Spaghetti Science And Mouth Taping Myths

The mysterious properties of pasta have been tested by physicists for decades. Also, social media influencers claim that taping your mouth shut during sleep has life-changing effects. But the evidence isn’t airtight.

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

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:16Speaker 01

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• 0:30Ira Flatow?

  Hi, this is Ira Flatow. You're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:37Ira Flatow?

  Today on the show, are you part of that viral mouth-taping trend? We'll offer some advice on when and if you should tape that mouth shut. And then, open wide for the science of spaghetti.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  I was asking every scientist I talk to, like, what is it about spaghetti that gets you all so obsessed?

• 1:00Ira Flatow?

  I love pasta. I love to cook it. I love to make pasta dishes. There are really two schools of thought about what to do with spaghetti. There's those that slip the raw spaghetti strands whole into the boiling water, and then there are people like me who try to break the spaghetti into two pieces so it more easily fits into the pan. But you know what happens? You find that it always breaks into like three pieces and never cleanly into two. And it's not just me. For decades, this humble food has prompted physicists from all over the world to try to understand pasta's mysterious properties. Why can't you break it into two pieces?

• 1:42Ira Flatow?

  And what's in the secret sauce that makes cacio e pepe so hard to perfect? Well, my next guest wrote about the scientists cooking up the answers to these questions and more. He did it for a recent piece for the BBC. Joseph Howlett is math staff writer at Quantum Magazine, based in New York City. Joseph, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. I'm a huge fan. I want to start with famous physicist Richard Feynman's addition to the Spaghetti Science Club. Not that I'm surprised, given the fanciful nature of his work, but how did he get hooked on studying this stuff?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Apparently, it was one of his favorite foods. He noticed that if you hold both ends of a strand of dry spaghetti and break it, you can never break it cleanly into two pieces. And he wondered why that is. I guess Feynman just can't turn his physics brain off. And him and his colleagues spent basically the entire night breaking pieces of spaghetti until the kitchen floor was covered with it. This is a piece of physics folklore now, that Feynman had this obsession with spaghetti.

• 2:48Ira Flatow?

  Wow, so this was just the beginning of his romance with spaghetti, right?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the question he opened up became a real line of research that hasn't ended even now. And people are still finding out the mysteries of breaking spaghetti.

• 3:04Ira Flatow?

  So how did other physicists build on this curiosity, on his curiosity?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Well, for a long time, nobody could really understand what was happening. Until 2005, when a couple of researchers made a model that explained how it fragments and how the tension that you build in a strand of spaghetti distributes itself over the spaghetti so that it has to break in more than one spot at a time. And this won an Ig Nobel Prize the following year, 2006. So this was kind of the ostensible answer to the question. But scientists have continued to study it. And just a few years ago, a group of MIT mathematicians figured out that you could break it into two pieces if you twist it first. I know it's hard to imagine twisting a brittle strand of spaghetti, but with lab equipment, you can do it.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  You could twist it so well that there's no tension in the middle. So that's kind of distributed across the whole thing. And then if you break it, it'll break perfectly in two pieces.

• 4:04Ira Flatow?

  You know, the geek in me has to try this.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  You'll end the night like Feynman, I'm sure, with the kitchen floor covered in spaghetti.

• 4:10Ira Flatow?

  I should be another Feynman. You write about another pressing issue, the spaghetti problem. When you suck spaghetti into your mouth, it always slaps in your face, doesn't it?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you always end up with sauce on your face, or at least I did when I was slurping single strands of spaghetti as a kid. And physicist and mathematician George F. Carrier was really intrigued by this problem and wrote a serious academic treatise on it. He called it the spaghetti problem. So he was basically wondering, as you slurp it in, why does it always slap the side of your face? Why can't you slurp it in cleanly? And he was able to answer this with basic physics. It had to do with- All of these different acoustic modes that come into play when you move something long and bendy.

• 4:55Ira Flatow?

