Eating alone may be secretly spiking your blood sugar

Being more social has a ton of benefits: lower stress, decreased inflammation – even living a longer life! Recently, some scientists have added lowering your blood sugar to the list. To figure it out, researchers had people break bread both in duos and alone. And they think the results could tell us something about the roots of our social nature. Consider it another reason to prioritize our social lives. Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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  I'm here with Ari Daniel and Sasha Pfeiffer. Hey, Ari. Hey, Sasha.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  Hi, Regina.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  So I have a question for you. What are your guys' habits around eating? Like, do you do it purely for fuel, like for your body and your mind? Or do you like to treat it as a ritual?

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's certainly a source of fuel, Regina, but I do think of it as a kind of ritual, both the making of it and then the eating of it. Family meals are really important where we eat all together with our kids.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I don't know that I'd call it a ritual, but I do love to eat. And I'm certainly aware that how I eat can make my brain or body feel or look different. So I think of food in all sorts of ways.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think of it as a ritual, but like a fun ritual, you know? Like, I'm looking forward to this thing that we always do to keep me grounded. I love it. So the reason I ask about food habits is because our first story in this biweekly Science News Roundup episode is about how eating with friends and family could actually lower your blood sugar.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Oh, that's an interesting one. I'm interested to hear if there's something about communal eating that has some physiological effect.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we also got two others, very different stories. One about how loud birds can get and what contributes to that variety.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Plus, how samples from the asteroid Benue could help us answer questions about life's origins right here on Earth.

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  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 3:31Speaker 01

  OK, Sasha, as promised, we're going to start with the eating with or without company and how it might help your blood sugar.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yes. Tell us why in the world those two things are related.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so researchers in Israel gave participants the same amount of carbs to eat. So in this case, it was bread. Then they measured their blood glucose levels. And they found compared to people who ate alone, people who ate together were better at regulating their blood sugar.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Regulating like it didn't spike as high.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and their blood sugar came back down to baseline quicker. Basically, they recovered faster from the sugar high. Researchers calculated the social group was 24% more efficient at clearing glucose from their blood. The results are published in the journal Science Advances.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And why? Why would eating not by yourself but with other people or another person make a difference?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so lead author Sheer Adzil thinks one possibility is that our brains associate other people with eating and that social cue might push our brains to start the metabolizing process earlier, like by releasing insulin sooner, which helps regulate blood sugar.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  And behavioral neuroscientist James Kohn offered another idea to support these results, that our brains could interpret company as help is here if we need it. And so your body may not require as much sugar at the ready, and you could use it elsewhere, like to grow hair or store it.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  You can do other things with it than dump it into your bloodstream.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  You know, this is very relevant to me today because I went to NPR's in-house cafeteria, a little cafe. I got food, brought it to my desk, and ate it all by myself. And it sounds like you're saying, maybe I shouldn't do that all the time.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah. Both James and Sheer say this is a reason to prioritize our friendships and social lives. And Sheer also thinks this is evidence that our social nature as humans is rooted in our biology.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Maybe social bonds are actually rooted in the most basic physiological processes, or what I call homeostasis.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So what I'm saying, Sasha, is I'm happy to eat lunch with you when I see you.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Next time, we'll go to the cafeteria together, Regina.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  All right, tell me about your next topic, which is loud birds.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Right. So scientists have been studying bird vocalizations for well over a century, Sasha. And there's a ton of variation between species, says Jeff Podols, a behavioral ecologist at UMass Amherst.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  Because they're all communicating about the same sort of stuff, about being territorial or trying to attract mates. And that raises questions as to why we have all that diversity.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Most studies have focused on pitch and rhythm, but hardly ever on volume.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I would have thought that maybe volume would be the first thing they study. It seems like it's so straightforward. It's the thing we most focus on.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would think, but it hasn't been easy to do it in the wild until recently with devices like sound level meters and laser rangefinders.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  All right, so if scientists can figure out the volume of bird song, what can they learn from that?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Well, what they want to do is they want to try to figure out how some birds sing louder than others and perhaps why. So several years back, Podols and his PhD student at the time, Joao Menezes, set out to do just that. They recorded birds in western Massachusetts and fields and swamps and suburbia and all across Brazil, Joao's home country, from the top of a more than mile-high mountain to his balcony in Sao Paulo. Even in your backyard, you feel like an early naturalist measuring something for the first time.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  In a paper they published in the journal Evolution, they collected the volumes of 123 different species.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  So they got a really large range.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  It was staggering. There was an 800-fold difference between the softest species, a kind of hummingbird you can barely hear, all the way up to a very loud trio. Comparable to the level of a jackhammer. Including two species that are new contenders for world's loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird

