Episode 43: Jeff Volek explains the power of ketogenic diets to reverse type 2 diabetes
Today’s episode features an important interview with Dr. Jeff Volek, a researcher who has spent the past 20 years studying how humans adapt to carbohydrate-restricted diets. His most recent work, which is one of the key topics of today’s interview, has focused on the science of ketones and ketogenic diets and their use as a therapeutic tool to manage insulin resistance.
In 2014, Volek became a founder and the chief science officer of Virta Health, an online specialty medical clinic dedicated to reversing diabetes, a chronic disease that has become a worldwide epidemic. The company’s ambitious goal is to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people by 2025.
Earlier this year, The JMIR Diabetes Journal published a study coordinated by Volek and Virta that showed people with type 2 diabetes can be taught to sustain adequate carbohydrate restriction to achieve nutritional ketosis, thereby improving glycemic control, decreasing medication use, and allowing clinically relevant weight loss. These improvements happened after just 10 weeks on the program that Virta designed for people.
In addition to his role at Virta, Volek is a registered dietitian and full professor in the department of human sciences at Ohio State University. He is a co-author of “The New Atkins for a New You,” which came out 2010 and spent 16 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The book is an updated, easier-to-use version of Dr. Robert Atkins’ original 1972 book, “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution.”
Volek has co-authored four other books, including “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living” and “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance.” Both books are co-authored with and delve somewhat deeper than “The New Atkins” did into the science and application of low-carb diets.
Volek received his bachelor’s degree in dietetics from Michigan State University in 1991. He went on to earn a master’s in exercise physiology and a PhD in kinesiology and nutrition from Pennsylvania State University. He has given more than 200 lectures about his research at scientific and industry conferences in a dozen countries. In addition to his five books, he also has published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Although numerous studies have confirmed the validity and safety of low-carb and ketogenic diets, Volek and others who support carbohydrate restriction are often criticized for being so one-sided that their work comes across as more advocacy than science. But in “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living,” Volek writes:
“What is the proper response when three decades of debate about carbohydrate restriction have been largely one-sided and driven more by cultural bias than science? Someone needs to stand up and represent the alternate view and science.”
As Volek explains in episode 42 of STEM-Talk, this has become his mission.
Links:
“New Atkins for a New You” — http://amzn.to/2uOjLkF
“The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living”– http://amzn.to/2hh1W9k
“The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Performance” — http://amzn.to/2f2oPMV
New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/well/live/tackling-weight-loss-and-diabetes-with-video-chats.html?_r=0
JMIR DIABETES paper:
http://assets.virtahealth.com/docs/Virta_Clinic_10-week_outcomes.pdf
Show notes:
3:016: Ken and Dawn welcome Jeff to the show.
3:32: Dawn asks Jeff when and how he first became interested in science.
5:24: When Jeff was studying to be a dietitian, he was looking at a low-fat, high-carb diet. But when he began to work with diabetics, something did not seem right. Dawn asks Jeff if that is what led him to begin studying low-carb diets.
6:39: Ken comments on how diabetes is perhaps the greatest healthcare challenge we face as a society, which drives costs to more than $300 billion a year.
7:59: Dawn asks Jeff about the effectiveness of traditional treatment and management approaches for people with diabetes.
8:27: Dawn asks Jeff to talk about Virta Health, a company Jeff helped found, and a recent paper and JMIR Diabetes Journal. The paper reported on the results of a study that looked at whether sustained carbohydrate restriction and nutritional ketosis could be part of a comprehensive intervention that would allow people with type 2 diabetes to improve their health.
11.54: Dawn asks Jeff why this approach would work at the cellular level, whether it is the reduction in glucose alone or if the ketone bodies are playing a role.
14:13: Ken asks Jeff why he thinks some patients respond so remarkably and others not as much.
16:27: Dawn discusses how Virta’s mission is to reverse diabetes for 100 million people by 2025. She asks Jeff if this is a realistic number or a stretch goal.
18:28: Ken asks Jeff to briefly talk about the business model of this process and how he sees it shaking out.
20:09: Dawn asks Jeff how he and Sami Inkinen, founder of Trulia and another co-founder of Virta, crossed paths.
22:00: Dawn asks Jeff what his thoughts are on the possible epigenetic effects of the ketogenic diet, with respect to general health and wellness.
25:46: Dawn talks about an athletic friend of hers with Crohn’s disease and how she had positive health outcomes from following a ketogenic diet. She then asks Jeff if anyone has seen improvements to conditions like Crohn’s disease or rheumatoid arthritis when considering the inflammatory nature of these diseases processes.
27:54: STEMTALK BLURB
28:23: Dawn comments on how she has been a vegetarian for more than 20 years, and how it is difficult to be on a ketogenic diet with no meat as a fat source. She then discusses how “The New Atkins for a New You,” has a chapter devoted to a low-carb diet for vegetarians and asks Jeff if he has any tips to share for vegetarians or vegans.
29:59: Ken discusses a conversation he had with a woman about the difficulty of a ketogenic diet for someone who is fat-phobic. She has the idea that if she eats fat it will soon be on her. Ken then asks Jeff if this “fat fear” is something that he finds in working with patients.
32:30: Ken comments on how Rob Wolff reports that lipidologists are quite wary of the LDL-P, the particle numbers that they see in some people trying the ketogenic diet. As a result, these people have to increase their carb intake. Ken then asks Jeff what his thoughts on this are.
35:33: Ken discusses how LDL-P is more strongly correlated with heart disease than LDL cholesterol in the literature.
41:02: Dawn asks Jeff if he thinks that someone on a ketogenic diet would need a different amount of fiber per day compared to what has been recommended by the Institute of Medicine.
41:44: Dawn discusses how for decades recreational and competitive athletes have religiously consumed a diet rich in carbohydrates to fuel their performance, and the conventional wisdom has been to avoid fatty foods. However, in recent years these beliefs have been questioned. Dawn asks Jeff to give an overview of this trend.
44:58: Dawn asks Jeff to expand on why he thinks there was no difference in muscle glycogen between the two groups.
47:56: Dawn discusses a recent paper published in The Journal of Physiology where Louise Burke looked at elite race walkers while on the ketogenic diet. The team found that this diet impaired performance in elite endurance athletes “despite a significant improvement in peak aerobic capacity.” Her primary point was that race walkers showed increased oxygen demand for a given speed. Dawn then asks Jeff to share his thoughts on this paper.
49:40: Ken asks Jeff to briefly explain the role of PDH, and whether Jeff looked at this enzyme in his studies on athletes who were keto-adapted.
51:40: Ken discusses how in contrast to endurance sports, some more power-oriented athletes have reported that when on a ketogenic diet they experience low energy levels during the most demanding moments in the sport, but others do not experience this at all. Ken asks Jeff if he has any thoughts on power athletes on a ketogenic diet.
56:29: Dawn discusses how Jeff has spent a good amount of time studying keto-adapted elite ultra-runners, such as the western states 100 record holder, Tim Olson. Dawn asks Jeff what he learned at this event with regards to a low-carb endurance athlete, and how this informs recommendations he would make to athletes when they are fueling for a competition of this kind.
59:07 Dawn asks Jeff if he sees more athletes shifting towards a low-carb diet.
1:00:37: Ken discusses the use of exogenous ketone esters in the Tour de France races. He then asks Jeff for his opinion on this and to briefly address the confusion on this topic
1:04:01: Ken comments on how Jeff wrapped up the confusion nicely.
1:05:14: Ken and Dawn thank Jeff for joining them.
Episode 42: Tom Jones discusses defending Earth against the threat of asteroids
Frequent STEM-Talk listeners will more than likely recognize today’s guest, veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who joins us today to talk about the threat of near-Earth asteroids.
Tom occasionally helps co-host STEM-Talk. But for episode 42, regular co-hosts Ken Ford and Dawn Kernagis turn the microphone around to interview Tom about his days as an astronaut, planetary defense and asteroids.
It’s a topic, as you will hear, that Tom is quite passionate about. He also has a great deal of expertise in the field. Before he became an astronaut, Tom earned a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Arizona in 1988. He’s also a graduate of the United States Airforce Academy. His research interests range from the remote sensing of asteroids to meteorite spectroscopy to applications of space resources.
He became an astronaut in 1991 and received the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1994, 1996, and 2001. He also received the NASA Exceptional Service Award in 1997 and again in 2000. In 1995, he received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal.
Tom logged 52 days in space, including three space walks totaling more than 19 hours. He is the author of several books, including Sky Walking: An Astronauts Memoir, which the Wall Street Journal named as one of the five best books about space. His latest book is Ask the Astronaut: A Galaxy of Astonishing Answers to Your Questions about Space.
Below are links to Tom’s books as wells the STEM-Talk interview with Pascal Lee, which Ken refers to while interviewing Tom.
Links:
Pascal Lee interview: https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-17/
New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/vermin-of-the-sky
TFPD Report: https://www.ihmc.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/TFPD-FINAL-Report-to-NAC-10-6-10_v2.pdf
Tom Jones books:
“Sky Walking” – http://amzn.to/2t8dSQn
“Ask the Astronaut” – http://amzn.to/2vhUxZD
“Complete Idiots Guide to NASA” – http://amzn.to/2uWZHun
“Planetology” – http://amzn.to/2unXgnP
Show notes:
3:36: Ken and Dawn welcome Tom to the show.
4:11: Ken comments on the interesting path that Tom has travelled throughout his life and asks Tom to give a synopsis of his path of reinvention.
6:56: Dawn asks Tom to talk about the goals and highlights of the four shuttle missions he went on.
3:39: Dawn welcomes Tom as a guest on STEM-Talk.
9:23: Dawn comments on how Tom no longer flies in space, but he and some of his colleagues are now involved in another space mission that could save the Earth or a large part of it from destruction. Dawn then asks Tom how he became interested in planetary defense from asteroids.
11:30: Ken asks Tom to explain the differences between asteroids, comets, meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites.
13:37: Ken asks Tom how he would define a near-earth asteroid.
14:06: Dawn asks Tom how frequently asteroids strike the Earth.
16:27: Dawn asks Tom how likely she is to die in an asteroid catastrophe, statistically speaking.
18:27: Dawn discusses an article on planetary defense titled, Vermin of the Sky, published in The New Yorker in February of 2011. She comments on how Ken is quoted in the article as saying, “The very short perspective we have as humans makes the threat of asteroids seem smaller than it is. People of all sorts find it easier to kick the can down the road and hope for a mystical solution.”
20:04: Ken comments on how in the same article Clark Chapman notes that “Unlike Hurricane Katrina, we can do something about an asteroid, the question is whether we would rather be wrong in overprotecting or wrong in under protecting”. Ken then points out that one can imagine a near societal collapse should it be announced that, with high confidence, an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, and that as a society we have no means to deflect it. Humans, Ken adds, would come to envy the dinosaurs who had no time to ruminate about their fate. Ken asks Tom if he can even imagine the societal disruption of such an announcement.
21:50: Dawn discusses how in January of this year the U.S. Government released a strategy for preparing for a Near-Earth Object (NEO) impact. She then asks Tom if he thinks the strategy is on the right track.
23:29: Dawn asks Tom to give a sense of how NASA deals with the asteroid hazard today.