  Let's move on to figuring out the secret sauce. What drove Italian physicists to try to figure out the physics of why sometimes cacio e pepe fails to come together properly?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was this group of Italian scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, and they were lamenting how they would often be trying to make cacio e pepe and notice that the sauce, which is made of pasta water and cheese and nothing else, would sometimes suddenly form these big clumps that you could never break up, and you would have to throw out your entire batch of pasta.

• 5:32Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  And this was horrible for them, and it was particularly embarrassing when they would invite over their German friends and make a mess in front of them. So they decided to put together an apparatus to study why this happens and if there's a way around it.

• 5:46Ira Flatow?

  And what did they discover?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Fortunately for us, these Italian scientists are world-leading experts on the physics of phase separation, which is when you have a solution that's a mixture of different things, and they form liquid droplets within the solution. That was key to them understanding what was happening when things clumped into what they called the mozzarella phase. For them, this was the phase separation that made a clump of cheese within the pasta that you couldn't break up. They figured out that this had to do with a couple of things, and what they realized was the pasta water has some starch, which is essential to mixing the sauce, but not quite enough to ensure that clumping doesn't happen.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So if you accidentally heat your pasta enough, and this could be a difference of a few degrees, they found that these clumps inevitably form. And the way around it, they decided, was to artificially add extra starch, more than the pasta water could supply. So they did this with cornstarch. And if you add this extra little bit of starch, you can completely avoid the possibility of the mozzarella phase, regardless of how much you heat the sauce.

• 6:53Ira Flatow?

  Wow. You know, it's such a popular dish. You would have thought some famous chef would have figured this out instead of some scientist.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  That is exactly what they figured out as they were writing the paper. They found a YouTube video of a famous Roman chef, a Michelin star chef, Luciano Monosilio, who had said exactly this in his video. He had said he made a recipe for cacio e pepe, where you add additional cornstarch and you can completely avoid this clumping phenomenon. It's kind of a foolproof recipe. The researcher says it's the only time they've ever cited a recipe in a scientific paper.

• 7:29Ira Flatow?

  All right. Well, then they must figure out that there must be something that helps us better understand science or life on Earth when we understand the perfect recipe for cacio e pepe.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it turns out that what happens when you mess up your cacio e pepe might be the same kind of accident that caused life on Earth to begin.

• 7:49Ira Flatow?

  Really?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because this phase separation stuff, forming clumps within a liquid, you could kind of imagine that in the primordial goop, where the things that were precursors to cells initially formed, right? You have this dispersed solution, and then you need the important stuff, the proteins, to find a way to all get together and build more complex molecules. And people think that may have happened due to the physics of phase separation.

• 8:15Ira Flatow?

  You know, we've just talked about a few different studies, which raises the question, why are physicists so obsessed with spaghetti? I mean, it's just flour and water, right?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think that's part of the story. I mean, I was asking every scientist I talked to, like, what is it about spaghetti that gets you all so obsessed? One thing that came up a lot was exactly what you said, that it's a very simple substance. It's just flour and water. And yet, you get all of these complicated mechanical properties out of it. It's brittle and stiff and strong, and it breaks in these weird ways. And yet, when you cook it, it becomes this springy, soft, pliable thing that you can tie into knots. It's slippery and it's also kind of sticky. It's just so many things at once with only two ingredients.

• 9:02Ira Flatow?

  And it's cheap to experiment with, right?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a big part of it, too. The scientists who were breaking spaghetti in two, they said, yeah, we could have done this with brittle plastic rods, but they're very expensive. You can't be breaking them and filling your kitchen floor with them at the same price point that you can for a box of spaghetti.

• 9:23Ira Flatow?

  Are there any tips you can give us on cooking or preparing pasta, knowing the science, how it might help us?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  This story encourages me to try to have that same kind of curious mind as Feynman and others, like, to look for the science in the mundane, right? And to maybe never turn off that part of your brain that asks, why is this like this?

