Chapter 1: What are the common nutrition myths being debunked?
Gary, you got another good one lined up. We do. On our nutrition, not only the good, the bad, but also the ugly.
I guarantee by the time we finish this, you're going to be hungry.
Are you going to start eating kale after this? You put hot fudge on it, I will. A little whipped cream. A lot of whipped cream. Coming right up, StarTalk Nutrition Edition. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.
And when you hear special edition, you know who's to my right. Hello. Hello, Gary O'Reilly. Hey, Neil. And I got with us Paul Mercurio.
What's up? Good to see you again.
Fresh off the Daily Show. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Been to the Late Show and all that good stuff. Daily Show and the Late Show. Yeah. Late Show counting down the minutes. Yeah, yeah, we're counting down. Okay, counting down.
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Chapter 2: How do viral food trends complicate nutrition choices?
Yeah. So what have you cooked up today?
Okay, that's on the food scene. That's your fault. All right, so America has long been struggling with its health and especially nutrition. But now it feels like it's even harder to navigate with viral food trends, a Zen pick. It's never felt more complicated to make healthy choices.
We're going to discuss, yes, we are, popular health myths and how to deal with those in power and how they are pushing misinformation. So, Neil, if you would introduce our guest.
Ooh, okay. So, you know what you need for that? You need a nutritionist.
What a good idea.
And over here, we value PhDs. We do. We got a PhD nutritionist.
Even better.
What do you think of that? We've got with us Jessica Nurick. Jessica, welcome to Star Talk.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of seed oils in our diet?
And there's so many people in that situation. Of course, not only domestically, but surely around the world. It can't just be American folks who want to be healthy. So we're here to pick your brain. and find out what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong.
So Gary led off by saying, you know, America, we're kind of in a nutrition doldrums, but that baits the question, was there ever a time when we were healthier? I mean, I look at old ads for food and I look at things people were eating in movies and TV shows. None of that looks good. I think we have made some progress, haven't we?
I mean, I guess it depends on what we mean by healthier, right? Because if we're talking about life expectancy, we're certainly doing as good as we've ever done. If you're talking about infectious diseases, we're doing as good as we've ever done without the last year, maybe.
You're talking about the effort to combat infectious diseases based on knowledge we've gleaned in recent years.
Yes, thank you. Not getting infectious diseases. Right, combating infectious diseases. But if you look at lifestyle-related chronic disease, we're certainly in a place where the vast majority of Americans have at least one chronic health condition, something like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cardiometabolic disease. And a lot of that, again, is related to lifestyle.
So things like your diet, your physical activity, your stress levels, your sleep levels. And so that's where we are kind of missing the mark in this country, and we could be doing better.
Use the term cardiometabolic. What would that be?
Those are things like cardiovascular disease, so people having heart attacks, type 2 diabetes.
Right, so we heard that, but then you used cardiometabolic. What does that mean?
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Chapter 4: Are people really getting enough protein in their diet?
Things that have to do with your heart and your metabolism.
Thank you for dumbing it down for me.
So when you talk about we're in a better place, when you look at the numbers, our population is that much larger than it was 50 years ago. Do the statistics, the percentages stack up equivalently or have we moved in a better direction?
Yeah, it's relative. So the percentages are higher now. So people who have type 2 diabetes, significantly higher. People who have cardiovascular disease. But, you know, as I mentioned, we're living a lot longer now. And so part of chronic disease is it takes quite a few decades to see chronic disease on average. And so the longer someone lives, the more likely they are to get a chronic disease.
What seems strange to me is that the advances in medical science and researchers have been in the last... 50, 100 years, incredible, and yet our lifestyle outpaces that, right? Like, yet still we have type two diabetes in these issues. It seems a little counterintuitive to me.
I would think that given how sophisticated we are scientifically, especially when it comes to nutrition, that we would sort of be able to sort of stem that tide a little bit.
Well, I mean, we have great medical advancements and medical technology that help people live longer with those conditions.
Yeah, I want to eat bad and just have medicine save me. That checks out, right?
Okay, so there we are. What you've landed on is the quick fix solution, which is our GLP-1. So all I do, I pay, I find some money, I get my once whatever it is. Take a shot. Take a shot, take the tablet. When was the last time the quick fix was the solution? Or are we just kicking this can down the road?
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Chapter 5: How do lifestyle factors contribute to chronic diseases?
And that's where we would look at preventing these chronic diseases or at least mitigating them so that you – wait 10 more years until you get some sort of chronic health condition.
So these sort of weight loss drugs that I guess came to us from diabetes treatment, very fascinating secondary utility of those medicines, we have some benefit of track record for their use in the diabetic community, but now it's widespread for people just simply want to lose weight. But they haven't been around for 20 years,
How can we know the long-term effects of a miracle drug over a period longer than the time the drug has been around?
Yeah, I mean, in humans, we don't have great long-term data, obviously, because it hasn't been out. So you have to look at animal models that kind of can accelerate long-term trials.
