We are a tiny team, and we work really hard to bring you every single episode.
1:44 Cynthia Graber? And when we say really hard, we mean it. We read books and scientific papers, and we find people to talk to and figure out how to tell their stories. There is a huge, huge amount of behind the scenes work that you don't see, but I can promise, it is always going on.
1:57 Nicola Twilley? And to make that work possible, we need funding. We make some money from advertising, and we have grants from a couple of generous foundations, but we also rely on you, our listeners, to give us the support we need to keep.
2:10 Cynthia Graber? We know a lot of people are asking for support these days, and we also know it's not possible for everyone to give. But if you enjoy the show, and if you can, we deeply appreciate it. There are perks at every level of giving, but really, no amount is too small or too large. Gastropod.com/support or find us on Patreon, and thank you. We so appreciate every single one of you.
2:30 Nicola Twilley? This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, as well as by the Burrus Welcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
2:48 Speaker 04 You know that feeling when the holidays are here at Starbucks?
2:51 Speaker 05 Welcome in. Peppermint mokas for Holly and Ivy? Thanks, thanks.
2:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, that one. Together is the best place to be, at Starbucks.
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3:38 Speaker 07 My name is Aiyelit, and I am from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
3:42 Cynthia Graber? Our first question this episode comes from one of our teenage listeners. Aiyelit really enjoys listening to Gastropod episodes, often more than once.
3:49 Speaker 07 My favorite Gastropod episode is The Queen of Kiwis, which I listened to for at least two full weeks on repeat at 3:00 to 4:00 a.m. when I would wake up in pain after my tonsil removal surgery.
4:03 Nicola Twilley? This was confirmed for us by Aiyelit's long-suffering mother, Aviva. And it is a fabulous episode, but one has to admit that at a certain point...
4:12 Cynthia Graber? One has listened to it many, many, many times.
4:15 Speaker 07 I never got tired of it.
4:16 Cynthia Graber? Ailat's question is not about kiwis. We had that covered. Instead, she had a question about Atsai the Iceman, who, as it happens, was discovered before Ailat was even born.
4:26 Speaker 05 It's been hailed as one of the century's most important archaeological finds, the body of a Bronze Age mountaineer, which scientists believe could be 4,000 years old.
4:36 Speaker 07 He's an old dead guy. So yes, that falls right into my category of interests. I would like to clarify that what I mean by old dead guy means prehistoric, old dead people. It doesn't have to be a guy. But I don't mean like I'm interested in Thomas Edison. He's actually frankly quite boring. But if you give me an archeologic mystery, I will sit reading about it for days.
5:04 Cynthia Graber? We're not here to judge. We also love old dead people of all sorts. So Ailat had lots of questions about Atsai, but the big thing she wanted us to answer was what was in his stomach?
5:17 Speaker 07 I want to know what he ate. You know, if it was like a rabbit that that lived in the mountain or if it was like a wildflower or if it was rations that he had.
5:28 Cynthia Graber? So we called up Frank Meixner. He's a scientist at the Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy, which is an amazing thing. And for those of you who aren't familiar with Atsai, Frank had an introduction.
5:38 Speaker 05 The Iceman, what Tyrolean Iceman it's also called, or here's a nickname, Atsai, is actually a glacial mummy, which was discovered in the year 1991 by German hikers here in the border between Austria and Italy.
5:53 Cynthia Graber? We don't know Atsai's real name, of course, but his nickname comes from the particular mountain range where he was discovered, the Atsai Alps.
6:01 Speaker 05 It was discovered still sticking in the ice, a mummy which originally was thought that was maybe a hiker who died up there. But over some days, then radio carbon dating told us that he's actually 5,300 years old.
6:15 Cynthia Graber? Atsai is Europe's oldest known mummy, which made finding him incredibly exciting. You've probably heard about Egyptian mummies, but Atsai is different. In Egypt, people mummified the dead on purpose, and they did it by removing a lot of the internal organs and then slowly drying the bodies out.
6:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, in contrast to Egyptian mummy, the Iceman is the so-called natural mummy. So the Iceman actually was somehow freeze dried up there. Then the cold temperature. Glacier surrounding him kept all the tissue, the organic tissue around him. And this resulted in this very exceptional preservation, actually.
6:51 Nicola Twilley? Finding Utsi was like winning the old dead guy lottery. And scientists immediately set about trying to find out all sorts of things about him. They found out he was probably about forty five years old when he died, that he was about five foot three and a hundred and ten pounds, and that he had lots of tattoos, which are some of the earliest tattoos that have ever been found.
7:11 Cynthia Graber? What they didn't find, at least at first, was his stomach. But they wanted to know what he had been eating. So some scientists analyzed his hair to find evidence of nutrients from food. And from that, they thought he was a vegetarian.
7:22 Nicola Twilley? That conclusion was quickly revised, though, because other researchers were analyzing samples from his lower intestine. So that's like proto poop, digested matter that's on its way out the door. And they did DNA analysis on this stuff and found red deer DNA. So it seemed like Utsi definitely ate meat, too.
7:41 Cynthia Graber? But there were two problems. One, the tools they were using to analyze the intestinal remains didn't work very well. Ancient DNA is really degraded. And at the time, scientists were using tools that needed pretty long chains of intact DNA. So they weren't great at figuring out what those fragments meant. And two, a lot of food is absorbed by the time the food makes its way from the stomach, all the way to the lower intestine. So a lot of stuff was lost.
8:03 Nicola Twilley? But then Utsi got a new CAT scan in two thousand nine, and the radiologist spotted a stomach. It was there all along, but it had been kind of hidden. Part of that is that internal organs in a mummy do not look the same as the ones in normal dead bodies.
8:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, the mummification for sure changes also the inner organ structures. And lungs, for example, get, they shrink to a size where they hardly can be found anymore. And this upper part, under the rib cage, Then where the stomach was found, so in anatomically unusual position. So it moved upwards. It was not anymore at the position where you would expect the stomach.
