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Today on Something You Should Know.
There's something right above your stove I want you to pay attention to.
Then, there are a lot of myths about food and drinks, and today we're going to bust a few.
People will say, you know, pork, it's the other white meat.
This idea of pork being white meat is actually a marketing slogan.
It has nothing to do with science.
Have you ever heard of the expression breakfast is the most important meal of the day?
That's a marketing slogan.
It actually has no basis in science whatsoever.
Also, an interesting way to tell if someone is lying.
And simple inventions that change the world, like the nail.
Did you know nails were once very valuable?
In the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries, Americans were actually burning their houses down if they were going to leave that house and go somewhere else, because they would collect up the nails and then take those nails to the next location.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life today.
Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hey, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know.
Glad to have you here.
Here's a question for you, even if you're not a big time fancy cook.
When you do cook or do anything on the stove, do you turn the exhaust fan over the stove on each time?
Probably not, but you should.
You see, just the act of cooking produces many unwanted air pollutants that can actually be dangerous to your health over time.
Fine particulate matter and gases.
Things like nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde can contaminate the air as a result of cooking.
That's why restaurants are required to purchase large, expensive exhaust systems meant to protect employees from cooking-related air pollutants and accidental cooking fires.
For private homes, private kitchens.
There are no building codes requiring that, which means some people may not even have a kitchen exhaust system.
But if you do, all the science says it is a good idea to get into the habit of using the fan every time you cook and then leave it on for a while after you're done.
That will draw out those pollutants.
And that is something you should know.
Music.
Anytime you go to a party or an event and the topic turns to food and diet and health, someone often says something that makes you stop and wonder.
I've heard people say things like, oh, I don't drink coffee.
You know, it causes cancer.
Or, you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Or, I drink red wine because it's good for your heart.
And I wonder, well, really?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Sometimes there might be a grain of truth to that, or maybe it is true, or maybe it's not true.
So here to bust a few myths and to confirm a few truths is cardiologist Dr. Christopher Labos.
He co-hosts a podcast called The Body of Evidence and he's author of a book called Does Coffee Cause Cancer?
And Eight More Myths About the Food We Eat.
Hi, doctor.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Oh, thank you for having me.
First, let me ask you about salt.
Because we hear salt is bad for you.
We should cut back.
We should be eating less salt.
So why is salt so bad for you?
When we talk about salt, what we're actually talking about is sodium chloride.
And you are right.
It is the sodium that is problematic.
Our kidneys have a very, very specific mechanism, which is they hold on to all the sodium that we eat.
And the more sodium that your kidneys hold on to, the higher your blood pressure gets, the more water you hold on to.
So people who have issues with retaining water, with leg swelling, one of the things we tell them medically is cut salt out of your diet.
Cut sodium out of your diet as much as possible.
And so when you're young and healthy, you might be able to get away with it, because when you're young you know your body can metabolize cardboard.
And, you know, nothing you do is really going to have an effect on you.
But as we start to get older, we also tend to become more and more salt sensitive.
And so particularly older individuals.
The more salt they eat in their diet, the more their blood pressure tends to go up, the more they retain water and the more they start to get into cardiovascular problems as a result of it.
But I always have this sense that just cutting back on the salt that I sprinkle at the table on my food isn't doing a whole lot, because I hear that there's so much salt, so much sodium already in so many foods, in so many processed foods.
So where is the problem?
I mean, if you want to cut back on salt, how do you do it?
The greatest contribution of sodium to our diet, especially here in North America, from restaurants.
So if you're eating out, if somebody else is making your food for you, if you are ordering it from another location, that food is very high in salt, very high in fat and, generally speaking, a lot more unhealthy than the food that you are going to make for yourself at home.
Somebody who eats at home and cooks for themselves is going to invariably be healthier than somebody who goes out and eats at restaurants, because you are going to look out for yourself, whereas the person making you the food just wants the food to taste good.
They're not overly concerned about your long-term health and cardiovascular status.