Oh, because mice don't live that long, so you get multiple generations out of them in C. Exactly. Okay, so what have we found? Do they grow three heads?
No.
They have a crazy lifestyle. They party a lot, a lot of drugs. What happens to the GLP mice? A lot of smokers. Smoking mice. It's very stressful to be a mouse. What happens to them over the long-term effects on humans? I guess we have to infer that, like you said, from these other animals. What have we learned?
In order for a drug to come to market, it has to pass many different stages of clinical trial. It's very difficult. Over 90% of drugs fail in clinical trials. And so in order for it to come to market, we know that it has proven its safety, right? It's shown its safety in these trials.
Within some acceptable limits.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of ultra-processed foods?
And also today we're testing on— all kinds of people. I mean, there was a day they only tested on men or on white men or black men, whatever. But now, can we feel better that the testing regimens better represent people of all types?
Yeah, just in general. Yeah, I think we're getting there. I think you're right. For a long time, testing was just done in men on many things, and they just assumed that women were small men.
Wait, they're not? Exactly. Come on. Why do people keep me up on this stuff? I do have a question about nutrition in the context of these drugs. So is it quantity versus quality? In other words, you're losing weight. But does it address diet quality in the context of those drugs? Are people getting the right amounts of protein and fiber, et cetera, and nutrients?
Or does that fall off the charts or not address in the context of using these drugs?
Yeah, I mean, what the drug really does is it helps people to eat less, right? Because it kind of suppresses appetite a bit for people. And so there's nothing inherent in that that says you have to choose high quality foods now when you choose what foods to eat. But there is some understanding.
I think when I have just, and this is just anecdotal, when I've talked to people on these drugs, it gets them into the mindset of eating more healthfully. And so that's what they do. They'll opt for more health.
That was my next question is, or do we not have enough evidence yet? Does it rewire the brain? If I get off that drug, am I rewired going forward? Because it seems to me, okay, it doesn't make me want to eat more, but it's not sort of affecting the quality of what I'm eating.
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Chapter 7: How do dietary guidelines impact public health?
So it isn't addressing the elephant in the room, which is the quality of our diet. And so isn't this sort of a panacea in some way or a false hope that like, I'll take this, I'll be fine, I'll get off it and I'll continue to be fine, but that's not the case?
Well, I would argue that probably the most important thing, if I had to choose the most important thing, is the amount of food that someone eats. And so I think that it is addressing- Eat your pie hole, shut your pie hole.
Well, what does she know? What are you, a nutritionist? Oh, wait, okay, sorry. I guess you're right.
Yeah, it is addressing that aspect of it, which I think is probably one of the more important aspects. And so if someone can be on it, and then they kind of get a sense of what that feels like to be eating that amount of food. And also trying to, obviously, we always want people to improve their diet quality, but it is addressing kind of one of the more important things.
I tweeted some years ago, I said, if a diet book were written by a physicist, it would be one sentence long. Consume food at a lower calorie rate than you burn it. That's it. That's it. That's it. And then everyone responds, no, it's more complicated than that. No, it's not. Yeah, exactly. If that happens, you will lose weight. It's a basic math equation.
And so now we have a drug that fulfills the one sentence physicist diet book.
But is it the too good to be true? So let's get back to that.
So I remember when I was in seventh grade, I wrote a paper on Ponce de Leon. All right. And he was an explorer, I think it was Spanish, who came to the New World looking for the fountain of youth. Yep. And I remember thinking, I'm 12 years old, and I say, was he an idiot? You think you just drink from some gush of water from the ground and then you live forever?
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of understanding scientific consensus?
He's got to be an idiot. What's going on here? And then I got older, and I realized people are always looking for the quick fix. And it's something endemic within us. And now I'm blaming him less for this urge. Now that I see it prevalent in our society and advertisement, this is the miracle, kale, this is the miracle, the miracle drug. There's a pill to grow more hair, literally.
Yeah, so are we just so lazy, we will not accept the possibility that to be healthy requires a little more work than one magic solution. So could you just address people's urges to have instant fixes?
Yeah, I think that it really speaks to this idea that we see the wellness industry flourishing right now and supplements, right? Because people are just, they want something that is flashy, exciting, but also kind of easy to do, right? Taking a supplement, taking a medication is pretty easy. I think it's one of the more difficult things.
When I got into this field, I started really trying to understand what can we do to reduce risk of chronic disease. That was really my goal when I first started graduate school. And what I realized really quickly was we have actually a lot of great data on how to prevent and reduce risk of chronic disease. What we don't have is people actually adopting those behaviors.
And so I think one of the things has to do with it's difficult to get people to adopt. You know, it's a difficult thing to do and to adopt healthful eating and to get eight hours of sleep a night and all of the things that we would say reduce risk of disease.
But also more than that, you kind of have to look at the systems in our country because we have to look at our systems set up for more people to succeed or for more people to fail. And a lot of times people are kind of swimming upstream trying to make these healthful decisions. And so I think that plays into it too.
So it's a human- So it's forces operating against their desires.
Yes, exactly.
Right?
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