8:44 Cynthia Graber? But they found it and it turned out that it was full of food. So obviously they wanted to sample the stomach to get at that food. But this was a big deal. Utsi had only had physical samples taken twice in the 20 years since he'd been uncovered.
8:56 Speaker 05 And then it was decided to do another sampling campaign, which was not as easy since the iceman is frozen. You need to defrost him also to get access to these samples.
9:06 Nicola Twilley? One thing to bear in mind here is that Utsi is very, very fragile. Sure, he's amazingly well preserved for a 5,000 year old guy. But like Frank says, he has to be kept frozen and he has to be spritzed with distilled water on a daily basis to keep him from drying out. And if you destroy any tissues while you're sampling, well, then those are gone forever. And future scientists with even better tools will never have the chance to study them.
9:32 Cynthia Graber? So scientists have to balance what they might learn with what they might destroy. Like, for example, in theory, the researchers could have maybe learned more about Utsi's diet from his teeth. It's common to look at the plaque on teeth and maybe some fossilized bits of food that were stuck in someone's mouth. But Utsi's mouth was frozen shut and the scientists didn't dare try to pry it open. But they were willing to give the stomach a try.
9:52 Speaker 05 Luckily, there was already an access point. People in Innsbruck, where the iceman was initially stored, and they made some also sections on the iceman. And here was a small cut already present on the belly.
10:04 Nicola Twilley? To understand the contents of Utsi's stomach, Frank basically needed biopsies of the food itself and of the stomach wall. And getting those biopsies was super intense. He and his colleagues had to gown up and sterilize themselves and then just be really, really careful.
10:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's very, it's very, it's a special moment for sure.
10:24 Cynthia Graber? After they got the samples, even before they did any molecular analysis on the DNA of the plants or animals in his stomach, they could figure out some of what he was eating just by looking at a bit under the microscope.
10:35 Speaker 05 You see initially already that he was not vegan, he was not vegetarian, he had an omnivore diet. Because we saw under one plant remains, but we also saw clearly signs for animal fibers, muscle fibers.
10:49 Speaker 06 Was present in his diet. So these two things already told us quite a lot. And then an acubotanist, if he's very skilled and we had one which is very skilled could already tell us based on the plant remains. That it's einkorn, actually.
11:03 Nicola Twilley? Einkorn is an ancient type of wheat. It's one of the oldest cultivated grains.
11:07 Cynthia Graber? But of course Frank and his colleagues wanted to make sure that their visual analysis was accurate. And they also wanted to figure out what meat was in there. Luckily, not only were there more intact food bits than had been found in his intestines, but there were better tools to analyze ancient degraded DNA.
11:22 Nicola Twilley? Frank sequenced the ancient DNA and then the team compared it to genetic databases of European animals and plants to look for matches. And they came up with a menu for Otzi's last meal.
11:33 Speaker 06 I think the Iceman had a very balanced diet, I would call it, having on the one hand cereals, then having also plant remains we would not have expected, like the bracken fern, which is a toxic actually plant. And then it was supplemented by animal protein diet, coming from the ibex, but also from the red deer.
11:52 Nicola Twilley? An ibex is a kind of wild goat with big curvy horns.
11:55 Speaker 06 On top, it was lipid rich, so fatty diets, which definitely makes sense in this altitude where he was walking to have an energy rich also diet.
12:04 Cynthia Graber? The one thing that did surprise them was that bracken fern, the one Frank said was poisonous.
12:09 Speaker 06 So this fern, which normally, yeah, it's it's growing here in in this area. It's widely distributed in the woods. However, it's toxic and it was initially also assumed maybe this was just unintentionally ingested. And maybe he just wrapped his food with this fern leaves.
12:28 Nicola Twilley? But then they realized that there was too much of the leaf matter for it to just be a trace of a food wrapper. Otzi must have chosen to eat it.
12:35 Speaker 06 And over time, we realized, okay, this is not the first case, which is reported. There are other indeed. populations also which are known that they eat the young spruces of this fern, which is less toxic also.
12:47 Cynthia Graber? Some scientists speculate that maybe he was eating it as a form of medicine, but there's no way to know.
12:51 Nicola Twilley? This is not the only thing that Frank doesn't know, even with his fancy new DNA analysis.
12:57 Speaker 06 So for example, the archaeobotanist also saw saw some plant remains he could not address.
13:01 Cynthia Graber? They couldn't find a match for those remains in the DNA database they have. They just don't have every plant sequenced.
13:07 Speaker 06 In best case, for example, we would have a dataset of all wild plants present in the Alps. Ideally, this would be the reference dataset one would need. We are far away from this yet.
13:16 Nicola Twilley? But even though they couldn't get a full ingredient list, they did gather some clues as to how the meat, the deer and ibex in Otzi's last meal, was prepared.
13:25 Cynthia Graber? They figured this out by doing some experiments themselves. They cooked meat and then they also dried meat to see how each process changed the muscle fibers.
13:33 Speaker 06 So one thing we realized is, for example, in the in the muscle fibers, that we don't see any evidences for cooking or harsh heat treatment. So it seems to be that he more maybe air dried this meat similar to beef jerky.
13:48 Cynthia Graber? With the einkorn, they don't know. Maybe it was eaten as bread, maybe as porridge, they couldn't tell.
13:52 Nicola Twilley? Another thing this stomach analysis did shed light on is one of the biggest mysteries about Otzi, how he died. We already knew he was killed because radiologists found an arrowhead buried in his back, right below his collarbone.
14:07 Speaker 06 And this arrowhead ruptured an important artery and led to a immediate deep beating actually of the eismann. So the eismann was actually murdered up there.