25:04: Dawn asks Tom if he thinks that as NASA’s interests in asteroids has increased, if it is striking the right balance between science, exploration, and planetary defense.
26:59: Ken discusses how Tom and Rusty Schweickart co-chaired the NASA Advisory Council’s Ad Hoc Task Force on planetary defense, and how in October of 2010, their task force made five primary recommendations. Ken asks Tom to review them and briefly discuss what has transpired in the years since in a lightning round. Recommendation number one: organize for effective action on planetary defense.
28:17: Recommendation number two: acquire essential search, track, and warning capabilities.
29:10: Recommendation number three: investigate the nature of the impact threat.
29:41: Recommendation number four: prepare to respond to impact threats.
30:39: Recommendation number five: lead U.S. planetary defense effort in national and international forms.
32:05: Ken praises Tom on the successful lightning round.
32:08: Dawn asks Tom what the current score card is on our detection of NEOs and how the percentage of the NEO population discovered is.
33:49: Dawn asks Tom why we do not get more notice of the approaching objects.
34:53: Dawn comments on how Tom talked about the limitations of the ground-based detection. She then asks Tom to discuss why ground-based detection has these limitations.
36:10: Dawn asks Tom to talk about some of the cons of these space-based detection missions and whether or not there are solutions to these cons.
38:16: STEMTALK BLURB
38:42: Dawn asks Tom what we learned from the Chelyabinsk impact in 2013.
40:36: Dawn asks Tom how much it will cost to deal with the asteroid threat effectively.
41:55: Ken comments that clearly these relatively modest preventive costs would be entirely dwarfed by several orders of magnitude for any significant impact on Earth in a populated area.
42:57: Ken states that to put it in perspective, the initial annual cost estimated in the report is essentially the cost of a single, frontline jet fighter.
43:27: Dawn discusses Tom’s role as a science advisor for the B612 Foundation that is now creating a new asteroid institute at the University of Washington. She then asks Tom what his take is on the new activities that this institute will be enabling, aside from searching for NEOs.
45:05: Dawn comments on how Tom is associated with the Association of Space Explorers and asks why they are interested in planetary defense.
46:16: Ken asks Tom to imagine that we have detected an NEO that seems to be on a collision course with Earth. He then asks Tom to review the leading proposed ideas on how humanity might deflect it sufficiently for it to actually miss the Earth.
49:45: Ken asks Tom if once we divert an asteroid collision whether or not it is gone for good. More specifically, how we can prevent an asteroid on its elliptical orbit from passing through a gravitational keyhole and returning to threaten Earth again.
52:37: Dawn comments on how ESA and NASA have been discussing a joint-asteroid deflection demonstration mission. She then asks Tom what the prospects are for that mission.
54:36: Dawn asks Tom if he thinks that the UN is the best organization to plan for a public safety hazard of this magnitude.
56:32: Ken asks Tom to talk about the natural uncertainty associated with projecting the exact place of impact on Earth and the implications for planning a deflection mission.
59:30: Dawn asks why it is that the topic of NEOs seems to fly under the radar and be of so little interest in comparison to other threats of much less gravity.
1:01:20: Ken comments on how he believes that this topic suffers from the sky is falling syndrome, evoking the story of Chicken Little. Also, that political leaders tend to think in terms of best election cycles and that it is hard to get them excited about potentially cataclysmic events that are nearly certain to happen in the long run.
1:02:50: Dawn discusses how NASA’s 2017 budget eliminates funding for the asteroid redirect mission, which is to return a boulder from a Near-Earth Asteroid and put it on the moon. She then asks Tom if this cancellation affects our planetary defense efforts in any real sense.
1:04:10: Dawn asks Tom how we can use Near-Earth Asteroids and their resources to aid our human space flight exploration efforts.
1:05:13: Ken comments on how he finds Phobos and Deimos, moons of Mars, absolutely fascinating. He goes on to state that these may in fact be asteroids. He then asks Tom to talk about Phobos and Deimos and why they are of such great interest.
1:07:56: Ken recommends that the listeners interested in Phobos and Deimos check out an earlier STEM-Talk podcast with Pascal Lee. (See link above.)
1:08:14: Ken asks Tom what he sees as the role and timing of the lunar activity in the larger scheme of human space exploration.
1:09:53: Ken asks Tom what he sees as the best way for government to conduct its programs so as to help enable the success of commercial space products and service providers without directly subsidizing them.
1:11:39: Dawn comments on how Tom has had a very impressive career path and asks him what advice he would give to others who would like to someday work in space or explore the solar system.
1:14:03: Dawn discusses the four books Tom has written on space flight: “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to NAS;” “Sky Walking: An Astronauts Memoir;” “Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System,” and “Ask the Astronaut: A Galaxy of Astonishing Answers to Your Questions about Space Flight.”
1:15:23: Dawn asks Tom if he deals with the asteroid hazard or planetary defense in any of these books.
1:16:19: Ken comments that Tom should heavily distribute The Complete Idiot’s Guide to NASA in certain quarters of D.C.
1:16:46: Dawn asks Tom what other interests he pursues in addition to space.
1:17:31: Ken and Dawn thank Tom for joining them.
Episode 41: Dr. David Diamond talks about the role of fat, cholesterol, and statin drugs in heart disease
Dr. David Diamond is a University of South Florida professor in the departments of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology and director of the USF Neuroscience Collaborative.
He is well known for research that looks at the effects of stress on brain, memory and synaptic plasticity. A primary research project over the past few decades has been the study of treatments for combat veterans and civilians with PTSD.
Although his academic specialty is neuroscience, recently he has been closely examining the role of fat and cholesterol in heart disease. He began looking into lipids after test results showed his triglycerides were through the roof. He also launched a critical look into the effectiveness of statins, a class of drugs doctors frequently prescribe to help people lower cholesterol levels in their blood.
Dr. Diamond’s findings contradicted the low-fat, high-carb diet that he, as well as many Americans, had been advised to follow. This led him to explore ways for people to optimize their diet for cardiovascular health.
He eventually created a graduate and undergraduate seminar entitled, “Myths and Deception in Medical Research.” A lecture he gave at the university entitled “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic” is now a YouTube video with nearly 200,000 views. The lecture focused on how “flawed and deceptive science demonized saturated fats and created the myth that a low-fat, plant-based diet is good for your health.”
Dr. Diamond received his B.S. in biology from the University of California, Irvine in the 1980. He continued his post-graduate work at the university and earned a Ph.D. in biology with a specialization in behavioral neuroscience.
From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Diamond was an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. He then moved to University of South Florida and since 2003 has been a professor in the departments of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology.
In addition to directing USF’s Neuroscience Collaborative, Dr. Diamond also is the director of the university’s Center for Preclinical and Clinical Research on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His research projects at the university have ranged from “The Effects of Stress on Brain, Memory and Synaptic Plasticity” to “The Cognitive and Neurobiological Perspectives on Why Parents Lose Awareness of Children in Cars.”
Dr. Diamond has served on federal government study sections and committees evaluating research on the neurobiology of stress and memory and has more than 100 publications, reviews, and book chapters on the brain and memory. He is a fellow in the American Institute of Stress and in 2015 he received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Science from the Riga Diabetes and Obesity World Congress. In 2015, Diamond also received the University of South Florida International Travel Award.
Links:
USF lecture: “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vr-c8GeT34
IHMC lecture: “An Update on Demonization and Deception in Research of Saturday Fat, Cholesterol and Heart Disease —https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20170531/
Show notes:
4:31: Ken and Dawn welcome David to the show.
4:42: Dawn comments on how David has always been interested in science and even wanted to be a physician as a child. She also asks him about majoring in biology and receiving his PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
5:41: Dawn asks David about his varied research topics at the University of South Florida, including cognitive and neurobiological perspectives on why parents lose awareness of children in cars.
7:00: Ken asks David what led him to research cardiovascular disease and statins, since he has such an extensive background in memory and PTSD research.
7:46: Dawn mentions David’s lecture he gave at the University South Florida entitled, “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic”.
9:51: Dawn comments on how David and one of his colleagues recently published a review paper showing that statins have failed to substantially improve cardiovascular outcomes, yet so many doctors continue to prescribe this drug.
10:39: Dawn asks David what additional risks he sees with statins.
11:44: Ken asks David to discuss relative risk versus absolute risk calculations, as there is much confusion around that topic.
13:41: Dawn asks David if there are any ongoing trials looking at the degree of cholesterol lowering and clinical outcomes using absolute risk statistics.
14:39: Dawn discusses the two interwoven stories: one of possible statistical deception and describing the putative benefits of statins, and the other issue of whether there are instances where it makes sense for physicians to prescribe statins. Dawn asks David if there are any subsets of patients that he would recommend treating with statins, and asks about patients with hypercholesterolemia.
16:24: Dawn asks David if there are any other subgroups where the use of statins may be defensible.
17:39: Dawn notes that increased LDL is common in people who start a ketogenic diet while their other biomarkers tend to improve. She asks David to comment on this observation.
18:45: Ken comments on how cholesterol has been so demonized that a lot of people are not aware that our bodies need cholesterol to synthesize the naturally occurring steroids in our systems. Ken then asks David to give an overview of the role that cholesterol plays in our bodies.
19:42: Dawn asks David to talk about some of the dangers of low LDL.
20:54: Ken comments on how an often overlooked aspect of lipoproteins is their role in the innate immune system. Ken then asks David if the medical community should look at lipoproteins from a bit of a broader perspective than simply looking at them as lipid shuttles and a source of cardiovascular disease risk.
22:24: Dawn asks David what actually causes heart disease and what people can do to reduce the risk of having a heart attack.
24:44: Dawn asks David what types of diet or exercise approaches would be optimal for improving cardiovascular health.
29:34: Dawn asks David what an ideal ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 is in our diets, and whether or not David thinks this is important.
31:03: Dawn comments on how they have discussed David’s diet and personal routine and asks him what else he incorporates into his personal health regimen.
32:13: Ken asks David what kind of pushback he has received in response to his research findings and lectures.
33:37: STEMTALK BLURB
34:06: Dawn discusses the London Daily Telegram’s story about a group of international experts, including David, who claim that cholesterol does not cause heart disease in the elderly and how trying to reduce it with drugs like statins is a waste of time. The story also points out that these experts’ claims drew immediate skepticism from other academics. Dawn then asks David how he thinks the public deals with conflicting messages like this.
36:25: Ken asks David that assuming his analysis is correct, if he has any thoughts on why errors this large and pervasive continue to persist.
37:14: Ken comments on how we do not often see stories like this in other professions, such as engineering. Ken then asks David what it is about medical research that amends itself to this process.
40:16: Ken comments on how doctors have very prescribed standards of care that they are expected to follow.
41:06: Ken asks David if perhaps the modest benefits of statins could be associated with their recently touted anti-inflammatory properties, rather than primarily their cholesterol lowering effects.
43:07: Dawn comments on how people seem conditioned to think that they can find good health in a pill. She then asks David if this is his experience.
44:00: Dawn notes that in the past people did not place great trust in medicine, however this has certainly changed over time. Dawn then asks David to speculate on why he thinks this is.