So red meat, let's talk about that because that's another thing where it seems to go back and forth and there's different diets, high-protein diets that rely on red meat and other diets that are vegetarian.
So when the dust all settles, where are we with that?
This is a fascinating topic because when you really look at various groups that have tried to analyze the data,
You have different groups that can look at the same data and come to different conclusions by emphasizing different aspects of the data and questions of certainty.
If you are somebody who says I want there to be double-blind, randomized controlled trials, where we take one group and give them red meat and we take another group and we give them a meat substitute that looks identical and tastes identical to meat but isn't actually meat, and I want to follow these people for 30 years to see if they're less likely to get cancer in middle age.
Those types of studies don't exist because it's practically impossible to do something like that.
It's very hard to do randomized studies in nutrition research because you can't force people to eat a particular way.
After about a few weeks, people are going to revert back to what their normal diet would otherwise be.
So if you're somebody who goes and says I want there to be randomized control data, there isn't very much of that.
And so if that's your camp, you're going to look at the data and say I am unconvinced by the evidence.
We should still keep eating red meat and make no change.
If you are somebody who's willing to look at what we refer to as observational data, where you compare different people in different countries, some of whom eat a lot of red meat and some of whom who eat less, you see a general association that the groups and the people who eat less red meat are healthier overall, particularly with a decreased risk of colorectal cancer, where the strongest association exists.
So it's a question of, What evidence are you going to use to inform your decision?
How much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate?
And are you willing to change your behavior?
The fundamental risk assessment, if you get into it, is that if you're an average risk individual, if you have no family history of colorectal cancer, your lifetime risk of getting colon cancer is about 5.
And if you're somebody who regularly eats meat, like every day, that risk may go up to about 6%.
So you can look at that number and say, you know, a five to six percent increase.
That isn't enough for me to change my behavior.
Then that's fine.
You're just going to have to absorb and tolerate that increased risk of colorectal cancer.
But if you're somebody who says well, hold on a second, I don't want to be at higher risk for no reason.
I'm going to cut back and I'm going to substitute out some of the red meat and replace it with fish and vegetables and other sources of protein.
You know, that's a pretty good choice, too.
So it becomes almost a value based decision.
You know, I've always wondered why people say red meat, because I mean, mostly that means beef.
You know, chicken is white meat.
Beef is red meat.
But why?
Why the colors?
From the scientific standpoint.
You know, people will say you know pork, it's the other white meat.
Pork is not considered white meat.
Anything that walks on the ground and has four legs is.
You know, a mammal is red meat.
This idea of pork being white meat is actually a marketing slogan.
It has nothing to do with science.
A lot of the things that people say and repeat often, they think they are scientific terms.
They are, in fact, marketing slogans, which just gives you an idea of how much marketing shapes the way we think and talk about food.
Have you ever heard of the expression breakfast is the most important meal of the day?
All the time.
That's a marketing slogan.
It actually has no basis in science whatsoever.
It's just something that the Kellogg's brothers from Kellogg's cereal they started repeating to get people to buy more breakfast cereal.
It worked.
Yeah, it worked.
Bacon.
We today associate bacon as a breakfast food, whereas a century ago it was more of a dinner food.
It was something you ate as a meal, as your meat plate.
Uh, and that was largely a, a marketing campaign.
They wanted to get a marketing company who worked for the industry that sold, for companies that would sell bacon.
They sort of started a marketing campaign to get people to think of bacon as a breakfast food, and and it worked.
Now you can make the argument that they didn't have to work that hard because people like the taste of bacon and they said fine, but so much of of how we think of food has really been shaped by cultural influences rather than by actual scientific fact.
And once you realize that, you sort of realize like, well, there are no rules.
Like I don't have to do these things just because I can change.
And once you accept the principle that you can change, making these changes becomes a lot easier.
It has certainly become pretty well accepted that A little red wine is good for you.
It's not just not bad for you.
It's actually good for you.
It does something positive.
True or not?
No, not true at all.
I mean the French paradox, the idea that red wine is good for your heart.