• 9:43Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, he was very good at doing that. And you are very good at explaining it. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Ira.

• 9:51Ira Flatow?

  Joseph Howell, math staff writer at Quantum Magazine, based in New York.

• 9:59Ira Flatow?

  We have to take a break. And when we come back, the popular wellness trend of mouth taping. Should you be adding this to your nighttime routine?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  If your body is actually opening its mouth to allow more oxygen, forcing it closed, you know, it's not the right thing to do.

• 10:21Speaker 01

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• 12:04Speaker 04

  Hey, Science Friday. It's Grace from Brooklyn. My question for you is regarding mouth taping. Now, my social media feeds are flooded with influencers promoting this trend and the health benefits that come with it. So should I be adding this to my nighttime routine? Any information you could share would be great. Thanks in advance.

• 12:20Flora Lichtman?

  If you frequent the wellness world on social media, you have probably seen this mouth taping trend. If you avoid wellness TikTok like an unsterilized jade egg, then you probably haven't. But it's people using adhesive tape to force their mouth closed while they're sleeping to promote nose breathing.

• 12:41Speaker 06

  I absolutely love mouth taping. It has completely changed my life, my sleep, the way that I look.

• 12:46Speaker 07

  I have such a stuffy nose by nature, deviated septum, all the nose problems. And it forces your nose to kind of clear out. I've never woken up with a clearer nose.

• 12:55Speaker 08

  The mouth tape, and the reason why I wear this is because I'm a heavy mouth breather. If I just tape my mouth, I think my sleep can get better.

• 13:04Flora Lichtman?

  And yes, it can make practitioners look like they're part of a hostage negotiation. So is this a good thing to do? Is there any benefit to breathing through your nose? Here to help us sort fact from TikTocktion is Dr. Lynda Lee, physician and surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. Lynda, welcome.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. I love being here for this topic.

• 13:26Flora Lichtman?

  You do?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so timely. And I get this question from patients at least once or twice per clinic.

• 13:34Flora Lichtman?

  You're joking.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  No, I do, you know, deviated septum surgery and nose breathing surgeries. And they want to know, is there evidence to it? Is this safe? Yeah, let's, let's go through it. Okay, first of all, is this a good idea? I think it is generally not a good idea to do before you've had an evaluation. Because a lot of people actually cannot breathe through their nose. They either have DBT septum, they have allergies. And so if your body is actually opening its mouth to allow more oxygen, forcing it closed, you know, it's not the right thing to do. So you might need your mouth to breathe. There, there are some cases where I think it can be a good thing. Really? Do you want me to tell you about them?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I, I mean, I think it sounded like absurd to me, but yeah. Is there any, is there any reason why you would want to breathe through your nose? So I think sometimes you are doing it out of habit. So now I think you can try to train your body. But I still feel like first, let's try during the day when you can consciously, you know, take it off if you're not getting enough air before you try to shove it closed at night. Before you go into an unconscious state where you force your mouth closed? Yes, exactly. And then one of the most interesting things that I think is at Mathlinir, a lot of our surgeons are really into sleeping quality. And so they'll do something where they call it drug induced sleep endoscopy,

• 15:01Speaker 03

  which means let me put you to sleep under anesthesia and watch you sleep. And they can tell where the obstruction is. So a lot of mouth taping is to try to compensate for sleep apnea. Like instead of using a CPAP machine, let me close my mouth. And so in these sleep endoscopies, you can actually see where is the level of obstruction? And there are some people where they close their mouth during that sleep endoscopy and they see that now they don't have sleep apnea. So then now you can actually try to train your body to close your mouth with a chin strap or a mouth tape. But that's kind of after you rule out something else that is happening.

• 15:42Flora Lichtman?

  Well, what is the advantage of breathing through your nose?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's soft, soft evidence for sure. But maybe it helps with digestion, maybe it helps with sleeping. And even when you are breathing through your nose, you're able to close your mouth. So then your mouth doesn't dry out and saliva in your mouth is really helpful for like, not having bad breath, not having poor dentition.