45:17: Dawn asks David if it is the right approach when people have an illness or a biomarker that seems wrong and they immediately want to tackle that specific symptom instead of looking at what is causing it.
47:09: Ken asks David if there is any evidence that prescribing statins changes people’s perception of their risk of cardiovascular disease, and thereby changes their behavior in ways that might increase their risk.
48:43: Dawn asks David what he would recommend to patients when their physician says that he or she is going to prescribe statins.
50:10: Dawn asks David what his thoughts are on the effects of statins for exercise performance and muscle strength, in particular how it relates to the aging population.
51:24: Dawn discusses how there seems to be a recent trend to take low doses of a statin drug two to three times a week coupled with zetia. Dawn then asks David what his thoughts are on this, in particular regards to a recent study completed by Johns Hopkins.
53:50: Dawn comments on how there is a greater discussion around precision medicine. She then asks David if there are studies that integrate genetic testing prior to the administration of statins.
55:18: Dawn asks about the Ascot LLA study, the results of which have been promoted extensively through advertising. Dawn asks David to talk about what the results of this study demonstrate and why the study was terminated early.
56:58: Dawn asks David to expand on the Jupiter Study that he discusses in his publication.
57:59: Ken discusses a very new paper titled, Statins for Primary Prevention in Physically Active Individuals: Do the Risks Outweigh the Benefits? The paper examines the potential benefits and adverse events of statins among physically fit individuals, in particular the association of statin use with beneficial cardiovascular outcomes and adverse effects in active duty military personnel. Ken asks David if he has any comments on this paper and its findings.
1:00:51: Ken comments on the new category of drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors. He asks David to talk about this.
1:04:24: Ken asks David to explain how he has been very critical of drug companies in their promotion of statins, yet his neuroscience research has been funded by drug companies.
1:05:25: Dawn asks David what interests he peruses outside of science.
1:06:15: Ken and Dawn thank David for joining them.
Episode 40: Allan Savory talks about the global importance of restoring the earth’s grasslands
Joining us for this special edition of STEM-Talk is Robb Wolf, who will co-host today’s show with Ken Ford, STEM-Talk’s regular co-host and chairman of the Double-Secret Selection Committee which selects all the STEM-Talk guests.
Wolf is the New York Times best-selling author of “The Paleo Solution” and “Wired to Eat.” He’s also a friend of today’s guest, Allan Savory, a world-renowned ecologist who advocates for the restoration of the earth’s grasslands.
“I’ve known Allan for years as a passionate advocate for restoring the health of the earth, especially grasslands. So when Ken invited me to join him and co-host the podcast with Allan, I jumped at the chance,” said Wolf, who is filling in for regular STEM-Talk co-host Dawn Kernagis.
Grasslands take up a third of the earth’s land surface. And, as you will learn in today’s podcast, they are in serious trouble.
Seventy percent of grasslands have been degraded by global trends ranging from deforestation to droughts to agricultural and livestock practices. As more and more of earth’s fertile land rapidly turns into deserts, Savory travels the world promoting holistic management as a way to reverse thousands of years of human-caused desertification.
Savory is an ecologist, international consultant and the president of the Savory Institute, which promotes large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands. Desertification, which Savory says is just a fancy word for land that’s turning to desert, directly affects more than 250 million people worldwide and has placed another billion people at risk, according to the United Nations.
Savory was born in Southern Rhodesia, which is now the nation of Zimbabwe, and went to college in South Africa where he majored in zoology and biology. He went to work as a research biologist and game ranger in what was then known as Northern Rhodesia, but is now the nation of Zambia. Later in his career, he became a farmer and game rancher in Zimbabwe.
As a game ranger in the 1960s, Allen made a significant breakthrough in understanding what was causing the degradation of the world’s grassland ecosystems and became a consultant who worked with groups on four continents to develop sustainable solutions.
Most of his time as a game ranger was spent in the country’s savannas and grasslands among antelopes, elephants and lions. It was then that Allan started to notice that the healthiest grasslands were those in which large herds of wild grazers stayed bunched together and were constantly on the move because of predators that hunted in packs.
It was this insight that led Savory to develop what he refers to as a “holistic management framework,” a planning process that mimics nature as a means to heal the environment. Once an opponent of livestock, he grew to believe that increasing the number of livestock on grasslands rather than fencing them off for conservation was the way to stop desertification.
But when civil war broke in Rhodesia in the ‘60s, Allan ended up leading an elite military squad to fight communist guerrillas. In the latter days of the civil war, Allan became a member of Parliament and the leader of the opposition to the ruling party.
He was exiled in 1979 as a result of his opposition to the ruling party and immigrated to the United States.
In 1992, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, formed the non-profit Africa Centre for Holistic Management and donated a ranch that serves as learning site for people all over Africa. He and Butterfield then co-founded the Savory Institute in 2009, whose mission is to promote restoration of the world’s grasslands through holistic management.
The couple lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and have co-authored books together, including “Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment,” which came out last year.
In 2003, Allen received Australia’s International Banksia Award for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale. In 2010, he received the Buckminister Fuller Institute’s Challenge award for work that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. The Savory Institute also is one of 11 finalists in the Virgin Earth Challenge, a $25 million initiative for the successful commercialization of ways to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
Links:
Savory Institute – http://www.savory.global
“Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment” – http://amzn.to/2sHBkmm
“Holistic Management Handbook – http://amzn.to/2sI0Is7
Show notes:
4:51: Ken and Rob welcome Allan to the show.
5:01: Ken comments on how Allan has travelled an incredibly varied path through life and asks Allan to discuss his experiences as a biologist and park ranger in Africa.
8:23: Ken discusses the time Allan spent fighting communist guerrillas when civil war broke out in Zimbabwe in the 1960s and comments on the elite military group that Allan hand-picked and trained. Ken asks Allan to talk about how and why he was selected to lead this unit and about his methods of selection and training.
10:43: Rob asks Allan about the significance of the herds of wild grazing animals, that Allan observed when he spent time in the savannahs and grasslands as a game ranger and solider.
14:38: Rob discusses how in the later days of the civil war Allan served as a member of parliament, but in 1979 ended up being exiled and emigrated to the United States. Rob then asks Allan to talk about this part of his life.
17:50: Ken comments on how Allan has led an interesting life and taken on numerous difficult positions, never shunning a painful choice or controversy.
18:35: Rob discusses Allan’s frame of reference, now called holistic management, that he began developing. Holistic management mimics nature and also draws on organizational skills learned in the military and is considered by Allan as a legitimate option to heal the environment and reverse desertification. Rob asks Allan to clarify what holistic management is and when and how it developed.
22:09: Rob asks Allan to describe the desertification and the impact it’s having on the earth.
30:31: Ken asks Allan to discuss how he met his wife, Jodi Butterfield, and how the two of them created the Savory Institute, which works to promote preservation of the world’s grasslands through holistic management.
32:25: Ken asks Allan to share the activities and goals of the Savory Institute.
36:37: STEMTALK BLURB
37:04: Rob comments on how the world seems to always bifurcate into two ideological camps. On one hand there are malthusiasts, or folks who have predicted a number of collapse scenarios, resource depletion, mass starvation, etc., and although extremely convincing at times, their predictions are usually wrong. The other ideological group may be referred to as rational optimists, who make the case that markets and innovation will always save the day. Today, it is generally argued that rational optimists win the debate, but Rob has a gut sense that this may not go on indefinitely. Rob asks Allan what his views on this topic are, and whether he is a malthusiast or rational optimist.
44:06: Robb talks about advances in evolutionary medicine and how traditional medicine often chases symptoms in lieu of finding solutions. Robb asks Allan if he sees a parallel with sustainability in food production, and if this evolutionary framework could inform our approach to a sustainable future.
48:18: Ken comments on how many people are surprised to learn about the predator-prey interaction in the holistic management process and asks Allan to talk about this interaction.
51:41: Rob asks Allan to expand upon the constant battle of the topic of holistic management and properly managed grazing animals.
54:30: Ken remarks that many people have jumped on Allan’s claims regarding the potential of carbon sequestration, both supportive and critical. Ken then asks Allan to elaborate on his views of the efficacy of carbon sequestration in the framework of holistic management.
56:23: Rob asks Allan what the largest benefits are for the farmer adopting the practice of holistic management.
57:54: Ken comments how Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms is a large proponent of holistic management, and how he credits the approach as a key element in transforming Polyface Farms from an uneconomic farm into a prosperous operation, which serves as a model for many other diversified farm operations around the world. https://youtu.be/4dq8vsVvvOc
59:13: Rob asks Allan if there are any specific conditions that he could see the adoption of holistic management in agriculture proceeding either faster or slower around the world.
1:02:05: Ken asks Allan how new technology, such as robotics, may help holistic management practices.
1:04:41: Rob asks Allan to discuss his new book, Holistic Management: A Common Sense Revolution to Restore Our Environment, released in 2016 by Allan and his wife, Jodi. This book is a revised third edition of Allan’s book published in 1990: Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making. Rob comments on how the new book’s subtitle has a more urgent message and asks Allan to talk about why he chose to revise the subtitle.
1:05:47: Rob asks Allan if down time exists for him and what he does for fun in this time.
1:07:03: Allan ends the interview by talking about how it’s important that people take a position and stop sitting on the fence.
Episode 39: Suzana Herculano provides a new understanding of how our brains became remarkable
Prior to Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s research, scientists assumed that the brains of all mammals were built in the same way and that the overall brain mass as compared to body mass was the critical determinant of cognitive ability.
It was to resolve these conundrums about brain mass, body mass, and intelligence that Herculano-Houzel turned to chainsaws, butchers’ knives, and kitchen blenders to concoct what she refers to as brain soup.
As STEM-Talk co-hosts Ken Ford and Dawn Kernagis point out during their interview with Herculano-Houzel, epsisode 39 of the podcast turned out to be not only an enlightening conversation, but also one of the most fun STEM-Talk interviews to date.
Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian neuroscientist who devised a way to count the number of neurons in human and animal brains. She writes about this in her book, The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Her method of counting the neurons of human and other animals’ brains allowed her to study the relation between the cerebral cortex and the thickness and number of cortical folds in the brain.
She is currently an associate professor of psychology and biological sciences in Vanderbilt University’s psychological sciences department and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. She grew up in Brazil and received her undergraduate degree in biology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, to get her masters in neuroscience, and completed her Ph.D. in visual neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
After completing her doctorate, Herculano-Houzel returned to Rio and went to work for the Museum of Life where she designed children’s activities. In 2002 she returned to her alma mater and began researching how human brains compared to other animals.
In 2004, she devised a way of reducing brains to liquid as a means to count the number of neurons in them. It is technically known as the “isotropic fractionator.”
In 2004 she won the Jose Reis Prize of Science, and in 2010 she received the James S. McDonell Foundation’s Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She is also the author of a biweekly newspaper column on the neuroscience of everyday life for Folha de São Paulo, the major newspaper in Brazil. Going into its 11th year, the column has appeared more than 270 times since 2006. In addition to “The Human Advantage,” Herculano-Houzel is also the author of six books in Portuguese that focus on the neuroscience of everyday life. She also has a popular blog called “The Neuroscientist on Call,” which she describes as not-so-random thoughts about brains, the universe and everything. She lives in Nashville, TN, with her husband, son and two dogs.
