Luba Vukonsky
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Luba Vukonsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Birds do not have such large intestines as mammals. They don't store as many microbes.
And then he says, maybe there's a solution because, you know, in Bulgaria, people live that long.
He connected all these dots together. We age because in the intestines there is rotting. And lactic acid that is produced in sour milk can stop this rotting by killing the bacteria that cause the rotting. And there you have proof. All over the world, you know, newspapers started running stories.
And there was no turning back.
I mean, this started a real mania, yogurt mania.
I think it's rare to trace the beginning of an industry to a single event. But in this case, I can pretty much say that the yogurt industry started with that lecture.
There were ads, this cafe on one of the Parisian boulevards advertised Bulgarian curdled milk. The yogurt craze kind of, you know, grew and grew. I saw pictures of Danone, which I think in the States is called Danone.
They sold cups of yogurt and it said, recommended by Professor Metchnikoff and the medical profession. It was totally got out of hand, completely. There was all this hype and all this hoopla about it that he had no control over.
He tried sort of to present the facts and to separate it from the hype, but it was just way too late. The good thing about yogurt was that it was harmless, you know, because so many cures for aging were, you know, terrible and dangerous and lethal. And yogurt was cheap and it was safe. and easily available, so it was irresistible.
So he was looking to sort of to solve the riddle of aging on all levels. He was looking for partners in this quest.
He admired so much Tolstoy's writing about the fear of death, which are really masterful.
So he thought that Tolstoy must know some secret that I don't.
The reporter called it a meeting of two monarchs of universal literature and science.
So the only thing on which they agreed was yogurt, because Tolstoy turned out to love yogurt. But other than that, it was pretty much a disaster, the meeting. Mitrikov very candidly, very honestly wrote about this himself afterwards.
Meshikov was much more spiritual than Tolstoy gave him credit for. He did try, I think, understand human psychology. And I think he thought that somehow together with Tolstoy, he could get closer to cracking this riddle of, you know, what really happens in the human psyche, in the human mind, how, you know, we feel like that, how we feel when we age, why, you know, this fear of death.
And of course, it just, you know, totally crashed. You know, the meeting didn't work at all.
At the turn of the 20th century, this was a very dominant dichotomy between pessimism and optimism. Sort of your belief, you know, about the world, you know, is the world getting better?
In some of the Russian newspapers, he was bragging about how good he felt about He was saying that this is working. Look, you know, I'm eating yogurt three times a day. I believe, you know, it's doing me a lot of good. And look how vigorous I am.
What really killed him was World War I. He was such a believer in rational thought and science. He thought that there will be no more wars, that the world had learned from that. And he was devastated when war broke out and all signs stopped at the Pasteur Institute.
His wife describes it like how overnight he turned into an old man.
Showing 41–60 of 63 · page 3 of 4
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