I mean that is a myth that just will not die, despite the fact that there's been a lot of research against it, especially in recent years.
For people who don't know where this comes from again yes, they had a little bit of a science influence, but the idea of the French paradox really entered the public imagination as a result of Morley Safer doing a story on 60 Minutes where he was talking about this.
And he was talking about research regarding red wine.
And why does France have less heart disease than the UK or the US?
And he said And I think his actual line was maybe the answer lies in this inviting glass of red wine.
And after that story aired on 60 Minutes, red wine sales in the US at least shot up.
And that idea has stayed with us ever since.
The reality is, once you start to actually pick apart what the red wine, what the French paradox is about, you start to see some flaws into it.
First of all, if you were to actually watch the 60 Minutes story now, A lot of the things they say in it are very, very dated.
But this idea of red wine has really, really stuck around.
And it's largely it's explainable using a concept called reverse causation and or the sick quitter effect.
And it basically goes something like this.
Very few people in society, North American society, drink zero alcohol.
Most people drink some.
There are people who drink zero for religious reasons and cultural reasons, obviously.
But if you were to go and look at all the people who drink no alcohol, you would find something very, very interesting.
There is a big difference between people who never drank and people who used to drink and then quit.
And so there's a difference between never drinkers and former drinkers.
And the people who are former drinkers usually quit for a reason, usually because they got sick.
They developed liver problems.
They developed a heart condition.
They had high blood pressure.
And the general recommendation is alcohol increases your blood pressure.
So if you have high blood pressure, cut back on the alcohol.
You will consume less sugar.
You will lose weight.
Your blood pressure will go down.
A lot of good stuff will start to happen to you.
So a lot of the people who, in these studies, were being captured as people who consumed zero alcohol were not never drinkers.
They were former drinkers who quit because they already had heart disease, and it made those people look as if they were at higher risk and that's what created this u-shaped association.
So there are, there are ways to explain away the french paradox, and when you actually do genetic studies and more complicated forms of analyses, you see that no, it is a pretty linear association, which is the more and more you drink, the worse off you're going to be.
We are busting some myths about common foods that we eat, and my guest is cardiologist Dr Christopher Labos.
And the name of his book is Does Coffee Cause Cancer?
And Eight More Myths About the Food We Eat.
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So Christopher, talk about eggs, because it seems that has gone back and forth that eggs are good for you and then they're not good for you, that in fact they're bad for you, and it had to do with the cholesterol.
So clear that up.
Right.
If you go back to the 1980s and 1990s, you had these increasing rates of cardiovascular disease, which was due to a number of factors, but you had increasing rates of cardiovascular disease and there weren't very many good medications to do anything about it.
I'm gonna ask you a question now.
Do you know when we started giving people with heart disease aspirin?
It's 1988, which is pretty recent if you think about it.
I mean, for a lot of human history.
We basically had nothing to treat heart disease, as opposed, you know, apart from you know really hoping the patient got better on their own.
So You know you had these increasing rates of heart disease.
There really weren't very good medications to treat high blood pressure or cholesterol.
I mean, you had some diabetes medications, but nowhere near as good as the stuff we have now.
And so there was really this this searching to be like, well, what can we do?
And a lot of it was.
Well, let's start cutting fat out of our food, because this was very much the era of the, you know, for a gauntlet and steak for breakfast diet.
So it's okay, we got to do something about the fat in our diet and get our cholesterol down.
Long story short.
What we have seen now, 40 years after, the fact is that for most people, a lot of their cholesterol is genetically mediated.
And that if you want to lower someone's cholesterol which you do if you want to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, the best way to do that is with medications that can actually inhibit the enzymes in your liver that are going to manufacture cholesterol internally.
Diet matters a bit.
Maybe it accounts for 10 to 15 percent of your cholesterol, but if you have heart disease, if you had a heart attack or a stroke, undeniably you are less likely to have a second event, if i can get your cholesterol down to near zero levels.
But you can't accomplish that without medication, and so that's where The medical community has really shifted their focus to be.