Links you may be interested in:
“The Human Advantage”: http://amzn.to/2rtvNOY
The Neuroscientist on Call blog: http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com
Show notes:
5:32: Suzana talks about growing up in Rio and how she became interested in science.
7:07: Ken asks Suzana about her work at Rio’s Museum of Life.
12:55: Dawn asks Suzana when she firsts became interested in neuroscience.
16:00: Dawn follows up with a question about the composition of cells in the brain.
29:21: Suzana talks about how the brain represents just 2% of the average human mass, yet requires 25%of person’s energy.
33:14: Dawn tells Suzana she’s curious about Suzana’s method of counting neurons and asks her to talk about how she came up with the idea of brain soup.
38:58: Break
39:24: Dawn reads a portion of a book review that described how Suzana turned to chainsaws, butcher knifes and blenders to concoct brain soup and asks her to elaborate.
42:03: Suzana talks about some of the difficulty she had in locating brains for her research.
53:07: Suzana shares some of the lessons she’s learned from analyzing the brains of more than 100 species.
58:52: Ken asks if the cerebral cortex is the best overall predictor of cognitive ability across species.
59:50: Dawn wonders about whales and asks Suzana what we know about the intelligence of aquatic life.
1:05:41: Ken asks if there are neuronal differences in humans.
1:09:33: Suzana talks about how cooking helped homo erectus, the first modern human species, to double its brain size.
1:14:49: Ken reads an excerpt from an excellent review of “The Human Advantage” that ran in The New York Review of Books.
1:18:35: Ken and Dawn thank Suzana and sign off.
Episode 38: Dr. Mark Lupo discusses thyroid nodules and cancer
Thyroid cancer is one of the fastest growing cancers in the United States, especially among women. In Florida, thyroid cancer trails only melanoma skin cancer as the state’s fastest rising cancer.
Today’s guest on episode 38 of STEM-Talk has made it his mission to not only treat thyroid cancer, but also raise awareness about the disease.
Dr. Mark Lupo is founder and medical director of the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida which is based in Sarasota. A graduate of Duke University, he went on to earn his medical degree at the University of Florida where he worked with the world-famous thyroid expert, Dr. Ernie Mazzaferri. Dr. Lupo also did his internship and residency in internal medicine at Florida and then won a fellowship in endocrinology, metabolism and nutrition at the University of California San Diego and the Scripps Clinic.
Dr. Lupo’s research and practice are particularly focused on thyroid nodules, which are abnormal growths of thyroid cells that form a lump within the thyroid gland. Although the vast majority of thyroid nodules are benign, a small proportion do contain thyroid cancer. His practice is centered on diagnosing and treating thyroid cancer at the earliest stage and helping people avoid unnecessary surgeries.
He also is very involved in teaching neck ultrasound, thyroid cancer and general thyroid disease to other physicians at the national level. He has published book chapters and several articles on thyroid disease and thyroid ultrasound. In addition to his work as the medical director of the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida, he also is a clinical assistant professor on the faculty of the Florida State University College of Medicine.
Dr. Lupo also was named the 2017 recipient of the Jack Baskin Endocrine Teaching Award, which is annually presented by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
You can learn more about the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida by visiting http://www.thyroidflorida.com.
Show notes:
3:21: Ken and Dawn welcome Mark to the show and ask him what led him to study medicine at Duke.
4:52: Dawn asks Mark how he ended up choosing endocrinology with a particular interest in thyroid nodules and cancer as a specialty.
6:40: Dawn asks Mark how he found the time to go on incredible adventures, such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro as he worked to establish a practice.
8:40: Mark provides an overview of the thyroid.
9:46: Dawn asks Mark to clarify about whether a thyroid nodule is the same thing as a goiter.
10:25: Ken comments on how thyroid nodules and cancer seem to be epidemic and how there has been an increase of instances in the United States. He asks Mark if there is a greater incidence of disease or if there is just better detection or a combination of both.
14:33: Dawn asks if we know why thyroid nodules and cancer seems more prevalent in women.
15:01: Dawn inquires about the survival rate for those diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and whether or not it has changed over the years.
17:45: Dawn comments on how she has been looking forward to this interview as a result of a thyroid scare she had in graduate school where there was an inconclusive biopsy. She asks Mark how common it is to have an inconclusive finding and unclear results about a sample.
20:52: Ken comments on his personal experience with thyroid nodules that led to surgery and a positive outcome, and how he met Mark early in this experience after hearing him on a podcast discussing fine needle aspiration. After hearing this podcast, Ken concluded that he most likely needed this procedure. Ken asks Mark to talk about this.
23:37: Dawn asks Mark how often the thyroid nodules are discovered incidentally.
27:34: Dawn asks if there are certain characteristics you can see by ultrasound that give you an idea as to whether you are looking at a benign or malignant nodule.
29:53: Dawn asks what the histological differences are between a benign adenoma and a malignant nodule.
31:16: Ken brings the discussion back to the topic of indeterminate diagnosis, and comments that more of the biopsies are being read as being indeterminate, which leads to more surgeries. Ken asks Mark to discuss this phenomenon.
39:28: Dawn asks which institutions are doing specialized tests.
41:11: Break
41:38: Dawn asks Mark to go into further detail about what we are looking at when we do testing for molecular subtypes.
44:48: Dawn asks Mark if there is a genetic predisposition to any types of thyroid cancer.
48:13: Since positron emission tomography has been helpful in diagnosing metastatic disease in hurthle cell carcinoma, Ken asks if it makes sense to use a ketogenic diet as a supplemental approach to managing the cancer.
52:26: Dawn asks Mark what his thoughts are on the current interest and understanding that cancer is at least partially a metabolic disorder.
53:21: Dawn asks Mark to discuss the different treatment options for thyroid cancer.
1:04:20: Dawn asks Mark to describe the treatment of immunotherapy and how it relates to thyroid cancer.
1:05:56: Dawn asks Mark if thyroid cancer metastasizing varies by subtype.
1:06:58: Mark talks about how lifestyle and environmental exposures might impact the prevalence of thyroid nodules and cancer.
1:09:48: Dawn comments again about her thyroid scare, and the doctors believing that it may connect to her soy intake as a result of her being a vegetarian.
1:10:43: Ken asks Mark about the impacts of dental x-rays.
1:12:20: Ken comments on how thyroid shields should be used in dental x-rays.
1:12:39: Dawn asks Mark what, if any, prophylactic measures we can take to minimize our risk of thyroid nodules or cancer.
1:13:41: Ken asks Mark to talk about the correlation, and possible causation, between insulin resistance and the development of nodules.
1:15:27: Dawn asks Mark about his thoughts on screening individuals for thyroid cancer, since roughly 50 percent of the population has thyroid nodules.
1:18:21: Ken asks Mark if observation should be the standard care for non-palpable thyroid nodules under ten millimeters.
1:20:07: Dawn asks Mark what the quality of life consequences are for patients who are unnecessarily treated for thyroid cancer.
1:21:38: Dawn asks Mark to talk about the options for people who end up with benign nodules.
1:23:52: Dawn asks Mark if the ionization of salt backfired and contributed to the increase in thyroid nodules, cancer, and autoimmunity.
1:27:20: Ken discusses a New York Times article about doctors reclassifying a thyroid tumor, where they reported that noninvasive follicular thyroid neoplasms with papillary-like nuclear features are no longer considered a type of cancer. Ken asks Mark to discuss this shift in categorization and its consequences.
1:31:46: Dawn asks Mark about his work travelling around the country teaching surgeons and endocrinologists how to use clinical features to minimize unnecessary surgeries and about using ultrasound to risk stratify the nodules.
1:33:15: Ken asks Mark about receiving the 2017 Jack Baskin Endocrine Teaching Award from the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
1:34:20: Dawn asks Mark what else he likes to do in his spare time other than his mountain adventures.
1:35:09: Dawn and Ken thank Mark and sign off.
Episode 37: Gary Taubes discusses low-carb diets and sheds light on the hazards of sugar
The front pages of Gary Taubes’ new book on sugar feature a blurb excerpted from the magazine Scientific American:
“Taubes is a science journalist’s science journalist who researches topics to the point of obsession – actually, well beyond that point – and never dumbs things down for readers.”
Gary’s most recent obsession is documented in “The Case Against Sugar,” a book that argues that increased consumption of sugar over the past 30 to 40 years has led to a diabetes epidemic not only in the United States, but an epidemic that’s now spreading around the world.
Episode 37 of STEM-Talk features a more than two-hour conversation with Gary about his latest research as well as a look back at other nutrition and science topics that have dominated Gary’s journalistic investigations since the 1980s.
Gary first burst onto the national scene in 2002 with an article in the New York Times Magazine titled, “What If’s It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” Gary made the point that Robert Atkins and his high-fat, low-carb diet had a better history and scientific record of helping people lose weight than the low-fat diet that was and remains the centerpiece of the nation’s health policy and food pyramid.
The article had an immediate impact. As Michael Pollan pointed out in the introduction of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in the fall of 2002 bread “abruptly disappeared overnight from the American dinner table.” Virtually overnight, wrote Pollan, Americans changed the way they eat.
Gary did not set out to become a science journalist. He graduated from Harvard College in 1977 with an S.B. degree in applied physics and went on to earn an M.S. degree in aeronautical engineering from Stanford University. But while at Stanford, he realized he wasn’t that passionate about becoming an aeronautical engineer and decided to enroll in the Columbia School of Journalism to become an investigative reporter.
In the ‘80s, Gary became fascinated with flawed science and started writing a series of magazine articles about bad science. That eventually led to a pair of books: “Nobel Dreams” in 1987 and “Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion” in 1993. After “Bad Science,” Gary turned to nutrition reporting and that resulted in the 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine.
He followed up on his research for the article with two books: “Good Calories, Bad Calories” in 2007; and “Why We Get Fat” in 2010. Both books detailed how refined carbohydrates are largely responsible for America’s rising obesity rate and a primary cause of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases of the Western diet. His new book, “The Case Against Sugar,” takes this argument a step further and shows how the explosion of sugar consumption and sugar-rich products in the United States has led to a global diabetes epidemic.
Dan Barber, author of “The Third Plate,” wrote in a New York Times review of Gary’s book, “Comparing the dangers of inhaling cigarettes with chowing down on candy bars may sound like a false equivalence, but Gary Taubes’s “The Case Against Sugar” will persuade you otherwise. Here is a book on sugar that sugarcoats nothing. The stuff kills.”
Below are links to Gary’s books:
“The Case Against Sugar” http://amzn.to/2ps8Qbl
“Good Calories, Bad Calories” http://amzn.to/2qTwJJ6
“Why We Get Fat” http://amzn.to/2qKuv2u
“Bad Science” http://amzn.to/2qTjyrI
“Nobel Dreams” http://amzn.to/2pXpRgK
Show notes:
4:41: Ken and Dawn welcome Gary to the show and ask him to talk about how a Harvard physics major ended up going to journalism school to become an investigative reporter.
12:53: Dawn asks Gary to tell the story behind his 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”
21:13: Gary shares how his work for “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” led to additional research and the book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories.”