14:16 Cynthia Graber? Scientists didn't know if he'd been chased up the mountain, if he was running away from someone at the time. But then they found his stomach and they saw that it was completely full when he was killed. So they realized he wasn't on the run. He was relaxing and enjoying a pretty substantial meal.
14:28 Speaker 06 We think that at that time, when he ate his last meal, he felt quite safe. Otherwise, he would not eat a complete meal.
14:37 Speaker 05 And this is our current hypothesis that at the time he felt quite safe and then he was shot to death.
14:45 Nicola Twilley? The plot thickens, but since Gastropod is not a true crime podcast, let's get back to food and more specifically what this one man's single meal can possibly tell us about how his community in Europe ate in general.
14:59 Cynthia Graber? Frank pointed out that sure, this is just one guy. It's a snapshot of a single moment for a single person, but his stomach contents can give us some clues.
15:08 Speaker 05 For sure, he lived in a time where it was not a pure farmer lifestyle. So it was on the one hand, domesticated plants for sure. So we have the einkorn present. For the animals, we not see any domesticated animals now in his meals or in his diet.
15:24 Nicola Twilley? Frank's colleagues have analyzed Atsii's clothing and found that his loin cloth was made from leather from a domesticated sheep and his shoe strap was made from cow leather. So his community did have livestock as well, but they clearly supplemented herding and farming with hunting and gathering. That's kind of what scientists thought was going on food wise in this part of the world at this time, but there isn't a lot of evidence to go on. So it's nice to have Atsii to confirm it.
15:52 Cynthia Graber? Atsii's been with us a few decades now, but we haven't learned everything there is to know about him. He still has some secrets that Frank and his colleagues are trying to reveal.
15:59 Speaker 05 Currently we are working on the gut microbiome actually. So we see microbiome structures still. We can compare this also to modern microbiomes and this is very fascinating. He definitely has a more diverse microbiome and there's a big difference between our microbiome.
16:16 Nicola Twilley? The other thing Frank's planning to do is use the more sensitive DNA tools he used on Atsii's stomach on other mummies that also have intact stomachs. Not all of them do, but Frank said there are some bog bodies from Ireland and freeze dried mummies from South America that would be good to look at again with these new tools.
16:35 Speaker 05 So I think this is very exciting. So that we can even use old extracts, reanalyze them. So the whole field actually needs.
16:43 Cynthia Graber? To do this because we are very limited in material in samples also. And these samples are very precious. We'll wait and see what food secrets those mummies have to reveal.
16:53 Nicola Twilley? I am here for more mummies. But in the meantime, buck up, kids. It's time to get into food comas. Are these medically real comas or just an excuse for not helping with cleanup? All will be revealed after this word from our sponsors.
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19:02 Cynthia Graber? We told you that Utzi probably felt pretty safe when he was killed because he had a full belly. He had time to enjoy his meal. But what we don't know is how he felt after the meal. Like, did he feel as lazy as our listener, Laura?
19:13 Speaker 01 Especially around the holidays with lots of delicious food and big family meals. I experience a food coma after these large meals. And sometimes that interferes with other things that I want to be doing, right? Like, I want to be going out or interacting with my family, playing games, going for a hike, whatever that may be. But I mostly just want to lie on the couch.
19:35 Cynthia Graber? So a coma coma is a real medical condition. But is a food coma? We figured we should ask a scientist.
19:43 Speaker 06 A food coma is a behavioral response to eating food when the animal, whether it's human or another animal, slows down and relaxes after taking in a meal. So it's exactly what it sounds. It's not a literal coma, obviously. It's a relaxation. Another way to put it is rest and digest. That's a phrase that we use to describe that in maybe more scientific terms.
20:07 Cynthia Graber? Nikolai Kokushkin, he goes by Nico. He's a life sciences professor at NYU. And we also turn to two other researchers who've also looked at food comas. Justine Herve is a professor of economics at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And Subhamani is a professor of economics at Fordham University.
20:23 Speaker 01 Basically, it's a decrease in alertness that happens like within an hour to two hours after ingestion of a meal. It's just simple feeling of lethargy and fatigue, and usually associated with eating a nice, big meal.
20:38 Cynthia Graber? One important thing to know is that a food coma is different from just feeling full.
20:43 Speaker 01 I think food coma is more associated with this idea of like a slowing down of your cognitive abilities or feeling of drowsiness.
20:49 Cynthia Graber? And not all meals are equal when it comes to food comas. Researchers believe that larger meals and meals that are heavier in carbs and fats, they're more likely to lead to a food coma.
20:59 Speaker 06 It depends on the person. It depends on the meal. It depends on the time of day. It might depend on your physical activity. If you went to the gym the day before. So as most things in our lives, it's very hard to predict whether something like that Will happen or not, just because our life is so full of many, many variables.
21:16 Nicola Twilley? But that feeling, you're lethargic, you don't want to get off the couch, you're kind of glazed over. It's a feeling, you feel like you're more tired and kind of slowed down, but are you actually? Can you really not think or move?
21:29 Speaker 07 Much less is known about the possible consequences of that phenomenon, right? If there is like a feeling of drowsiness and reduced alertness, does it mean that it actually leads to lowered cognitive or reduced cognitive abilities?
21:42 Nicola Twilley? Justine and Subha decided to look into this. Science has already shown that when we're tired, we do more poorly on tests. And obviously, we feel tired when we have a food coma. But do they have a similar impact? Is a feeling of being tired after a big meal the same as being tired from lack of sleep? To find out, they did a study that involved more than 4,000 students in India who were between the ages of 12 and 22. The students took a bunch of tests, tests in their native language, tests in English, math tests, and a logic test. They all took them at slightly different times, whenever the test team came to their houses, which meant that some of them ended up taking the test soon after a meal and some ended up taking it hours after they'd last eaten. Each student told the researcher when they had their last meal,
22:26 Nicola Twilley? and they also described how tired they were feeling. And then Subha and Justine and their colleagues sorted them into post-prandial or after-meal groups, based on whether they'd eaten within the past hour or within the past two hours or more. And it turned out that the students who'd eaten within the past hour, wow, they suffered.
