Dr. Joe Schwarcz
Appearances
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What is a superfood? an expression that i dislike even though i used it in the title of the book and i don't like it because no food really merits being labeled as an angel or a devil you know as a superfood because it suggests that it has some sort of health quality and usually there's a lot of hype in in there now Obviously, food is very, very important in terms of health.
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There's no question about that. We are constructed of the food that we eat, right? I mean, food is the only raw material that ever goes into our body. So we are indeed made of the food that we eat. And, you know, Hippocrates supposedly 2,000 years ago said, let thy food be thy medicine. Although, frankly, I've never found any concrete evidence that he ever said that, but he could have.
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It's much reported in the literature. So diet is certainly important. And go back to the Ebers Papyrus that was written 1500 BC, suggested already that half an onion and a froth of beer is a delightful remedy against death. Well, that's an overstatement. But of course, since that time, we've had many, many allegations of, you know, there being foods that were deemed to be especially healthy.
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Sylvester Graham gave us the Graham cracker, you know, high fiber food. Kellogg regaled us with stories about the health benefits of yogurt. Today, of course, there's a whole collage of foods that are labeled in the popular press as superfoods, ranging from olive oil to blueberries. What I point out,
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is that while certainly there are diets that are healthy and diets that are unhealthy, it is a mistake to label any single food as that.
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And that's why, you know, whenever students or members of the public ask me to kind of have a look at their diet and evaluate it, I say the only way we can do that is if they keep a diary in which they write down everything that they eat, including amounts that they eat for several weeks, then we can have a look.
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Because, you know, it's possible to eat blueberries every day, which actually I do try to do. It's possible to do that and still have a terrible diet. And it's possible to never eat blueberries and still have a good diet. So it's the overall components of the diet that will determine whether it is healthy or less than healthy. And that's why I don't like the idea of superfoods.
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So I use it in the title so, you know, I can discuss all of these nuances.
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Right. Well, we will run out of fossil fuels. That's a given because the earth is of a finite size and, you know, we only have so much in terms of raw materials. I don't think we have to worry about running out of fossil fuels within our lifetime, but eventually it is going to happen. So there is a search for alternatives. Bio, of course, comes from the Greek word meaning life.
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So we're looking for substances that are replaceable, usually because they are isolated from crops that can be grown. We cannot manufacture any petroleum, right? I mean, that's a given amount that we have in the earth. which is really the end result of the degradation of vegetable matter and animal matter over millennia.
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So we're not going to replenish petroleum, but we can grow crops from which we can isolate useful components. So we can grow corn, we can grow canola from where we can extract oils, and those oils can be used as fuel. Those would then be termed as bio-based. That is certainly a legitimate endeavor. For example, we are already doing that to some extent.
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As you may know, gasoline can have up to 10% ethanol content. And that ethanol can come from corn because the glucose in corn can be fermented to produce alcohol. So that would be biofuel. And then, of course, we also talk about biodegradable substances. And that is also a very important concept in terms of environmentalism.
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because we don't want substances building up in the environment that will stay there forever. We would like them to decompose into innocuous substances. So there's a lot of work on that as well, especially when it comes to plastics. Plastics have been demonized recently. And there's, of course, some legitimacy to that.
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We don't like to see plastic bags fluttering in the breeze or hanging in trees. We don't want to hear about this giant plastic garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We don't want to hear about nanoplastics, which are the end product of the badgering by sunlight and waves of plastics that get into the ocean and which eventually end up in our body, right?
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We don't want micro nanoplastics ending up in our body. So the question is to produce substances that are biodegradable, meaning that they will break down. And we can do that with certain plastics. Polylactic acid, for example, is made from corn, and it is biodegradable. However, there's a but. There always is a but in science. We tend to give with one arm and take away with the other.
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So it would be great to have the one-armed scientist who only gives us good things. The fact is that these biodegradable plastics are biodegradable under ideal conditions, which usually means some sort of industrial, commercial composting facility.
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And I can tell you that I've done an experiment where I have one of these plastic cups, the polylactic acid cups that are biodegradable, and I've left it out in my backyard and now for two years. And I can tell you that it has not degraded at all. It looks the same as it looked then.
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But if it were present in a compost pile that is constantly being turned all the time and where the microbes are monitored, where the temperature is monitored, then it would degrade.
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What is that smell? If you've ever opened an old book, I mean, we're talking at least decades old, probably a book that has not been stored very well, that has been exposed to mold or fungi, mostly humidity, you can develop a variety of smells. And that originates from the breakdown of the cellulose, which of course is the fundamental building block of paper. and also from the infusion of fungi.
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Fungi are everywhere. They're present in the air. They're microscopic, so you don't see them. But when they get into a book and especially aided and abetted by moisture, they will start to use the cellophane or the cellulose that is the essential part of paper as food. And when they digest that, they crank out some pretty smelly compounds.