31:00: Gary explains how his study of physics gave him a passion for understanding the history of theories, and how that passion has helped him over the years as an investigative reporter.
43:44: Dawn asks Gary to share lessons he learned from the Nutrition Science Initiative (NUSI).
50:06: Ken refers to reports about Kevin Hall, a researcher at NIH, who essentially claims he’s disproven the carbohydrate-insulin hypotheses of obesity, and asks Gary for his thoughts.
1:02:40: Dawn asks Gary if he thinks there are specific populations where it would seem less appropriate to be on a low-carb diet?
1:06:44: Ken asks if elevated LDL-P should be a concern for people on low-carb diets since it’s a concern for people on normal diets.
1:13:17: Gary talks about the history of sugar in America.
1:18:08: Ken asks Gary to provide the background on how diabetes is now becoming a worldwide pandemic.
1:31:31: Gary elaborates on the sugars found in cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
1:34:43: Dawn asks Gary, “If you could remove sugar from the modern environment, but keep everything else the same, do you think we would have an obesity epidemic?”
1:37:21: Gary talks about what brain scans reveal about the addictive effects of sugar.
1:41:53: Dawn asks Gary to share the background on a 2015 report in The New York Times that Coca-Cola initially subsidized the Global Energy Balance Network.
1:46:55: Gary talks about the role of the microbiome.
1:51:31: Ken asks Gary to share his thoughts about the possible effects of artificial sweetners.
1:54:33: Dawn asks Gary how his personal dietary approach has changed over the years.
1:59:01: Dawn and Ken thank Gary and sign off.
Episode 36: Jeff “Skunk” Baxter Discusses His Life in Rock ‘n’ Roll and the U.S. Intelligence Community
In a rare departure from interviews with scientists and engineers, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Director Ken Ford interview Jeffrey “Skunk” Baxter about his life as a musician and founding member of Steely Dan, and how he went on to become a defense consultant on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The two fields seem completely different, but Baxter explains the similarities between them and talks about how improvising in jazz is a skill that can carry over into defense analytics and tactics.
Baxter’s bio includes playing with a number of well-known bands, such as Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers. As a studio musician for 35 years, Baxter recorded with Donna Summer, Dolly Parton, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart. He was a record producer for Carl Wilson, the Beach Boys and Stray Cats. He also composed music for movies and television.
He has achieved a certain renown in Washington as an advisor and consultant for multiple agencies and defense technology companies. He chaired a Congressional Advisory Board on missile defense and was a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute.
Baxter also holds a unique affiliation with IHMC as “senior thinker and raconteur.” He and Ken go way back—to Ken’s own days in the rock ‘n’ roll business, which the two discuss in the interview.
Baxter’s IHMC bio is available at https://www.ihmc.us/groups/jbaxter/. More information on him is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Baxter or https://www.facebook.com/skunkbaxter/.
In 2009, Baxter gave an IHMC lecture entitled “The Revolution in Intelligence.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GRkCyvIz70
2:12: Dawn reads a five-star iTunes review.
3:04: Dawn reads Baxter’s bio and introduces Jeff and Ken.
4:38: Baxter talks about musicians who influenced him growing up, from Beethoven and Chopin to Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald.
5:05: Baxter was five years old when his mother gave him a great gift: “She taught me to read.”
6:04: Baxter read a lot of military history because of his father, who spent five years in active duty and 20 years in the reserves.
7:00: Baxter describes his beginnings as a musician.
8:00: His love of the complexity and improvisational nature of jazz helped prepare him for work in the intelligence community.
10:25: Ken asks Baxter to talk about his days in the ‘70s as a founding member of Steely Dan.
11:15: Baxter shares his insights about studio recordings.
12:27: Baxter notes that a long time ago Ken was very involved in rock ‘n’ roll as an agent who booked and managed bands.
15:30: Baxter talks about Steely Dan and the unsung hero of the band, Roger Nichols, who was the engineer.
17:30: Baxter describes his transition from Steely Dan to The Doobie Brothers.
21:11: Ken comments that the evolution of The Doobie Brothers was remarkable. He asks Baxter about bringing Mike McDonald to the band.
23:20: Dawn asks about Baxter’s transition from full-time rock musician to advisor on missile defense.
23:30: Baxter quips: “A radar is just an electric guitar on steroids.”
25:35: Writing a paper on converting the Aegis system to do theater missile defense on a mobile platform led Baxter to a position as a missile defense consultant on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
26:28: Baxter describes D.C. as “a whole new world to me” filled with “unbelievably talented, smart patriotic men and women.”
27:25: How Baxter used Beethoven, Bach, Jimmy Hendrix and Pink Floyd to teach radar at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
28:50: Edward Teller, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, was also a concert pianist. Baxter talks about how he began to realize that more and more physicists he met were also musicians.
29:48: Dawn asks how Baxter was received by the defense community in D.C., given his rock band background.
31:33: Baxter talks about his first ‘brutal” press conference on missile defense (not considered back then by the press as a worthy endeavor).
32:48: Ken adds, “It’s important to be disliked by the right people.”
33:00: Baxter describes how the people in Washington that he worked with in government, industry, military and intelligence communities were talented and patriotic people and, for the most part, unsung.
33:43: Baxter sees a connection between creativity in music, which involves problem solving in a non-linear approach, and the way talented people in government work.
34:05: Commercial break.
34:47: Baxter describes how the organizational chart of a symphony orchestra looks frighteningly like the government’s organizational chart.
37:00: The organization of a jazz quintet, however, is the opposite of an orchestra.
38:30: Baxter recalls a magazine article by William Nolte, who teaches intelligence at the University of Maryland, that made a case for teaching analysts to improvise the same way musicians do.
40:15: Baxter talks about how Pachelbel’s Canon has the same chord pattern as “Let It Be Me” by the Everly Brothers, or “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge.
43:25: Dawn asks about war games and the role of improvisation in what might happen next.
43:45: Baxter says war games are table-top exercises where there is a blue team (good guys) and red team (bad guys), a white team (overseers of the game) and various other teams.
45:48: In terrorism, Baxter says, “the improvisational part is important because terrorists don’t have the weapons, capabilities or resources, so they have to improvise.”
47:00: Dawn asks about the transition from analog to digital recording in the music industry back in the 1980s, and how it parallels with the evolution of defense technology.
49:28: Dawn reminds Baxter about his 2009 IHMC lecture that addressed ways to improve the U.S. intelligence gathering.
51:43: Baxter says it’s amazing how quickly the intelligence community has caught on to new technologies and leveraged them.
52:10: Ken notes this is in contrast to a time when Baxter once compared the name of the Steely Dan album “Pretzel Logic” to some aspects of the intelligence community.
52:30: Baxter describes how the electron is now the horse of the 21st century.
52:54: Dawn reminds Baxter that he once said the U.S. beat the Soviet Union because of our soft power (culture). Dawn asks if the U.S. can still play that card in places that are trained to reject U.S. culture.
53:11: Baxter recalls playing concerts in the Soviet Union where every song was illegal, yet thousands of people in the audience knew the lyrics, which is why he believes music is a way to bring people and entities together.
54:55: Baxter describes how missile defense as well as blue jeans, French fries and Elvis Presley helped bring down the Soviet Union.
55:42: Baxter explains how the British saved rock ‘n’ roll.
56:26: Baxter stresses the cultural influence of the U.S. and raves about Japanese rock bands. He also notes that Tito Puente won the Latin salsa competition several years in a row with an all-Japanese band.
58:22: Baxter has been working on a solo recording project for more than 15 years, which he says has been on his bucket list.
58:58: Baxter talks about doing jingles for Lays potato chips, Budweiser and Ford.
1:01:21: Ken mentions that Baxter scored the music for the popular animated TV show “King of the Hill.”
1:002:06: Ken asks Baxter about a 1968 meeting with Richard “Paco” Zimmer, a legendary concert promoter and road manager.
1:05:32: Dawn thanks Jeff for being a guest on STEM-Talk.
1:06:31: Ken says “this interview was especially fun for me; and it stimulated a lot of great memories.”
1:06:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 35: Stuart McGill explains the mechanics of back pain and the secrets to a healthy spine
Back pain has become the world’s leading cause of disability.
Stuart McGill has been at the forefront of non-surgical approaches to addressing back pain for many years. His 2015 book “Back Mechanic: The Secrets to a Healthy Spine Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You” is a wonderfully accessible account of his methods and perspectives.
McGill spent 30 years as a professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His laboratory has become a renowned destination for everyday people as well as Olympic and professional athletes from around the world who are struggling with back pain.
He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and 3 textbooks that address issues such as lumbar spine function and injury mechanisms, patient assessment, corrective exercise prescription, and performance training. McGill also consults for many medical management groups, governments, corporations, legal firms, and elite sports teams.
He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Volvo Bioengineering Award for Low Back Pain Research.
He released his landmark text, “Low Back Disorders: Evidence-Based Prevention and Rehabilitation,” in 2002. It changed the way coaches, bodybuilders, athletes and non-athletes approached core training. His new book, “Back Mechanic,” is written for a lay audience and addresses common misperceptions about back pain. It also provides a step-by-step guide of the McGill Method to fix back pain.
Backfitpro.com is a web site also geared for a lay audience and is dedicated to providing access to evidence-based information and products that assist in preventing and rehabilitating back pain. Products featured on the website have been tested in McGill’s lab at the University of Waterloo.
McGill and his staff have also produced a video, “The Ultimate Back: Enhancing Performance,” that synthesizes McGill’s approaches for avoiding back injury and enhancing athletic and physical performance. It is available for purchase on Vimeo.
4:23: Stuart talks about how he was more interested in becoming a plumber than a scientist until his high school football coach asked him to return to school and earn his high school degree. That led him to college where he met professors who got him excited about mathematics and physics, and eventually the study of spine biomechanics.
7:00: Ken asks Stuart to describe the remarkable research atmosphere Stuart was able to create at the University of Waterloo.
8:08: Stuart explains that he did not go to medical school, but that he learned he had a unique talent of assessing and relating to people with back pain.
11:00: Ken shares his experience of back pain and traveling to Canada to visit Stuart as a patient, which prompts Stuart to describe his process of assessing people.
14:53: Dawn asks Stuart to talk about his motivation for writing “The Back Mechanic.”
19:53: Although back pain is the world’s leading cause of disability, Dawn asks Stuart why back pain is underappreciated by so many people in the medical community.
22:04: Stuart explains some of the most mechanisms for back injury and ways to prevent them.
26:22: Ken asks Stuart to talk about a study he did several years ago on firefighters with the Pensacola Fire Department.
30:36: Stuart talks about how heavy weightlifting will probably shorten the careers of modern golfers like Rory Mcllroy, and how the great golfers of old who had wonderful long careers – Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player – weren’t weightlifters.
33:53: Stuart talks about the great strikers in mixed martial arts and the UFC are the leaner ones who can unleash muscle. The same is true of the great sprinters, the great golfers, and the great home run hitters, who are the ones who can create a very brief muscle power pulse, and let it go.
34:33: Dawn asks Stuart about reports that the rate of back surgery in the U.S. is five times higher than in other developed countries.
