Something You Should Know
The Truth About Popular Food Myths & Modest Inventions That Became Life Changing - SYSK Choice
08 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: Why is it important to use your kitchen exhaust fan?
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 gonna 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.
Chapter 2: What food myths does Dr. Christopher Labos debunk?
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.
If Bravo drama, pop culture chaos, and honest takes are your love language, you'll want All About Terry H podcast in your feed. Hosted by Roxanne and Chantel, this show breaks down Real Housewives reality TV and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about.
Roxanne's been spilling Bravo tea since 2010. And yes, we've interviewed Housewives royalty like Countess Luann and Teresa Giudice. Smart recaps, insider energy, and zero fluff. Listen to All About TRH Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes weekly.
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. 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.
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Chapter 3: How has the perception of salt changed over time?
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 going to 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 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 generation.
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 the 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.
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Chapter 4: What is the truth about red meat and health?
Because in fact, it was invented for pottery in ancient Mesopotamia. I really kind of push 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 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, you know, 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, you know, it really did change the way people lived. It seems that when people think of the wheel, they think of the transport wheel, 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 like she did 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 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 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. Magnetism just exists.
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