It's not the cholesterol in your diet so much as it is the cholesterol in your blood.
And so what's the recommendation?
Should you cut back on eggs?
Are they good for you?
Are they bad for you?
Well, here's the thing.
No food is really good for you and no food is really bad for you, right?
If we back up to salt, you know, sodium is not bad for you.
You need sodium.
If you had no sodium, you would die.
Your cells would stop working.
It is a critical element that you need for the normal functioning of the human body.
Our problem always becomes one of excess.
You need sugar.
Without sugar, you go into a coma and your brain dies.
But too much of it and you get diabetes.
And that's the real issue here is that we live in a society of excess.
But I think it's just human nature.
People would like somebody like you to say for the average adult, three eggs a week is about tops, or a dozen eggs, or just to have some sort of guideline rather than well, no food is good for you, no food is bad for you, because that doesn't help.
I get what you're saying.
And it's funny because when I started doing science communication for the public, one of the first radio interviews I ever gave was with a local host here in Montreal.
And during the commercial break, he started joking with me.
He said, you know, you should really write a diet book.
And I said yeah, but you know, the problem with diet books is that People write them and then six months later they're out of date because the research is changing.
He said, that doesn't matter.
You just write a new one the next year.
That's fine.
I'm not going to tell you what to do, because nobody can tell you what to do, because there is no right or wrong answer.
And I think once you learn that, once you see why that's the case, that's actually a little bit freeing because you don't have to worry about you know, is zucchini good for you.
Is tomato bad for you?
Should I eat kale?
Should I eat this?
You can eat whatever you want.
You should just probably eat less of it and do most of the cooking your home.
If I had one piece of advice for people.
Honestly, if you want to be healthier, do most of your cooking at home and you will guaranteed be healthier as a result, because the food that is pre prepared, that is pre processed by somebody else whether it's a company or a kitchen at a restaurant is not going to be as healthy as the food you make for yourself.
Talk a bit about the science of supplements.
You know, people.
I think still take vitamin C for a cold to prevent a cold or treat a cold.
People take multiple vitamins or lots of vitamins because they think it keeps them healthy.
But talk about the science there.
There's very little reason why you should take any vitamin or supplement unless you have a specific deficiency.
So just going out and taking a multivitamin.
I remember when I was young, I used to take a Flintstones chewable vitamin every day.
My parents gave me one.
It did nothing.
And there is so much research on this now.
If you think that vitamin C is going to cure the common cold, it actually won't.
And vitamin D.
Again, this was heralded as the thing that was going to cure both heart disease and cancer and everything else under the sun.
You know, it was going to be the cure for COVID at some point, too.
The problem is, is that when you actually test these things in objective manners, they don't work.
When you take somebody who has heart disease and give them vitamin D versus a placebo, no difference.
If you take people with cancer, give them vitamin D versus a placebo.
No difference.
So a lot of this stuff is largely being driven by initial enthusiasm that has not borne itself out.
So for the people who are out there taking supplements and buying stuff over the counter, you probably don't need it.
I didn't talk about this in the book, but Omega three is something I see a lot of my clinical practice.
People coming to me and being like, I'm eating, I'm buying these omega three supplements.
You're like, really?
That does nothing.
Even if you have heart disease, there's no reason for it.
And in this day and age when money is tight because everybody's feeling the pinch of inflation.
Not having to spend 20 to 30 per month on supplements that don't work makes a huge difference, and that is the harm of these things.
You'll get people who say, well, what's the harm?
There's no downside.
I'm like, well, there is a downside.
They cost money, and I don't have money to burn.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather not waste my money on stuff that doesn't actually work.
Well, the reason.
I imagine that your parents gave you a Flintstone vitamin and I had a one-a-day vitamin when I was a kid.
You hear the word insurance.
It's insurance in case you're not eating those vitamins in your food.
This will make sure you get what you're supposed to get.
And even if you are eating those nutrients in your food, no harm done.
Well, here's the thing.
No child in North America is going to get rickets unless they are truly malnourished.