39:31: Stuart provides an overview of the how to about a self-assessment of pain triggers.
46:29: Dawn asks Stuart to explain the McGill method to fixing back pain.
55:03: Ken asks about the technique of power breathing and the implications for spinal disability.
57:15: Ken mentions that he and Stuart are fans of kettlebells, and that power breathing is what a a person does when swinging a kettlebell. Ken asks Stuart to talk about the exercises that he sees as most beneficial with kettlebells. Ken and Stuart discuss the relative benefits of kettlebell swings, farmer’s walks, and bottoms-up carries.
1:06:49: Stuart talks about measuring competitors in the World’s Strongest Man competition, the NFL, heavyweight UFC fighters, and then asks Ken to guess who had the strongest core Stuart had ever measured. Ken says it was probably a kettlebell dude like Pavel. Stuart confirms that yes it was Pavel Tsatsouline.
1:10:29: Dawn asks if it is true the spine is weaker and more vulnerable to injuries in the morning.
1:14:30: Stuart talks about sciatica, which is usually caused by narrowing of the discs and a little bit of arthritic activity in the vertebra.
1:18:35: Stuart talks about what he describes as silly stretches and exercises, which includes sit-ups and crunches.
1:21:19: Ken asks Stuart to run through the McGill Big Three exercises for spinal stability.
1:30:41: In American training culture, Stuart says there’s too much emphasis on time under the bar, and not enough emphasis on pushing heavy stuff around. He goes on to explain how pulling a slid is a tremendously strengthening and athletically enhancing activity.
1:37:35: Ken talks about friends who’ve sustained back injuries, and points out that was often after they had joined certain training programs focused on Olympic style lifts with high reps. She asks Stuart if he is seeing increased number of spinal injuries with the increased popularity of those type of training programs?
1:43:38: Dawns asks if there’s a direct correlation between back pain or injury and a person’s ability to brace.
1:45:29: Ken asks Stuart to comment on a 2016 study showing that taken as a whole young men today have much less grip strength than their fathers.
1:50:39: Stuart talks about the kinds of back injuries that are associated with sex and ways to mitigate spinal pain associated with sex.
1:52:02: Stuart talks about how his lab was the first to measure orgasm.
1:55:16: Ken and Dawn thank Stuart and sign off.
Visit backfitpro.com to learn more about the approaches and back pain exercises that can rehabilitate and prevent spine injury.
Episode 34: Jim Stray-Gundersen explains how blood flow restriction training builds muscle and improves performance
Blood-flow-restriction training is a topic of growing interest. But as IHMC director and STEM-Talk co-host Dr. Ken Ford points out, there’s also a great deal of misinformation about the training.
Episode 34 of STEM-Talk addresses some of that misinformation with our interview of Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen, who helped pioneer blood flow restriction training and leads the Live Hi/Train Low program for the US Athletic Trust.
Since receiving his board certification in general surgery in 1985, Jim has focused his work and research on maximizing human performance, health and resilience. He pioneered the Hi-Low training protocol and played a key role in the development of the anti-doping test, SAFE, which stands for Safe And Fair Events. It is considered the most aggressive blood-profiling test in the fight against doping.
He has worked with numerous Olympians in various sports and has an ongoing relationship with world renowned long-distance runner Alberto Salazar, who also is a coach and director of the NIKE Oregon Project. Jeff has been an official physician and consultant of the United States, Norwegian and Canadian Olympic teams. He is an official member of 15 world championships.
Jim completed post-doctoral fellowships in cardiovascular physiology and human nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He received appointments as an associate professor of orthopedic surgery and physiology. He spent 20 years on the faculty of UTSW and helped build and direct two human-performance centers at St. Paul and Baylor University hospitals.
He has served on international medical committees that include the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, International Biathlon Committee, International Ski Federation and the International Skating Union.
Jim also is the sports science advisor for the US Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), and continues to lead human performance and altitude camps for Olympic athletes, masters athletes, as well as Navy SEALs. He runs The SG Performance Medicine Center and Sport Technologies for Maximal Athletic Performance, overall fitness, weight loss, and recovery in Frisco, Texas, and now the new center in Park City, Utah, located inside The Center of Excellence USSA Building.
As if that isn’t enough, he also is the chief medical officer of B STRONG (www.goBstrong.com)., a Utah -based company he co-founded in an effort to make blood flow restriction safe, effective, and affordable for the general public. B STRONG is a patent-pending exercise method based on blood-flow restriction exercise.
During the interview, Jim refers to several studies and articles. Below is a link to those studies and papers, and two suppliers of blood flow restriction gear. Be sure to also check out the US Athletic Trust, an organization that supports American Olympic hopefuls, that Jim talks about toward the end of the podcast.
Studies:
— Repetitive restriction of muscle blood flow enhances mTOR signaling pathways in a rat model
— Use and safety of KAATSU training: Results of a national survey
— Blood flow-restricted exercise in space
— Applications of vascular occlusion diminish disuse atrophy of knee extensor muscles
Gear:
Kaatsu Global, to get 15% discount use discount code: IHMC
Go B Strong, to get 15% discount use discount code: IHMC
Show notes:
:30: Dawn welcomes Ken, who talks about how he has been using blood flow restriction training for the past several years and what a fascinating fellow Jim is.
2:00: Ken reads the winning five-star iTunes review, titled, “I feel my brain making more connections while I listen.”
3:00: Dawn and Ken review Jim’s background and career.
5:00: Dawn welcomes Jim to the podcast.
5:30: When Dawn asks Jim how he first became interested in science, Jim talks about being a hellion in elementary school and how his mother and teacher worked together to find out what interested Jim. Turns out, it was bugs, and Jim started collecting insects.
8:00: As a child, Jim also was interested in sports and talks about how his father came to the United States from Norway on a track scholarship.
10:50: Dawn points out that Jim studied ethology and animal behavior as an undergrad, and asks him why he decided to jump from that to medicine.
16:11: Dawn follows up by asking Jim how he transitioned into sports medicine.
19:21: Jim gives a general definition of blood flow restriction exercise, followed by a more technical description.
23:51: Ken points out that it’s called blood flow restriction training, and not blood flow occlusion training. Ken then asks Jim for his thoughts on the degree of restriction stimulus necessary to safely achieve very strong or close to optimal results.
27:51: Break. STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering groundbreaking technologies aimed at leveraging and extending human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
28:11: After Dawn asks Jim if he has different protocols for different applications, Jim explains that he uses the protocols established by Dr. Yoshiaki Sato, a Japanese sports scientist who developed the technique.
30:21 Jim gives an overview of how 50 years ago Dr. Sato came up with blood flow restriction training, which is referred to as Kaatsu.
32:20: Jim explains the origins of the word Kaatsu, which in Japanese is two words: “Ka,” meaning additional, and “atsu,” meaning pressure.
36:51: Jim talks about a study in Japan involving more than 12,000 people that looked at the incidence of deep vein thrombosis in individuals doing Kaatsu.
40:21: Jim points out that through trial and error, Dr. Sato and his colleagues found safe ways of doing blood flow restriction training.
44:36: Ken asks Jim to comment on blood flow restriction and the use of light weights in tandem.
48:51: Jim talks about how most of us were taught that if you wanted to get a muscle stronger, you had to exercise that muscle. The big secret of blood flow restriction is that using some muscles that are distal to the band can stimulate growth in all muscles used during the exercise.
52:45: With respect to the efficacy of blood flow restriction training, Ken asks Jeff to identify three of the most important positive effects people see in blood flow restriction training.
57:51: Ken points out that as baby boomers continue to mature, there is a growing interest in fending off sarcopenia, the age-related loss of lean muscle mass, strength and functionality.
59:11: Jim goes into detail about how blood restriction training for seniors and baby boomers is a God-send as a way to address sarcopenia.
1:00:57: Jim talks about exciting work being done by his colleagues in Scandinavia where they have shown that they are getting stem cell activation as well as conversion of IIx fibers into IIa fibers.
1:01:27: Dawns asks Jim to address speculation that blood flow restriction training might also have an effect on ligament bone strength.
1:03:17: Jim talks about how blood flow restriction is being used to avert the atrophy normally associated with ACL tears.
1:05:02: Jim talks about his experience working with Todd Lodwick, a Nordic skier who tore his rotator cuff and broke a couple of ribs just before the Sochi Olympics. Todd started doing blood flow restriction twice a day and was able to compete in his sixth Olympic games 40 days after his injury.
1:06:57: Ken and Jim talk about how blood flow restriction training is especially useful when traveling and how to turn your hotel room into a workout room.
1:10:17: Jim explains how exercise and nutrition are critical for specific outcomes for all kinds of exercise, but especially blood flow restriction training.
1:11:23: As NASA contemplates long-duration space flights, Ken asks Jim for his thoughts on the potential of blood flow restriction in the context of human space flight.
1:13:09: When Dawn asks if there’s a particular sport or type of athlete who seems best adapted to blood flow restriction training, Jim says that pretty much everybody can benefit from correct instruction in blood flow restriction.
1:14:30: Jim says that blood flow restriction training particularly has a place in middle schools and high schools in terms of introducing young athletes to strength training.
1:15:35: Jim talks about working with the Olympic skier Bode Miller, who had chronic back problems, and how he used blood flow restriction training to bounce back and compete in the Vail World Championships in 2015.
1:19:29: Dawn asks Jim to explain his role in the US Athletic Trust.
1:22:10: Dawn and Ken thank Jim for appearing on STEM-Talk.
1:22:23: Dawn and Ken say that they enjoyed the interview with Jim so much, that they will appeal to the Double Secret Selection Committee to have Jim back on the podcast.
1:22:45: Dawn and Ken encourage people to take a minute to go to iTunes to rate the podcast, and then sign off.
Episode 33: Dr. Natalie Batalha talks about exoplanets and the possibility of life in our Milky Way and beyond
Dr. Natalie Batalha’s STEM-Talk interview was so contagious that Dawn Kernagis said it made her dream of returning to school to get a second graduate degree in astronomy.
“Hearing Natalie talk about her research had all of us in the STEM-Talk studio buzzing,” said Dawn, the podcast’s co-host.
Natalie is an astrophysicist and the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler Mission, a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. She sat down with Dawn and veteran astronaut and IHMC senior research scientist Tom Jones for episode 33 of STEM-Talk.
As one of the original co-investigators of the Kepler Mission, Natalie has been a leader in using the telescope to discover exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our own sun. Natalie has been involved in the Kepler Mission since the proposal stage and has helped identify more than 150,000 stars that are monitored by the telescope.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from The University of California Berkeley, and a doctoral degree in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. She taught physics and astronomy for 10 years at San Jose State University before joining the Space Sciences Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, which is located in California’s Silicon Valley.
In 2011, Natalie received a NASA Public Service Medal for her vision in communicating Kepler’s science to the public, and also for her outstanding leadership in coordinating the Kepler science team. That same year Natalie also headed up the analysis that led to the discovery of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system.
She joined the leadership team of a new NASA initiative in 2015, which is dedicated to the search for evidence of life beyond our solar system. Called the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, the program brings together teams from multiple disciplines to understand the diversity of worlds, and which of those exoplanets are most likely to harbor life.