22:44 Speaker 07 Testing in the post-prandial period reduced their cognitive ability by like 5 to 9% across the board, like for all of these types of tests. It's a substantial reduction in your ability to perform.
23:00 Nicola Twilley? The results varied, but in general, the students who had eaten within the past hour did even worse the harder the test was.
23:06 Speaker 01 So for instance, we find that the effects on, you know, talking about levels of difficulty, we find that the effects are much smaller on their ability to read a letter and read a word. This effect is much larger for your ability to read a paragraph. So you know, there's quite a bit of gap between how food coma impacts your ability to read a word vis a vis your ability to read a paragraph.
23:27 Nicola Twilley? So Justine and Subha found that taking a test after a meal does cause a pretty big dip in performance, and the harder the challenge, the bigger the dip. Then they looked into why.
23:38 Speaker 07 Like one possibility could be. That, you know, in the post-prandial period, students just like feel more fatigue and though they exert less effort on the task. Another possibility is that they do exert effort, but they just they lack the cognitive ability to solve the question, you know, it's like your brain is foggy and even if you try, you just don't manage to do it.
23:57 Cynthia Graber? Researchers usually use the amount of time a student takes to complete a test as a stand-in for effort. And in this study, the students on average took roughly the same amount of time on the test regardless of when they'd eaten. So Subha and Justine say that the ones who took their test within an hour after their meal, they didn't try as hard, they just didn't have the juice.
24:14 Speaker 07 The idea that the problem is not about them exerting less effort, it's about, you know, individuals having less cognitive capacities or like that, you know, there's a depletion of their cognitive capacity to solve that question.
24:29 Nicola Twilley? In other words, the food coma is real. From their data, it seems as though the effect is stronger in adolescents than older teens. It also wears off after that first hour post-meal. And sorry, Subha and Justine didn't have any solutions for our listener, Laura, to speed up that recovery.
24:48 Cynthia Graber? So there's nothing we can do individually to get rid of a food coma. But is there something schools should maybe do if a food coma affects a student's cognitive abilities?
24:56 Speaker 01 We have clear evidence that timing of test matters, digestive fatigue matters. So maybe after a meal, you give children a short break or a nap to restore their cognitive fatigue, or at least change the schedule in a way that easier sections are done after meals and more harder sections on math or language or something is kept for early parts of the day or later parts of the day when children have greater cognitive alertness.
25:23 Cynthia Graber? But Subha told us, we shouldn't assume this research holds true for all students around the world. The students they studied are particularly poor and they don't have high levels of education.
25:31 Speaker 01 So I think the reason we're seeing these big effects is because this is where there is very poor learning outcomes to start with as well, which is why even a small, you know, food coma, fatigue and cognitive resource depletion that comes from eating a meal has all these, you know, bigger effects that we see.
25:49 Nicola Twilley? Subha pointed out that it could easily be that for higher income students in richer countries, the effect of a food coma on test performance wouldn't be nearly as big. That's something Justine said they still want to study.
26:01 Speaker 07 I think one first question is, do these results hold in other contexts? A second question could be, does it have an
26:07 Speaker 06 Effect on your learning ability, not even just your ability to test, but your ability to learn also in that time period.
26:12 Cynthia Graber? And then also, the biggest question of all is, why do we get them in the first place? What's going on?
26:17 Nicola Twilley? Over the decades, researchers have proposed a variety of mechanisms that might lie behind the food coma.
26:23 Speaker 06 The medical literature started with explaining food comas like a diversion of the blood flows like away from the brain and towards your digestive system. And that's why you would feel more sleepy after eating.
26:35 Cynthia Graber? I heard this all the time when I was a kid. I had this mental image that like the blood had all pooled around my stomach, but that doesn't seem to be the main thing that's going on.
26:43 Speaker 06 Another one to mention is tryptophan in Turkey. There is this longstanding idea that Turkey has the special property of inducing a food coma because it is rich in tryptophan, which is a basic amino acid. Any food would have some amount of tryptophan, but Turkey does happen to have a little more of it.
27:01 Nicola Twilley? The idea here is that when your body digests tryptophan-rich foods, it turns them into melatonin, which works with your circadian rhythms to make you feel drowsy.
27:11 Speaker 06 But I think that theory has also been disproven. It doesn't appear to have that much of an effect. And even very tryptophan-rich foods might not necessarily induce a food coma.
27:24 Cynthia Graber? There are even theories that food comas aren't really a thing. It's just a natural circadian rhythm and you tend to feel more tired in the late afternoon anyway, at about the same time as you might finish eating a large lunch. But super interesting study shows that's not true.
27:36 Speaker 06 Because what we show in the paper is that this phenomenon exists at different hours of the day. So whether like after a meal in the morning, after a meal in the afternoon or after a meal in the evening, we do find this decrease in performance everywhere.
27:50 Nicola Twilley? It's so funny. This sensation, we all know, we've all experienced, but up until now, science has kind of drawn a blank.
27:59 Speaker 06 What's very interesting is that so far, there is no definitive
28:02 Cynthia Graber? On the the cause of this phenomenon, we just know it happens. But recently, Nico thinks he may have found a biological explanation for food comas. And he started looking into this kind of by accident when he was studying how memories form in sea slugs.
28:17 Speaker 06 Sea slugs are much simpler animals. Their brains are much simpler. Their memories are very simple. And so we can get access to the most basic components of what makes a memory in an animal. And that's why we were interested in sea slugs.