But then...
The solution to malnourishment does not give children vitamin.
It's give them proper food so that they are well fed on a daily basis.
You will not gain anything once you are no longer deficient in vitamin C, vitamin D.
If you are truly vitamin C deficient, you are going to get scurvy.
And unless you're an 18th century British sailor, you're not going to get scurvy.
Um, you know if, if you are deficient in certain B vitamins, you'll get things like Berry, Berry and Pelagra.
And if you don't know what those diseases are, it's because you've never seen a case, because they just don't exist anymore.
So this idea of, oh, if a little bit is good, more must be better.
Doesn't actually hold true, because once your body has all the vitamins that it needs, it just excretes the rest of them in your urine.
And so the old joke is when you're buying vitamins, what you're doing is you're buying expensive urine.
That is largely true.
Well, I think there's a real desire.
I think people really want to know the truth about nutrition and diet and food and all that, because I mean it affects us all.
It affects us in very important ways.
And yet there are a lot of myths and things that get passed around, a lot of it just because that's what people grew up believing.
So I think it's really important to hear the truth.
I've been speaking with cardiologist Dr. Christopher Labos.
He is the co-host of the podcast The Body of Evidence.
And he's the author of a book called Does Coffee Cause Cancer?
And Eight More Myths About the Food We Eat.
And there's a link to the podcast and to the book in the show notes.
I appreciate you coming on.
Thanks, doctor.
You take care.
Thank you, sir.
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Have you ever stopped and wondered?
I ask this because I've done this.
Have you ever stopped and wondered how different our lives and our world would be if simple things that we take for granted the common nail, string the wheel?
Those things, as simple as they are, have changed the course of the world?
Well, someone with a similar curiosity has taken a look at several of these seemingly small inventions to see where they came from and just how much they did change the world.
Roma Agrawal is a structural engineer who has designed bridges and skyscrapers and all kinds of things.
She's the author of a book called Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way.
Hey Roma, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me, Mike.
So if we can, let's start with the nail because, you know, what could be simpler than a nail?
We don't look at one with any great sense of wonder, but imagine life without nails.
If I open up the drawer just next to me on my desk, there are lots of nails just kind of rolling around at the bottom and I might pick one out and I might whack it and it bends and I don't really care.
But once upon a time, nails were extraordinarily precious pieces of engineering.
And the story of the nail really begins with the story of metal.
So it was really when our ancestors started mining and working metal to create intricate objects that they started to think hang on a second, we can actually fashion this metal into something that has a sharp point, and maybe that can help us join stuff together.
Now, the problem was that the early metals that we worked with, which were gold and silver, are a bit too soft.
And so it was only really when bronze and copper became a thing that people said oh OK, now we can create this hard enough thing that would allow us to put different objects together.
And we think I mean we have evidence that the ancient Egyptians were using nails and even rivets, which is a cousin of the nail, about between 4000 and 6000 years ago.
So that's some of the very earliest archaeological evidence that we have of the nail itself.
Is the nail today pretty much been the nail for a long, long time?
Have there been like big, huge improvements to it or a nail's a nail?
A nail's a nail.
And I love this question because there's mostly, yes, it's the same.
And then there are a few little subtle differences perhaps that may come in.
But the function of a nail is to have a sharp point that allows you to whack it into a different material, usually wood.
And then it uses friction, the friction force between its own body and then the body of say, the wood that it's been whacked into.
And that friction basically ties and binds the two things together.
And in that principle, the nail has not changed in thousands of years.
The ways it has changed is the way we make it, the materials we use and, of course, the economic implications of buying a nail.
And the idea that once upon a time, say in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries, that Americans were actually burning their houses down if they were going to leave that house and go somewhere else, because they would collect up the nails that held their old house together and then take those nails to the next location to build it up.
And the reason was that Britain was producing nails, was a colonizer of America at the time and they said we're not sending these precious commodities across the pond to the Americans.
And so Americans kind of had to make do with the nails that already existed.
But it would seem that they wouldn't be that hard to make even back then.