As if Dawn and the STEM-Talk gang weren’t excited enough after talking to Natalie about the search for life beyond our solar system, NASA announced about a month after our interview with Natalie that its Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed the first known system of seven Earth-sized planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.
According to a NASA press release in February, the discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.
0:30: Dawn welcomes Ken Ford, IHMC founder and director as well as the chairman of the Double Secret Selection Committee that chooses guests who appear on STEM-Talk. Dawn and Ken then talk about Natalie’s background as an astrophysicist.
4:35: Dawn welcomes her co-host for this episode of STEM-Talk, Tom Jones, and they begin the interview by asking Natalie how she became interested in astronomy.
8:03: Natalie talks about how as an undergrad at Berkeley she met a post-doctoral researcher from Brazil who later became her husband. As a result, she ended up doing her post-doctoral work in Rio de Janeiro.
15:47: Dawn asks Natalie to describe the history of the Kepler mission.
19:00: Tom asks Natalie to describe the difficulty of trying to detect a distant planet.
21:34: Natalie describes how long the Kepler telescope has been in space and provides a summary of its findings.
25:30: Natalie talks about lava worlds, which have oceans larger than the Pacific Ocean, but they’re made of lava, which is why scientists call them lava worlds.
27:30: Dawn asks Natalie about the discovery of Kepler 10b, which was the identification of the first rocky planet outside of our own solar system.
32:30: Natalie describes how the host star that Kepler 10b orbits is almost exactly like Earth’s sun, except that it’s about 8 billion to 11 billion years old as opposed to our sun which is four and a half billion years old.
36:30: Dawn reads a quote that describes the discovery of Kepler 10lb as one of the most profound scientific discoveries in human history and asks Natalie to talk about that.
39:00: Tom asks Natalie to provide statistics on the kinds of planets that the Kepler mission is finding.
42:30: Natalie talks about planets in the Goldilocks Zone.
44:35: Break that features Ken talking about STEM-Talk, an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering groundbreaking technologies, in that leveraging and extending human cognition, perception, locomotion, and resilience.
45:00: Tom comments that Kepler must have detected anomalies over the years, and asks if they occur frequently and what might cause these anomalies.
47:30: Natalie describes one of the most extreme examples of an anomaly, which is a star known as Tabby’s Star, or Boyajian’s Star.
51:30: Natalie talks about micro-lensing, which is a technique used to detect exoplanets.
53:00: Natalie gives an overview of the W First Mission, which is expected to launch in mid-2020s.
59:00: Dawn asks how many scientists are involved in analyzing Kepler’s findings and how the findings are confirmed.
1:00:30: Dawn asks how long the Kepler Mission will continue.
1:04:30: Natalie talks about plans to follow up on the Kepler Mission once its operations shut down.
1:07:00: Natalie talks about the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is a transit photometry mission that’s complementary to Kepler.
1:10:30: Tom asks Natalie to talk about the likelihood of habitable planets throughout the Milky Way.
1:12:30: Natalie says there are 10 to 20 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the galaxy.
1:16:00 Dawn asks Natalie for her thoughts about the need for society to prioritize learning about possible other planets that can support life.
1:20:00: Natalie talks about how the process of exploration and the act of pursuing knowledge changes us as a species and directly influences our quality of life on Earth.
1;23:30: Dawn asks Natalie about Pascal Lee and the SETI Institute, also known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute.
1:24:02: Tom mentions that he’s fascinated by the idea of rogue planets and asks Natalie if they’re real.
1:27:00: Dawn mentions that Ken often comments how astronomers have the coolest scientific jargon, which includes terms like red dwarf stars, gravity waves, gas giants and galactic cannibalism.
1:27:30: When Dawn asks Natalie what she does for fun outside of searching for planets, Natalie talks about growing grapes and making wine with her father.
1:30:00: Natalie ends the interview by encouraging young people to do what they love and to find what gives meaning to their life.
1:33:00: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 32: Dr. Claire Fraser explains how our gut microbes improve our health, prevent disease and even play a role in our mental health
Women who are pregnant often talk how careful they are about what they eat and drink. They’re careful, points out Dr. Claire Fraser, because they’re feeding their baby.
“Well, we should all think about diet in the same way that pregnant women do,” says Fraser. “Everything we put into our mouths, we’re either feeding or not feeding our gut microbes … And it’s important we keep our gut microbes happy.”
Fraser is a pioneer and global leader in genomic medicine, a branch of molecular biology that focuses on the genome. In episode 32 of STEM-Talk, Fraser sits down with host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC founder Ken Ford to explain why we should all pay more attention to our guts, which is the home of more than 100 trillion bacteria.
An endowed professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Fraser is a founder and director of Maryland’s Institute for Genome Sciences. From 1998 to 2007, she was the director of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and led teams that sequenced the genomes of several microbial organisms, including important human and animal pathogens.
In 1995, she became the first person to map the complete genetic code of a free-living organism, Haemophilus Influenza, the bacterium that causes lower respiratory tract infections and meningitis in infants and young children. This discovery forever changed microbiology and launched a new field of study, microbial genomics.
During this time, she and her team also sequenced the bacteria behind syphilis and Lyme disease, and eventually the first plant genome and the first human-pathogenic parasite. She even helped identify the source of a deadly 2001 anthrax attack in one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement.
Research into the benefits of gut bacteria has exploded around the world in the past decade. In this STEM-Talk episode, Fraser explains the role these microbes play in improving health, preventing disease, and keeping us mentally sharp. She even shares how her diet has changed since she started studying the gut microbiome.
Fraser also talks about working with the FBI during the 2001 antrhax attacks and her early work in microbiology that led to the first mapping of a free-living organism’s complete genetic code.
Her recent lecture at IHMC, titled “The Human Gut Microbiome in Health and Disease,” can be viewed at ihmc.us/lectures.
If you’re interested in learning more about the gut microbiome, Fraser in her lecture recommended “The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health” by Stanford University scientists Justin and Erica Sonnenburg.
1:36: Dawn reads the five-star iTunes review titled “Intellectually Stimulating.”
2:28: Dawn and Ken provide a summary of Claire’s background and research, pointing out that she has authored more than 320 scientific publications, edited three books, and has served on committees of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health.
4:13: Dawn welcomes Claire to STEM-Talk.
4:27: Claire talks about growing up in a suburb of Boston and taking her first biology course as a freshman in high school, which set her on a path toward a career in science.
5:37: Dawn asks Claire what led her to study microbiology.
6:53: Ken points out that there are more microbes on a person’s hand than there are people in the world. He asks Claire to give listeners a short intro into “Microbiome 101.”
9:34: Claire talks about the role of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), a strain of bacteria that is part of many popular probiotic products and has a reputation as a helpful microbe.
12:00: Ken asks Claire to expand upon the potential of probiotics and their usage in human beings.
14:56: Dawn points out that Claire is internationally known for her role in genome sequencing and asks what led Claire to establish the Institute of Genomics at Maryland.
18:02: Claire talks about her involvement in the first genome sequencing and where the technology stands today.
22:39: Dawn follows up with a question about how the evolution of sequencing technology has changed the way we monitor the spread of pathogens.
29:26: Claire talks about some of the new sequencing technology on the horizon.
32:02: Ken asks Claire to explain the kind of data-analysis challenges that this new technology is creating.
34:29: Claire describes her experience working on the anthrax attacks in 2001, which at the time was one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement.
41:39: Dawn asks Claire about the effects of antibiotics on the gut.
47:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
47:25: Fraser talks about the early science of fecal transplants.
50:04: Ken asks Claire about the role of the microbiome in obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes.
52:38: Dawn asks what kinds of solutions there are against antibiotic-resistant strains.
57:15: Ken talks about increasing evidence of a connection between the gut and brain, and asks Claire to talk about what she has learned about the gut-brain connection.
1:02:47: Claire talks about preliminary research she and her colleagues at Maryland are doing on traumatic brain injury and the microbiome.
1:05:49: Dawn asks Claire to explain how diet affects the microbiome.
1:12:05: Ken points out that dietary fat has been demonized for several decades and asks Claire what she has learned about fat from a microbiome perspective.
1:15:27: Dawn asks Claire if her research into the gut has changed the way she eats.
1:18:48: The podcast ends with Dawn and Ken asking Claire to talk about her hobby of making wine.
Episode 31: Dr. Michael Turner, who coined the phrase ‘dark energy,’ talks about the deepest issues in cosmology
Dr. Michael Turner makes a “big bang” in the world of theoretical cosmology. Translation: He’s an expert on the universe—what it’s made of, what’s in its future, and how it came to be.
Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. From 2003 until 2006, was Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Michael Turner and Vera Rubben, who recently passed away.
Turner is most well-known for having coined the phrase “dark energy” in 1998, which he calls “very, very mysterious stuff.” Thought to comprise 70 percent of the universe, dark energy is responsible for both the expansion of the universe and the increasing speed at which that expansion is occurring.
Another five percent of the universe is atoms, and the remaining twenty-five percent is “dark matter”—what Turner calls “the cosmic infrastructure of the universe.” The universe, he adds, has largely “been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.”
“He [Turner] is able to explain the deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance,” says IHMC Director Ken Ford. “His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation.”
With Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb, Turner co-wrote the well-known book “The Early Universe.”
More information on Turner can be found here: https://kicp.uchicago.edu/people/profile/michael_turner.html and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Turner_(cosmologist).
Turner’s 2011 IHMC lecture, “The Dark Side of the Universe,” can be viewed here: . Turner was also a guest on STEM-Talk for an earlier episode for his interview on the discovery of gravitational waves.
Turner is interviewed by regular STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and guest host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at IHMC.
00:37: Ken calls Dr. Michael Turner “exactly the right guy to talk to about dark energy and dark matter. After all, he coined the phrase dark energy. He is able to explain deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance.”
1:04: Ken pays tribute to Vera Rubin, who passed away on Christmas Day. She confirmed the existence of dark matter and transformed modern physics and astronomy.
2:24: Ken asks for feedback on STEM-Talk and reads 5-star iTunes review from BobRXUF: “With all of the garbage we are bombarded with, listening to STEM-Talk reminds me that there is higher intelligence, the hope for mankind.”
3:35: Dawn and Ken introduce Michael and talk about his background.
4:17: Dawn and Tom welcome Michael to STEM-Talk.
4:39: Tom asks Michael to give listeners the big picture about the structure of our universe and explain how we stumbled upon the phenomenon called dark matter and dark energy?
5:14: Michael explains that a half of one percent of the universe is in the form of stars. The other 99.5 percent is dark.
6:29: Michael talks about how dark matter matter provides the cosmic infrastructure of the universe.
7:45: “Our universe,” says Michael, “has really been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.”
9:49: Michael explains that’s it’s the stars that give off energy and it’s the atoms we’re made of. “We’re the tip of the iceberg. We’re the special stuff.”
10:52: “Michael talks about producing dark matter particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
11:25: Tom asks Michael what was the original evidence for dark matter and dark energy and who were the people who made that discovery?
13:20: Michael describes how Vera Rubin, a scientist working at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was able to confirm dark matter at work in our own galaxy.
15:06: Tom asks if it’s dark matter that holds things together and makes the clock, the universe, tick?