28:30 Nicola Twilley? Sea slugs look like the blobby, gelatinous sea creatures of your nightmares. But they are very useful to researchers. Kind of amazingly, Nico used to get his from a guy who had a boat called Slugger. But now he just buys them from a couple of different companies.
28:46 Cynthia Graber? When he gets the sea slugs into his lab, Nico puts them in aquariums. And to keep them contained, but still give them something to wander around, he buys them pasta colanders.
28:54 Speaker 06 Pasta colander is supported by some foam, so they're they're floating. And that's where they they hang out. They mostly just run around in circles around that pasta colander.
29:03 Nicola Twilley? Run might be an overstatement here. Things are very low energy in the sea slug world.
29:09 Speaker 06 They're not super exciting animals. They don't have a huge behavioral repertoire. They move around, they wave their head, and they wait for us to bring them seaweed. They prefer red seaweed, but we don't always have that. So we usually feed them sushi nori. So our lab smells often like sushi. We've had some students who just could not eat sushi after doing a PhD project in our lab.
29:35 Nicola Twilley? Sometimes you have to suffer for science.
29:37 Cynthia Graber? So Nico knew from other research that there's a particular insulin like hormone that a rat makes. And if you inject that hormone into their brain, you can strengthen their memories. He wanted to know if the same hormone would strengthen the memory of a sea slug.
29:50 Nicola Twilley? Wait up just one moment there. I am curious exactly how you would know if a sea slug's memory was strengthened. It's not like you can give them a test.
30:00 Speaker 06 This has been studied for many decades, and we understand precisely how that memory is formed at the level of individual neurons. So what we can actually do is pull out those individual neurons and have them in a petri dish.
30:12 Cynthia Graber? When sea slugs have Have their neurons in their bodies and you give them a little shock, they pull in their tail. If you shock them again, they pull it in faster, which means they remember the shock. And you can mimic this in a Petri dish with a dose of serotonin. You might have heard serotonin is sometimes called the feel-good hormone in humans, but it does a lot of different things in humans and in other animals and in sea slugs. It's the chemical their brain produces when they're shocked.
30:34 Nicola Twilley? Okay, so that's the sea slug memory test. And so then what Nico did was get hold of that insulin-like hormone that boosts memory and rants. He added that to the mix and he waited to see what happened.
30:47 Speaker 06 And we saw that if you add an insulin-like peptide into that Petri dish and simultaneously put that splash of serotonin, this danger chemical, the connection between the neurons gets enhanced more strongly. It's a stronger formation of a memory between those two neurons.
31:04 Cynthia Graber? That's great. It worked. But as we said, this is an insulin-like hormone, so it makes sense that it's released when the animal eats. Nico wanted to know if maybe it would slow the animal down, literally give it kind of a food coma.
31:15 Nicola Twilley? So Nico set up an experiment where he did two things. Some of the slugs just got their regular nori rations and some got their seaweed dinner plus an injection that blocked their receptors for this particular insulin-like hormone. And then he waited again.
31:33 Speaker 06 It really takes them a long time to eat that. It takes them an hour to even find it in that colander and then another few hours to munch on it. It's an interesting thing to watch.
31:42 Cynthia Graber? Nico's being more than slightly sarcastic because here's the problem. He wanted to find out if they slow down after eating, but it sounds like sea slugs are already so slow that like, how would you even know if they're slower than usual if it already takes them hours to eat? How do you figure out if they have a food coma if they pretty much look like they're experiencing a food coma all the time?
32:02 Speaker 06 One thing that I've learned about these animals is that if you want to understand them, invertebrate. You have to speed it up 12 to 20 times for sea slugs. And then suddenly they start making sense.
32:13 Nicola Twilley? Their lives just happen at a slower pace than ours. So Nico had six colanders full of slugs and he installed cameras above them. And he recorded many, many hours of footage of the sea slugs doing their thing very, very slowly. And then he compressed all of that into just one hour.
32:31 Speaker 06 And then I sit there and I watch those six colanders. And I mark on my keyboard what each slug is doing. And this is the single most boring experiment that I ever did in my life. It was incredibly difficult not to fall asleep.
32:47 Nicola Twilley? That's called a science coma, folks.
32:50 Cynthia Graber? I would not want to try this at home. But luckily he found what he thought would probably happen. When they ate, they slowed down even more.
32:56 Speaker 06 They literally become sluggish, more sluggish than they normally are. They're always sluggish, but they're extra sluggish when you give them those chemicals.
33:05 Nicola Twilley? This one insulin-like molecule, Nico and his colleagues showed that it not only enhances memory, but it also helps the slugs digest glucose. And during that digestive process, they're in the slug version of a food coma.
33:20 Cynthia Graber? So if you're a sea slug, your gut makes a molecule that helps you digest food. But why would that same molecule make you slow down and also help you remember things? Nico says, though, that it makes sense that this insulin-like molecule would be so powerful.
33:33 Speaker 06 It's not just to take in the nutrients from the food. It is simultaneously to take in those nutrients and to reallocate the energy into storage of memories. And what we sometimes forget is that memory is from the past, but it is for the future. The point of memory is to change the behavior in the future. So if we approach it from that standpoint, then it makes sense that the goal of creating this food coma would be to enhance the events that led to it and make them more likely to happen again. You've found some food, you want to remember where you found it. You want to store the state of your brain for later and access it in the future. Find more of that food.
34:18 Speaker 06 So it makes sense to slow down, stop exploring, invest that energy that you've just acquired into forming a memory.
34:26 Nicola Twilley? This is a very elegant theory, but there is a caveat. Nico doesn't yet know whether the memory that's being strengthened by that food coma molecule is a memory about food. It could be a memory about a particularly attractive fellow sea slug.
34:42 Cynthia Graber? This seems like it would be really hard to test, but Nico told us that sea slugs find their food by the chemical traces in the water, kind of like smells. And so in theory, they would test if a sea slug was quicker to find a similar meal the next time. Quicker is relative, of course.