• 16:05Flora Lichtman?

  Is there any science to back up mouth taping as beneficial?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so there is science, but it's not very good. So there's a study out of Taiwan in 2022, and it's literally called, "Impact of Mouth Taping in Mouth Breathers with Mild Obstructive Sleep Apnea." And they do call it a preliminary study, so they're kind of saying this is not a great study. It's early. But their conclusion was that mouth taping during sleep improved snoring and the severity of sleep apnea in people who have mild sleep apnea. Their conclusion, which I think is so dangerous, it says, "Mouth taping could be an alternative treatment in patients with mild sleep apnea before turning to CPAP therapy or surgical intervention."

• 16:52Speaker 03

  And that kind of stuff is so powerful in potentially a dangerous way, because nobody likes their CPAP, right? So if you tell me that I can tape my mouth closed rather than use CPAP, I'm definitely going to try it. But sleep apnea, it means you deoxygenate your body, and you're not oxygenating your organs. So if you get evaluated and they find that, you know, you do a sleep endoscopy and you can close your mouth and your sleep apnea gets better, then sure, for that person, it can be an alternative treatment. But if the random person that needs a CPAP is just doing it instead of mouth taping, that's dangerous. And then there are other studies that are telling people like there is no benefit.

• 17:35Flora Lichtman?

  I have to ask you why I have you. The trend that's made it to me, this elder millennial, are these nose magnets? Have you seen these?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:44Flora Lichtman?

  They go over the bridge of the nose?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:47Flora Lichtman?

  To open your nostrils, I think?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:49Flora Lichtman?

  What's up with these? What do you think of these?

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the problem with the magnets is they are so extreme. So they really like pull your nose open a ton. You're pulling your nose out to twice the size of normal. So actually, I love the idea of a Breathe Right Strip, which is like a very toned down version of the magnet. Those are the things you see football players wearing on Sunday at the football game. Those are very conservative. They open your airway a little bit, and they can make a big difference in helping you to try to nose breathe.

• 18:23Flora Lichtman?

  Big picture, are these social media health trends changing your practice?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  They are in terms of awareness. I don't know if you've seen these TikToks on morning shed.

• 18:35Speaker 09

  The more crazy you go to sleep, the prettier you wake up. What? You don't have a morning shed routine? Girl, let me show you my morning shed routine that leaves me looking perfect in the mornings.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  It's like people will wake up and, and kind of shed their nighttime routine. And it's always a mouth tape. There's even like mouth tape with a straw hole in it. And it's just, it's very trendy.

• 18:55Flora Lichtman?

  Mouth tape with a straw? I just like, it seems to defeat the

• 18:58Speaker 03

  It does seem to defeat the

• 19:00Flora Lichtman?

  of a mouth tape if there's a hole in it.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  It does, it does. So I think what's happening is that patients are coming in realizing that I can't breathe in through my nose. And should I be looking at, are there ways to have my deviated septum fixed? Or get my allergies treated so that I'm breathing through my nose?

• 19:18Flora Lichtman?

  So it's calling attention to

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:21Flora Lichtman?

  a part of the body you care about.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Right. And actually, I think it's great. Like what a lot of TikTok and social media does is bring awareness to the issue. But then you have to just be careful that you are backing that up with some science. You know, don't just do it without realizing, is it the right thing for you?

• 19:39Flora Lichtman?

  Because an influencer told you so.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 19:42Flora Lichtman?

  Makes sense to me. Thanks, Dr. Lee.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Of course. Thanks for having me.

• 19:47Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Lynda Lee, physician and surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. And if you have a question about a wellness trend or something you saw on TikTok, our line is always open. Call us at 877-4-SY-FRI. That's 877-4-724-374.

• 20:08Ira Flatow?

  Hey, thanks for listening. And don't forget to rate and review the podcast, but only if you like the show. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis and Sochida Buxbaum. I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.