• 7:28Speaker 03

  and the red-legged seriama.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  They really, they really did their homework, didn't they?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they found that larger species and those with wider mouth openings tend to sing louder.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  All right, I get if you have a wider mouth opening, that anatomically, maybe you can belt it out more. Any idea why there is so much variety among all this?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  They don't have that answer just yet. The scientists couldn't find any clear patterns. But here is a cool fact. Some of these birds are actually louder than the published values of certain mammals, like lions and wolves and elephants.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  You know, that initially seems hard to believe, but then I think about the times I've been woken up by crows in the morning. So yes, maybe birds can, you know, out loud, an elephant at certain times.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Better than being woken up by a lion.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  True.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  We chatted with Sue Ann Zollinger, an ornithologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, who wasn't involved in the research. She was impressed with the study but acknowledged it's natural for such a broad survey to have its constraints.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  You can't really go into a lot of detail about the mechanics that might underlie these differences. Oh, scientists study such interesting things, don't they?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  All right, for our last topic, it was something to do with asteroid samples. Tell us about that one.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's something that truly boggles my mind. NASA sent a spacecraft to Benue. This is an asteroid that comes pretty close to Earth every six years to collect samples. And they brought those samples back to Earth.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  The samples landed in the Utah desert in September of 2023. And these precious rocks and dust grains were sent to scientists around the world to study. We talked to one of those researchers, Larry Nittler at Arizona State University.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Literally, I get in the mail, a box, and inside it is a little glass container with a little tiny, tiny black rock. And I'm like, this came from outer space.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And so what do those little black rocks tell them?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot. Another chemist named Maria Schoenbeckler also got a little stash of these rocks. She and her team looked at the chemical signatures and compositions of these samples. And they determined that Benue actually formed a lot closer to the sun than previously thought. And this has huge implications.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  It goes back to very, very basic questions. Where are we coming from? How did life emerge on Earth? And if we want to answer this question, we can actually, but we need more of this material. That's why we need these samples here on Earth in the labs.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  They wrote about all of this in the journal Science Advances.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  We just heard her say that these samples could help answer the question of how life emerged on Earth. How could it tell us that?

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Well, the origins of this asteroid could give us some hints. The study suggests Benue formed in the part of the solar system called the water ice line, basically right before you hit Jupiter. If that's true, that could mean that when the solar system was just forming, asteroids like Benue could have brought water and possibly organic material to the young Earth.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And Sasha, I want to say that getting these samples from Benue and another asteroid, Ryugu, is crucial because the only space rocks that scientists have studied before were meteorites that survived the fiery journey through our atmosphere and then crashed into Earth. But just studying stuff that falls to Earth means we might be missing a huge part of the picture of what's really going on out there.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  So as is often the case with science, a lot more still to be learned.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  We just need more space rocks. Sasha, thank you so much for spending time with us and, you know, being a science enthusiast with us just for a little while.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  It's always fun. Thanks. Good to talk to both of you.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  You too, Sasha.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  You're always welcome here. You can hear more of Sasha on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast, about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely, Ewan Fain, and Tiffany Vera Castro were the audio engineers. I'm Ari Daniel.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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