34:57 Speaker 06 We haven't done that study, but I think it's a reasonable thing to ask. After consuming a certain type of meal, would the sea slug become more sensitive to that particular food and seek it out more efficiently than another type of food?
35:13 Nicola Twilley? But also, not to be totally anthropocentric here, but does finding out what triggers a food coma in a sea slug have any relevance to humans?
35:22 Speaker 06 The short answer is we don't know. We know that we have related molecules.
35:26 Cynthia Graber? We have related molecules, but they're slightly different. Over the course of the millions of years of evolution that separate us from our sea slug cousins, we've developed a couple of different hormones that are released after we eat that mimic what the insulin-like hormone does in the sea slug.
35:39 Speaker 06 And so what works in the sea slug will not necessarily work the same way in a human.
35:45 Nicola Twilley? But Nico says that it is also possible that this ancient connection between digestion and memory is still functional in humans.
35:53 Speaker 06 It's possible that it's a vestige of something that used to have a functional purpose and no longer does. But evolution is pretty smart. And usually, if there was something that didn't help us, that purely slowed us down without any flip side to it, evolution would have probably gotten rid of it over millions of years. So I think it is very reasonable to assume that if we so consistently get tired and fatigued after a meal, that there's something useful about it. We can't always make that assumption, but I think it's a pretty Pretty reasonable hypothesis.
36:29 Cynthia Graber? This is all super interesting and might just be the answer to why we get a food coma. But one thing is bothering me. Justine and Suba's study showed that the kids were doing worse on tests after they ate when they felt tired. If their memory was being enhanced by the meal, surely they'd be doing better.
36:44 Nicola Twilley? When we asked Nico about this, he said Justine and Suba's results actually make sense because if those post-meal digesting students are using their cognitive resources to strengthen a memory, those resources wouldn't be as available for other cognitive challenges like reading a paragraph. Their brain is otherwise occupied.
37:04 Cynthia Graber? Nico and Justine and Suba say we have most definitely not solved all the mysteries around food comas, but these are intriguing studies. And at least, Laura, we know that you're not just being lazy. Food comas are real.
37:16 Nicola Twilley? But so is a dessert stomach. And so I am guessing we all still have room for one more mystery this episode. What up with ranch?
37:25 Cynthia Graber? That story after the break.
37:28 Speaker 05 We're just days away from the midterm elections, which means I only really have one question.
37:35 Speaker 05 Hi, Samika. I'm Jessica. Yeah, and I'm Al. We're from the Culinary Union. How are the issues that we've been tracking all year actually playing out on the ground? The reason why we're out here is because we're actually out here canvassing for Aaron Ford and Mr. Horstberg. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. Oh, yeah, I'm voting for them. Amen. A few weeks ago, I headed west to Nevada, where the entire midterms can basically be summed up in just three words: the Trump slump.
38:04 Speaker 07 Even with our great union jobs that we had, we struggled. That never happened before. And it's because of these politicians what they're doing to us. The Trump slump.
38:17 Speaker 05 This week on America Actually, midterms canvassing with the Las Vegas Culinary Union. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
38:30 Speaker 06 I'm Seth Matlins, and on this week's Creator Destroy: Reimagining Marketing, my two guests are Walmart's CMO, William White, and Waymo's CMO, Suzanne Fillion. Walmart's got 150 million people walking through its doors every week, while Waymo operates its autonomous ride-hailing cars in only 15 US cities as of now. But both shared stories about why they need to keep earning customer trust and how trust is earned by everything the companies do and say, in that order. Creator Destroy. It's a business show, a marketing show, and a show that argues they've always been the same thing. From the Wisdom is Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
39:07 Speaker 04 I'm Bridget Reed.
39:08 Speaker 05 And I'm James Walsh.
39:10 Speaker 04 The Alexander Brothers moved in a world of multimillion-dollar homes, exclusive parties, and powerful people.
39:17 Speaker 05 Behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault.
39:23 Speaker 04 In our reporting for New York Magazine, we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories.
39:31 Speaker 05 Now, that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docu-series, The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers.
39:38 Speaker 04 You'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped.
39:43 Speaker 05 Stream all three episodes now, only on Peacock.
39:51 Cynthia Graber? We've had two courses so far, and this listener-inspired episode. And now, finally, for dessert, you guessed it, you get some ranch dressing.
39:58 Speaker 04 There were a few people who were experimenting with ranch ice cream. I thought that a ranch birthday cake could work because buttermilk and frosting doesn't quite work, I would say.
40:09 Nicola Twilley? Abby Reisner is the author of Ranch: An Ode to America's Beloved Sauce, and she loves ranch, unsurprisingly.
40:16 Cynthia Graber? Our listener Josh is the one who asked us to investigate this pressing topic, and he has also seen the dessert connection.
40:23 Speaker 00 As a middle school assistant principal, I see kids dip all kinds of things in ranch dressing, not just put it on their salads. I've seen things like pickles and cookies and, I mean, it's- It's like gross, actually, but fascinating at the same time.
40:38 Nicola Twilley? Josh wanted to know what on earth is going on with this ranch on everything trend. But I'm actually coming at this with a much more basic question. What is it? As you listeners will know, I'm British and I grew up in England. And the dressings that you could buy in bottles when I was a kid were blue cheese, Italian, Thousand Island, and of course, that British speciality salad cream, which is like a weird pourable mayo. Ranch was not a thing.
41:06 Cynthia Graber? I'm obviously American. I grew up here. And Nikki, we overlapped on everything but that odd sounding salad cream. We did, though, have access to plenty of ranch, but I didn't spend a lot of time reading the ingredient list.