Like you say, a nail's a nail.
I mean, it's just a little piece of metal, and you may not make them fast, but you could make them.
The trick here is with the materials that were used.
Good quality iron, good quality steel were difficult to come by.
And then you had to put in a lot of hard labor to actually create the nail.
And so there are all these stories of how nails have been created pre-industrialization.
There's the story of the women and the children in the middle of England in the 16th 17th, 19th centuries again, where women used to gain these skills to make nails, and then men would aspire to marry a nailing wench, as they call them, because that meant that they would get a little bit of income on the side.
There's also the story of thomas jefferson, of course, founding father of the us, and his plantation in monticello had become fallow and wasn't producing much crops and much income for his family.
So he actually had 400 enslaved men and boys manufacturing between 8000 and 10000 nails a day in this foundry that he created just seven years before he became president.
So there's such interesting history.
So let's talk about string, because I'm actually surprised that that's on your list of seven things, seven inventions that changed the world, because I don't think of string as all that important.
I'm surprised it's on the list too.
You know when I was breaking down all of these objects in my head thinking you know what are the core little elements that allow us to create complex things.
Um, string was not one that I was expecting to land on, but we figured this out.
Our ancestors figured this out a long time ago.
They used vines, they used natural fibers and so on.
It wasn't even humans that invented. the first kind of manufactured string.
It was actually the Neanderthals.
And we found evidence of this in a cave in France only two or three years ago.
Like, while I was writing about string, there was like oh, here's a new discovery which was fantastic.
So it's, you know, potentially 40 to 50,000 year old technology.
And the beauty of the string that the Neanderthals invented was that they took these natural fibers from a coniferous bark.
They twisted them together.
And then they took three of these strands and then twisted them together again.
Now I took up knitting and crochet, and the yarn that I use basically has the same construction as this 40 to 50000 year old string.
And that kind of blew my mind.
It seems as if a lot of string today that you, you know, buy at the hardware store is not made from anything in nature.
And same with rope that we've, move beyond natural material to make stronger or better string.
So nylon being the first one that was invented in about the 1930s.
And then there's also the incredible technology that's known as Kevlar, which was invented by Stephanie Kwolek.
And she was a chemist working in the United States.
She was a Polish immigrant, and she almost made this fiber by mistake.
She was trying to create a fiber that could strengthen the tires of racing cars, but that was much lighter than the steel wires or the metal wires that they were using so far, and she came up with this.
You know, artificial fiber it's, it's a string of polymers, you know, like plastic, and this stuff is so strong that it's used in bulletproof vests.
And Again, the idea that string which, again it just it seems really fragile and delicate but it can stop a bullet in its tracks.
Um, and I think that's a really incredible piece of engineering.
You talk about the importance of the lens and.
I mean, everybody interfaces with lenses.
We wear glasses, there's lenses in microscopes and telescopes.
I mean, there's lenses everywhere.
A lens being a curved piece of glass or any other transparent materials or something that lets light through and that bends it or manipulates it in some way.
So the ability to manipulate light allowed us to see things that we could never have seen before.
It allowed us to discover bacteria and algae and microscopic stuff.
And it also allowed us to discover the solar system and galaxies and the Milky Way and extraordinarily large things.
And I think one of my favorite stories in the research I did was of a physicist called Ibn al-Haytham who was practicing science in about 1000 AD.
And 700 years before Newton did any of his seminal work, Ibn al-Haytham had written a book on optics and he was the first person to understand how light really worked, how sight worked, the fact that our eye probably has a lens inside it.
And he recorded all this incredible work, yeah, 700 years before Newton did.
So the wheel, I guess you have to.
I mean, the wheel has to be in your list, because imagine life without the wheel.
And I was surprised to read that, according to your expert engineer's opinion, Fred Flintstone's car wheel would never work, because I always thought that was such a great wheel.
I mean, it looks like a great wheel and it's taken me many, many years of deep study and engineering qualifications to ascertain that it wouldn't work.