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Duct tape is fascinating, of course, in many ways. First of all, the name. It actually comes from a Dutch word, and it has nothing to do with ducks. It has nothing to do with D-U-C-K. And it turns out that... During the Second World War, ammunition boxes were sealed with a type of paper tape, but that paper tape would tear very easily.
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So when soldiers in the heat of the battle had to open these ammunition boxes, the tape would tear and they wouldn't be able to open the box. And that precipitated a search to find a tape that would be hardy, but that would easily be removed without tearing. And that's what gave birth to what we now call the duct tape.
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Now, one interesting connection there is that that tape originally was made with a backing of a rubber adhesive and some polyethylene that made it waterproof. And in between those was a sandwich, the type of fabric that was referred to as cotton duck. That was the name of a type of fabric. So that also is one of the reasons that people have used the word duck tape, D-U-C-K.
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And there are all kinds of uses, you know, as you can imagine for duct tape. It saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts where a catastrophe was averted because the astronauts were able to rig up a contraption to remove carbon dioxide from the air that they exhale. And they used duct tape in order to do that.
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You know, it's been said that WD-40 is what you need to make things go, and duct tape is what you need to make things stop. We hear a lot today about PFAS.
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PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl substances. which are really a family of compounds that have some very interesting properties that are commercially useful because they make substances water-resistant and oil-resistant. So PFAS would be used, for example, in the making of rain gear. It is used in firefighting foams because it can very effectively blanket a fire and seal out oxygen.
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It is used in the manufacture of Teflon. It has a myriad of uses. Your pizza box in which your pizza is delivered. You don't want that box to be greasy or wet. So it is treated with these chemicals. Now, the problem is that whatever makes these so useful also creates a problem.
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The carbon-fluorine bond is a very, very strong bond, and it is responsible for all the beneficial properties of these compounds, but it also means that they are very difficult to break down. So these are not biodegradable. These substances build up in the environment. Now, of course, then the question comes up, so what?
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Well, once we find that they build up in the environment, we start looking for them everywhere, including in our urine and including in our blood. And it turns out that they are there. It is, however, always important to point out that the presence of a chemical cannot be equated to the presence of risk. That's a different question.
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So just because they're present in our urine and our blood doesn't mean that they're creating some sort of havoc in our body, but it does mean that it requires further exploration. And that further exploration has been done. And it turns out that there are links to elevated blood pressure,
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to greater risk of kidney disease, to greater risk of diabetes when there is an excessive amount of these chemicals in the bloodstream, which unfortunately can happen because they are so widely used in so many commercial items. However, the real problem is that they get into the environment not from the products that we tend to use on a daily basis, but from their manufacture.
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So it's not the pizza box from which we eat the pizza that has transferred some trace amount of PFAS into the pizza that gets it into our body. That's not the major problem. The major problem that these chemicals are manufactured on a gigantic scale around the globe because they are so much in demand.
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And when you're manufacturing things on such a large scale, it's impossible to prevent their entry into the environment. So they get into the water, they get into the air, they get into the soil. And from there, they get into our body because we drink water, we eat food, we breathe air. So really the only way to try to battle this problem is
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is to cut down on the overall production of these substances. But that means that you've got to find replacements. And right now, there are no substances that can do the job as well as these PFAS. However, I think in this context, it also needs to be mentioned that we are exposed to literally millions of compounds on a daily basis.
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Chemical abstracts, which is a service that basically lists all known chemicals, there are over 160 million compounds. chemicals that are now listed. Now, of course, we're not going to encounter all of those regularly, but we certainly encounter thousands of chemicals on a daily basis.
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Just to give you an example, when you drink a cup of coffee, you're consuming over a thousand compounds, over a thousand compounds, including some like caffeic acid or furfural, which are known carcinogens. Now, if we label something as a carcinogen, it means that we know that at some dose in some animal or in some laboratory trial, it causes cancer. It does not mean that it does so in humans.
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That's a common misconception that people make. They think that if something is labeled as a carcinogen, it means that it causes cancer in humans. No, it just means that it has the potential to cause cancer. Now, we know that coffee does not cause cancer. We know this.
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If coffee did cause cancer, we would know because there's enough coffee consumed by enough people around the world that this would reveal itself epidemiologically. So here we have a situation where we have known carcinogens present in the coffee, but of course the whole coffee as an entity doesn't cause cancer. Why? Because the amounts of the carcinogens in there are in very, very small doses.
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And coffee also contains some compounds like antioxidants, which can mitigate cancer.
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No food really merits being labeled as an angel or a devil because it's possible to eat blueberries every day. At this point, I think it's just become common practice that if you have a business and you sell online, Shopify is the way to go. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.