41:17 Speaker 04 Well, at its core, ranch dressing is some dairy. You know, that could be buttermilk. It could be sour cream. It could be coconut milk. You can make a vegan ranch. Or any combination thereof and mayonnaise often. And then herbs and spices. So a combination of dried herbs. And that can really vary by the chef or by whoever is in charge of Hidden Valley. And often dried onion, dried dill, some really pungent things. And that really contrasts the cooling nature of all the dairy.
41:50 Nicola Twilley? Okay, this gives me some sense of what we're dealing with here. But I also asked Abby for some tasting notes just to help me get in the ranch headspace.
41:59 Speaker 04 I would say it's almost a parabola of an experience. The first thing you get is really the creamy coating of your mouth. And then you get the spices, the alliums of it all. And then afterwards, the dairy comes back in.
42:11 Cynthia Graber? So Nikki, you might never have tasted ranch before, but Abby says you've probably tried some of its culinary cousins from around the world.
42:18 Speaker 04 The basic combination of this, we see it all over the place. There's a Polish white creamy dairy sauce. There's aioli that people know. I think every, not every culture, but a lot of cultures across the world have something that's very similar. So I think it's a situation of same good core idea manifesting in different ways across the world.
42:37 Nicola Twilley? Lovely. Now I have a handle on the basics, so let's get into this. Who manifested ranch?
42:44 Speaker 04 So it was a guy named Steve Henson. He went up to Alaska. He was a plumber. We're talking 1940s, 1950s.
42:51 Cynthia Graber? At the time, contractors in Alaska made a lot of money. That's what Steve went up there for. And he also occasionally served as a cook for construction crews.
42:58 Nicola Twilley? Veggies weren't necessarily super fresh on job sites out there. And so Steve would attempt to make them more appetizing with a creamy, herby dressing. But there weren't a lot of fresh herbs either, so he used dried.
43:11 Speaker 04 And then after making it big in Alaska as a plumber, he said, you know, what I really want is to own a ranch in Santa Barbara. So he moved just outside of Santa Barbara, bought a place. It was originally called Sweetwater Ranch. He renamed it Hidden Valley, which, you know, is where we get eventually to the Hidden Valley of today.
43:31 Cynthia Graber? At their California Hidden Valley Ranch, he and his wife Gail opened a restaurant. It was kind of a restaurant nightclub combo. There wasn't much around there. In the evenings, Gail would play the organ for entertainment.
43:40 Nicola Twilley? The food was pretty basic, sort of steakhouse fare. And everything came served with Steve's house dressing.
43:47 Speaker 04 There was an account from both his son and then also someone who had worked and lived at the ranch for a while. And they said it was really very popular, served on the steak and on potatoes, sometimes with the vegetables as well.
43:59 Cynthia Graber? That ranch dressing, that's what he called it. The dressing itself was probably the most popular food Steve made. People started taking it home in jars. Another nearby restaurant started serving it, too.
44:09 Nicola Twilley? Eventually, Steve realized that more people wanted this dressing than he could sell it to in liquid form. So he made a mix of dried herbs and onions and garlic so people could recreate it at home.
44:20 Speaker 04 He ended up doing a mail order product of the little ranch packet. And for, you know, I think less than a dollar. So you could write in and get this packet mailed to you. And all you'd have to really do is mix it up with, you know, some mayo and some dairy. And it was like a cake mix, but for ranch dressing.
44:38 Cynthia Graber? The mail order ranch packet business ballooned, and it eclipsed the steakhouse Dude Ranch. They shut everything down so they could fulfill orders. And then big business came calling.
44:47 Speaker 04 In the 70s, it was bought by Clorox for $8 million and was really, had a lot of advertising. Behind it at that point. And I think that's what really got it out to the masses. I don't think that Steve Henson's mail order business would have been long term sustainable enough to really popularize it. But it is funny to me to think that of all things, it was Clorox that bought it. It's just not an association I would put in my head.
45:11 Nicola Twilley? This is also confusing to me. Clorox, I associate with cleaning the bathroom, not with making a salad. But it turns out that at the time, Clorox had recently been spun out of its parent company, Procter and Gamble, and they were on a mission to copy the very successful P and G playbook.
45:28 Cynthia Graber? P and G owns a ridiculous number of brands. Today, none of them are food brands. But back in the 70s, they owned a lot of food companies, ones like Folgers Coffee and Jif Peanut Butter. And Clorox thought they should get in the food game, too.
45:39 Nicola Twilley? Weirdly, they pretty much stopped after ranch. But anyway, that was the business thinking at the time.
45:45 Cynthia Graber? And as Abby said, Clorox threw a bunch of money into advertising their new product.
45:50 Speaker 04 It's comical, almost slow motion videos of young girls walking their cows through the fields and someone squeezing Hidden Valley Ranch onto a single stalk of broccoli and then biting down. Hidden Valley Ranch, how could anything so fresh and delicious come from anywhere else? True, not everyone can live in Hidden Valley, but you sure can get a taste of it. There really was some hefty marketing budget behind it. And it was kind of, you know, it was phrased as a healthy alternative to blue cheese originally, whether or not that's true.
46:22 Nicola Twilley? It was also positioned as a sneaky, secret ingredient behind homemade deliciousness.
46:27 Speaker 07 Terrific salad. Especially your dressing. Ever gonna tell us how you get this special taste? Got a secret recipe.
46:34 Speaker 06 Hidden Valley Ranch, nobody else has our secret recipe. Nobody else has our special taste.
46:39 Cynthia Graber? Packet salad dressing wasn't unusual at the time. You could even find packets of Italian dressing, herbs and spices that you'd mix with oil and vinegar. But you could also find bottles of fully made salad dressing on the shelves. The problem with ranch was the dairy.
46:53 Nicola Twilley? About by 1983, the whiz kids at Clorox had figured out how to make the buttermilk component of ranch shelf stable, too, and bottles of Hidden Valley Ranch dressing hit the shelves.