My favorite fact about the wheel is that it wasn't invented for transport.
Couple that with the phrase, we shouldn't reinvent the wheel or don't reinvent the wheel.
I say to people that that phrase really upsets me, because if we hadn't been reinventing the wheel throughout our history, We wouldn't have any vehicles that could run on a wheel and axle, because in fact it was invented for pottery in ancient Mesopotamia.
I really kind of pushed this idea that we should be reinventing the wheel.
I talk about the potter's wheel going to a solid cartwheel, going to a much lighter spoked wheel.
From the spoked wheel, we go to the wire wheel, which is familiar to us on our bicycles.
And then you can even take that a little bit further and think about all the gears that are at the heart of our machines, and even to gyroscopes, which are basically spinning wheels that have momentum and you can do really cool things with, such as navigate the International Space Station.
So when you say that the wheel was not invented for transport, how were things transported pre-wheel?
Was it just Was there any other device, or was it just, let's all lift and carry it over there?
So there was a lot of lifting and unfortunately our animal friends had to do a lot of that lifting.
So we had pack animals and so on.
What the wheel allowed us to do was to navigate a whole range of terrain.
And by creating carts and wagons, we could then harness animals onto that.
And it was, I guess, easier for them to pull the loads that way.
So it changed the way society was set up.
So, whereas you would need dozens of people, if not more, to create enough agriculture and crops to sustain a settlement of people, then once the wheel came along, then a family could do it by themselves with an animal and a plow.
And so it really did change the way people lived.
It seems that when people think of the wheel, they think of the transport wheel the, you know, on a car or a vehicle.
But wheels are used in so many things, not to move stuff but to well, I guess it is to move stuff, but you know what I mean.
Like in devices and appliances and things like that.
Yes.
And one of my favorite stories is about an American woman inventor called Josephine Cochran.
And she grew up in 19th century us, at a time when women were of course not allowed to really get degrees, particularly not in engineering, but she came from a family of engineers.
She got irritated that her precious vintage crockery set used to get chipped after she'd hosted people.
Um, like she did as a, as a good housewife.
And then her husband dies, leaving her in debt.
So put all of these things together and she went, I'm gonna invent a dishwasher that actually works.
Because a number of men had tried and not really succeeded.
She put together a patent prototypes, displayed it at an exhibition and created the first automatic dishwasher.
And so explain how she used wheels, the technology of wheels to make that dishwasher work.
She created a wire cage in which she put all her crockery and her plates and her cups and everything.
And then it was in a big drum and she used um, you know, these gear, mechanisms and levers to spin this drum around, while it was being pelted with soap and hot water and so on.
And so you needed that spinning action in order to create this effective machine.
So yeah, that's, that's where the wheel comes in.
Talk about the magnet because that's different from some of the other ones, because we didn't invent the magnet, that magnetism just exists.
But I think people find magnetism very mysterious.
So magnets was a funny one because we didn't really completely invent the magnet.
We found them, we discovered them in nature, but the magnets that we see in nature are weak.
They're quite variable.
They're difficult to find.
And so they're not very effective as a piece of engineering.
And humans did a huge amount of work to create two different types of magnets.
One is the permanent magnet, the sort that we put in our fridge, you know, to hold up our grocery lists.
And the other one are the electromagnets, which really are the core, the heart behind all of our communication technology.
So the fact that we can be, you know, thousands of miles apart and have this conversation is thanks to electromagnetism.
So I talk about how electromagnetic technology that underpins our communication systems changed during three generations of my family.
So you know, starting off with the telegram which was used by my grandfather and my uncle to exchange messages,
What the telegram does is it use magnets and electricity to convert letters or symbols into other letters or symbols that can be picked up miles away.
The telephone which my aunt, who emigrated to the US with her husband in the 1970s, used to communicate with her family back in India.
And that uses a magnet and electricity again, but this time it converts electromagnetic forces into vibrations that we can hear.
I talk about the television that uses magnetism to shoot electron beams across a screen and create moving pictures, and internet technology as well, where everything to do with our internet ports, the way radio waves are sent to satellites that allow us to use GPS, is all underpinned by magnetism.