47:03 Cynthia Graber? And ranch's popularity skyrocketed.
47:06 Nicola Twilley? At this point, ranch dressing was popular enough that Kraft and other companies that introduced their own versions to compete with Hidden Valley. But ranch really got a boost in 1986 when it transcended the dressing sector and became a chip flavor. Introducing new Cool Ranch flavored Doritos.
47:27 Speaker 04 A creamy blend of tangy spices and cheese flavor.
47:33 Speaker 04 It's a little before my time, but I think about my older siblings and to them, that's just such a part of the late 80s and early 90s. It's just fun and you've got people eating it in lunchrooms and it just becomes a core memory for people that grew up during that time, further cementing the ranch flavor as more of a thing rather than just ranch dressing.
47:55 Cynthia Graber? A few years later, in 1992, ranch reached another milestone. It became the most popular salad dressing in America.
48:02 Speaker 04 The 90s, that's when, to me, a few things happened. You've got Cool Ranch Doritos taking on a cultural phenomenon. You've got Domino's. It's believed that Domino's Pizza spearheaded the wedding of pizza and ranch. They were selling ranch with their chicken wings and found that people were actually dipping their pizza into it.
48:24 Nicola Twilley? The 90s were good for ranch, but the 2000s and 2010s, that's when ranch truly exploded, so to speak. At one end of the spectrum, you had McDonald's, Taco Bell, serving ranch as a source for fries, nuggets and nachos. But at the same time, high-end chefs were embracing it and making their own haute cuisine versions.
48:46 Cynthia Graber? There's a famous Chicago restaurant called Alenia. The chef is Grant Aketz, and they served their own particular high-end version of a salad with ranch.
48:54 Speaker 04 And I think it really was truly a leaf on top of some dressing sprinkled with ranch powder, which is just kind of funny, that is about as high as you can raise ranch.
49:03 Nicola Twilley? And then ranch started showing up in pop culture.
49:06 Speaker 04 You have Melissa McCarthy dousing herself with Hidden Valley Ranch on SNL. Okay. The products we're going to be testing today is a new line of dressing from
49:16 Cynthia Graber? Hidden Valley Ranch.
49:17 Nicola Twilley? Awesome.
49:18 Cynthia Graber? Woo!
49:19 Nicola Twilley? Awesome. Hidden Valley Ranch.
49:21 Cynthia Graber? In the skit, Melissa McCarthy is one of three taste testers. She's wearing a sweatshirt with Spock's face on it, and she's clearly already a huge ranch fan. She keeps whooping and cheering.
49:30 Nicola Twilley? There's a Hidden Valley Ranch party in my mouth.
49:35 Nicola Twilley? A Hidden Valley Ranch party in my mouth. Write that down for your... There's a Hidden Ranch party. Homer Simpson is another pop culture ranch superfan. He would rather have brunch than belly dancers. Enough.
49:47 Cynthia Graber? I grow weary of your sexually suggestive dancing. Bring me my ranch dressing hose.
49:56 Cynthia Graber? Hidden Valley really leaned into all of this. They made a ranch dressing keg. They made a special bottle for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's wedding.
50:03 Speaker 04 I think around 2017 or so, you start to see some really out there ranch merchandise. You have sapphire and diamond encrusted bottles. You have ranch Christmas ornaments, even, something very simple. But just taking over everywhere and really getting ranch top of mind for people and these kind of novelty gifts.
50:25 Nicola Twilley? Abby was always a ranch lover herself, but in writing her cookbook, she ended up going really deep into ranch culture.
50:32 Speaker 04 I watched a video that I'd like to unsee, but it was someone taking a literal bath in ranch dressing and putting it on TikTok.
50:41 Cynthia Graber? Abby does not suggest in her cookbook that you bathe in ranch, which I do appreciate. But she does have a whole variety of recipes. There's ranch biscuits, ranch grilled cheese, ranch artini, a ranch frittata, and of course, a recipe for homemade ranch powder itself.
50:54 Nicola Twilley? Which you can use to make homemade ranch Doritos.
50:57 Speaker 04 I do love the homemade cool ranch Doritos. They take a little bit of time because you have to fry tortillas, but it is an amazing party trick to pull out. I made them for coworkers six years ago at this point, and they still talk about it to this day.
51:12 Cynthia Graber? Ranch's popularity isn't a thing of the past. We're still riding that wave. It's the thing that Josh's middle school students tip pickles and cookies in. You can still find it in all sorts of restaurants, and it's still the number one salad dressing in America.
51:25 Nicola Twilley? But to Abby, ranch... Dressing is more than just a delicious salad dressing and dip. It is the ultimate American food.
51:33 Speaker 04 My favorite fun little thing to think about with Cool Ranch Doritos is how everywhere else in the world is called Cool American because that is equating ranch with America.
51:44 Cynthia Graber? To Abby, it's not just that Europeans see ranch as equivalent to America, but also ranch as a story. That's what makes it really American.
51:51 Speaker 04 Maybe this is a little philosophical, but to me, it comes down to its origin story and how it's coming from a man who really did the American dream. And, you know, it then goes into capitalism and all this. And to me, everything that ranch has been through is a very American story. So not just is it paired with foods that are also typically consumed by a high number of Americans, like pizza, like chicken wings, but it's the backstory of it all that it really fought for its life out there and it came out being purchased by billionaires.
52:24 Nicola Twilley? Thanks this episode to Abby Reisner, Frank Meixner, Justine Herve, Subh Bhamani, and Nikolai Kukushkin, whose research was conducted at the Karu Lab. We have links to their research and books on our website, gastropod.com. And thanks, of course, to all you delightful listeners who wrote in with fascinating questions.
52:42 Cynthia Graber? Thanks, as always, to our amazing producer Claudia Geib. This is our last episode of 2024. We hope you all have a wonderful end of the year and we'll see you in 2025.
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