I think that magnetism is a little bit magical.
As you say, I don't think any physicist really understands how it works.
And so would all of those things be impossible without magnets, or would there be another way to do it?
I think that instant and quick, long-range communication would be impossible without the magnet.
So even the microphone that I'm speaking with you today, the speakers that you're listening to me on, there's magnets underpinning all of that technology.
Let me ask you to talk a little bit about the spring, because I mean, everybody knows what a spring is.
You know it's in a.
You've included it in your list of seven great small inventions.
So why this spring?
So spring was actually one of the trickiest ones for me to define, like what is a spring?
And I'm sure that if you asked a different engineer, they'd probably come up with a slightly different explanation.
But my take on it is that you have some kind of material that you can deform, which allows it to store some energy.
And then when you release it, so it kind of undeforms itself, it releases that energy, and then we can do something useful with it.
So the first picture that might come to mind are those, you know, the coiled metal springs.
And those actually were only invented relatively recently in human history.
Before that came the bow and arrow.
And the bow is in fact a spring.
The reason it's a spring is because you've got say, a piece of wood.
It's curved.
You pull a string, you're deforming it, you're changing the shape of it, which puts some energy into the arrow that you're holding in the string.
And then, when you release that arrow, the energy from this deformed bow goes into the arrow and allows you to create a projectile that would go much further than if you tried to throw that arrow by hand.
So that's an example of deforming something, creating energy and then using that energy to do something useful with.
And the spring can be used in everything from mechanical watches to weapons and even in earthquake isolation in buildings and to create the best concert halls in the world.
There are hidden springs that allow us to do all of that.
Well, how do springs help a concert hall?
So the idea in the concert hall is you want to create silence?
Okay, you're sitting in a city, in a building, and there are cars and trucks rumbling outside.
There might be a train line or ships, people shouting, um, making noise.
There's horns beeping.
You know you can imagine that kind of soundscape and you're sitting inside a building and you don't want any of that sound to come in.
So what you do is you create a room within the room.
So it's called a box in a box.
And between these two boxes is an air gap where there are springs.
So you're, you're essentially suspended within this inner box.
And when these sounds are trying to make their way to you, the springs vibrate.
They absorb that energy and they don't allow it to come inside your concert hall.
So it stops that sound from coming in.
That's pretty clever.
The kind of extreme application of this, we've seen some really devastating earthquakes this year.
And there are ways in which you can put enormous springs under the columns, the vertical elements of a building that carry all this weight.
You put springs under them at ground level.
And so if the earth is actually shaking underneath that building, the spring can do some work to absorb those vibrations and dissipate some of that destructive energy before it finds its way up into the building.
And so it can be an effective way to limit destruction, even in some of the most devastating earthquakes.
Well, this has been really fun and interesting.
And I love the story about how people burn their houses down in order to collect the nails.
I'd never heard that before.
I think that's one of my favorite stories.
And what I don't think I mentioned when we talked about it is that the state of Virginia actually had to pass a law that banned people from burning their houses down.
That's incredible.
I've been speaking with Roma Agrawal.
She's a structural engineer and author of the book Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way.
And you will find a link to that book in the show notes.
Appreciate your time.
Thanks for coming on.
No, thank you, Mike.
Music.
The next time you hear a story that's hard to believe, pay attention to the order in which the story is told.
According to Pamela Meyer, she's a certified fraud examiner.
Liars tend to tell their story in chronological order and build up to a big finish.
When we tell a true story for the first time, we tend to blurt out details that had the biggest impact on us randomly, not necessarily in the order that they happened.
Another giveaway to a phony or exaggerated story is the end.
Truth-tellers tend to include an epilogue describing how they feel or how they were affected.
That's difficult for a liar to do, considering they didn't actually experience those emotions, since it never really happened.
And that is something you should know.
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You know people who would like this podcast.
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So please share this podcast, ask people to listen, and help us grow our audience.
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Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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