17:37: Michael explains how Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin went about building empirical evidence for dark matter.
19:40: Michael talks about research into “neutralinos,” particles that scientists speculate are left over from the Big Bang. “We’re in the midst of this detective story.”
21:24: Tom asks if the facilities and equipment exist to solve the mystery of the neutralinos and the dark-matter particle?
24:31: Commercial break.
24:55: Dawn wonders if our understanding of dark matter and dark energy continues to advance, what future applications might arise from this knowledge?
25:21: Michael explains that if scientists are able to verify the existence of the neutralino, “it would be the first evidence of the super string theory, which unifies all the forces—a very, very bold theory that says there may be additional dimensions in space-time.”
27:20: In continuing to answer Dawn’s question, Michael says, “If history is any guide, any time we understand nature a little better, there will be spin-offs and practical applications that change and improve the way we live.”
27:43: Tom asks Michael to talk about dark energy and the continuous expansion of the universe.
28:54: Michael shares how two teams discovered in 1998 that rather than slowing down, the expansion of the universe is speeding up, suggesting it’s back to the drawing board on the ultimate fate of the universe.
30:18: Michael talks about what he describes as the most profound mystery in all of science: that gravity can be repulsive rather than attractive.
32:48: Michael refers to a theory that could prove to be even grander than Einstein’s. This new theory says that “as the universe thins out, after expanding for 15 billion years, it starts to speed up.
35:27: Tom asks about Congressional funding for the National Science Foundation research and Turner explains that almost every country on earth is grappling with funding allocations for science.
42:22: Michael talks about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which he describes as big and bold and the kind of project that only the U.S. can do.
43:17: When Dawn asks Michael what led him to become a cosmologist, he talks about how great high school teachers led him into science.
43:51: Michael encourages young people to pursue careers in science. “Just about every challenge that our country and our planet have involves science…trying to understand the secrets of nature and solve the mysteries of mankind are really, really exciting. The career opportunities are good.”
44:41: Michael describes the rewarding nature of his career. “I get to think about the mysteries of the universe. I get to think about how the universe began and how it will end. That’s a pretty good job to have.”
46:3: Tom talks about getting his first telescope when he was 12 years old and how that was a gateway into science.
47:19: Dawn recaps the “mind-boggling statistics” Turner shared in the podcast, staring with 99.5 percent of our universe is dark.
47:38: Ken talks about the great turn of phrases Michael used during the podcast, such as when Michael referred to the evolution of the universe as a “battle between two dark titans.”
48:01 Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 30: Art De Vany Talks About Hollywood Economics, the Paleo Way, and the Role of Fitness and Diet in Aging
Dr. Art De Vany is an American economist known for his work on the Hollywood film industry. He is perhaps best known, however, as the grandfather of the paleo diet, a high-protein, high-fiber way of eating similar to the way our hunter-gather ancestors ate during the Stone Age.
Born in 1937, he has had a varied career that began right out of high school when he signed a baseball contract with the Hollywood Stars, a minor-league affiliate of the Pittsburg Pirates. Even though he could “run like a deer” and “hit the ball out of sight,” his poor eyesight ended his baseball career and led him the UCLA where earned a doctorate in economics. He spent most of his academic career studying Hollywood and the film industry. His research has ranged from “Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry” to “Quality Revaluations and the Breakdown of Statistical Herding in the Dynamics of Box Office Revenues.”
De Vany turns 80 in August and has spent the past 40 years living the paleo way. He outlined his diet and fitness philosophy in “The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us About Weight Loss, Fitness and Aging.” https://www.amazon.com/New-Evolution-Diet-Paleolithic-Ancestors-ebook/dp/B004EBT6SS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487717091&sr=1-1&keywords=New+evolution
He is working on a new book that’s tentatively titled “Renewing Cycles: Healing the Wounds of Aging Through Improved Cellular Defense and Systemic Signaling.” De Vany gave a lecture at IHMC in Pensacola last December where he talked about the New Evolution Diet” as well as his upcoming book on aging.
In Episode 30 of STEM-Talk, host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford have a wide-ranging conversation with De Vany that covers his statistical study of home-run hitting to the dynamics of box-office revenues to the role that exercise and diet play in aging.
0:15: Dawn welcomes Ken, who talks briefly about Art’s background.
1:32: Dawn announces the winning iTunes review.
2:05: Dawn and Ken give an overview of Art’s career and research.
3:12: – Dawn welcomes Art to the show.
3:50: Art talks about his youth and how he started weightlifting as a teen-ager.
5:23: He signs with the Pittsburg Pirates and talks about playing in segregated baseball parks in the South, which was something he had never experienced before.
7:40: Ken and Art compare the lean physiques of great sluggers active in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s such as Ted Williams, Hank Aaron and Carl Yastrzemski with today’s much larger home run hitters.
10:37: Art recalls how debates with one of his professors at UCLA about central planning versus decentralized control systems led him into economics.
13:10: Dawn asks Art to talk about his research into the economics of Hollywood.
16:17: Art explains the impact of movies like “The Titanic,” which can generate 10 percent of all the box-office revenues during a year that will see 600 to 700 movies that are released.
17:06: Dawn asks Art to share his fondest scientific and professional memories.
18:11: In 1979, Art’s newborn son is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and leads to Art’s interest and research into metabolism.
20:20: Dawn asks Art to describe the most profound power laws he has discovered in his pursuit to counter the aging process.
22:26: Ken shares his thoughts about “The New Evolution Diet,” which he describes as beautifully built on Art’s personal interest in evolution and his professional interest in complex stochastic systems.
25:26: Art explains how the book grew out of his realization that insulin controls the pathways that drive growth and obesity as well as shutting down the protective pathways.
26:45: Art describes genes as Bayesian forecasters arising from non-genetic influences on genetic expression.
28:17: Ken inquires about Art’s time at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, which Art describes as a dream place for him.
30:05: Dawn asks Art to expand upon his comment that there’s no such thing as healthy aging.
33:22: Art responds to Dawn’s question about Blue Zones and points out that the healthiest long-term aging individuals have low insulin, high strength, and they have not exhausted their subcutaneous body fat.
36:10: Ken asks Art about the role that exercise and diet play in epigenetics and molecular-level changes.
41:10: Art addresses how muscle development aids the immune system and how strength is probably the best predictor of a person’s future longevity.
44:13: Ken asks Art to expand on his comments that body composition is one of the best predictors of longevity.
46:25: Ken and Art talk about sarcopenia, the age-related loss of lean muscle mass, strength and functionality, and how baby boomers are looking for ways to fend it off.
50:22: Dawn asks Art to talk about the notion of hierarchical sets in weightlifting and what might account for their effectiveness.
52:55: Art describes his current exercise routine.
55:54 Dawn, Ken and Art discuss the negative impacts of marathons, triathlons and other inefficient training regimens.
58:18: When Dawn asks Art to share his views about the best way for older people to maintain their fast-twitch muscles, he points out that it’s possible for people to double their strength even at age 90.
1:00:39: Art expands upon his thoughts about sarcopenia and how it’s driven by general anabolic resistance. “You’re either building new cells or you’re removing damaged ones and regenerating them,” he says.
1:05:25: Ken asks Art for his thoughts on beta hydroxyl butyrate induced HDAC inhibition in treating diseases and extending longevity.
1:09:14: Art talks about antagonizing the body through fasting, semi-starvation, and intense exercise as ways to prolong longevity.
1:10:07: Dawn asks art about the evidence to support that humans were grazers.
1:12:39: Art explains his thoughts about pre- and post-workout nutrition.
1:15:56: Art gives an overview of the new book he is writing.
1:19:27: Art doesn’t think people appreciate the robust survival capacity they have, which they inherited from their Ice Age ancestors.
1:21:51: Dawn thanks Art for an interview that she describes as great fun and signs off.
Episode 29: Leonard Wong Discusses a Culture of Dishonesty in the Army
Dr. Leonard Wong, a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College, led an important study titled: “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.” The study, which was published in 2015 generated much discussion as well as some consternation and reflection.
www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf
In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC’s Director Ken Ford talk with Wong about his study and its implications. Wong also lectured about his study at IHMC in Pensacola last September:
https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/.
Wong’s research focuses on the human and organizational dimensions of the military and includes topics such as leadership development in the military profession. He is a retired Army Officer and taught leadership at West Point. He is also an analyst for the Chief of Staff in the Army. Wong’s research has led him Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Vietnam. He has testified before Congress and has been featured widely in the media, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, 60 Minutes and CNN.
Wong is a professional engineer and holds a Bachelor’s from the U.S. Military Academy. He also has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in business administration from Texas Tech University.
1:43: Ken reads five-star iTunes review from “CC Rider,” which is entitled “Intelligent Podcast: What a Relief:” “What a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate people discussing worthwhile topics.”
2:17: Dawn describes Wong’s bio.
3:18: Dawn welcomes Wong and Ken.
3:42: Wong describes his role at the U.S. Army War College, as well as the College’s structure. When Army leaders arrive at the War College, they’ve generally been in the Army for twenty years. They’re at the point of thinking strategically about leadership and their roles.
5:27: Wong’s research into this topic started over a decade ago, with the question of how to build more time into the schedule of junior offices to facilitate innovation. Wong and his colleagues discovered an overwhelming amount of requirements, which were stifling Innovation. In the back of his mind, Wong concluded: ‘If we require more than they can possibly do, what are we reporting?’
6:36: Wong, in conversation with his colleague Steve Gerras, once asked him what he was doing on his computer. He was supposedly doing mandatory training, but not really. He said, ‘I know, I’m just saying I did it.’ Wong realized then ‘how casually we approach lying, but we don’t call it lying.’
7:15: The theory of Wong’s subsequent study came from a book entitled “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It,” by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (http://amzn.to/2gBJtib), along with what David Messick called ethical fading. The methodology was to use focus groups from various ranks throughout the Army, including staff officers at the Pentagon.
8:12: Dawn mentions that Wong’s study had a precedent: In 1970, the U.S. Army War College published a study showing that lying in the Army was pervasive. Digitization, the audit culture, and downsizing have made it worse today.
8:43: Wong says, “The Army is like a compulsive hoarder. It collects requirements, and it never gives any up. We always add more. We keep adding to the pile. Technology has made a huge influence on this.” Now, with email and Internet, we can ask people to provide digital signatures, and do various online trainings.
9:42: Wong characterizes another part of the problem: “The Army has had a giant emphasis on being a profession. It’s a good thing, but it’s made us believe that we are better than we are. We forget that we are humans. We forget that we are talking about people who can fall to the same temptations, go the same route, as an ordinary human.”
10:35: Ken asks about Wong’s description of people in the Army being so overwhelmed that they have to prioritize.
10:50: Wong says, “One of the ways to ethically fade is you take away moral aspects…. So you are void of all the baggage that an ethical dilemma brings.” Euphemisms are a common way around this, and prioritize is one way of saying you lied. “Prioritize means taking a risk: We didn’t do it, but are going to still report that we did it. Prioritize is a convenient way to convince ourselves that we haven’t lied.”
12:00: “What this study isn’t saying is we have an institution full of liars, or a cohort of people with low ethics. We’ve created an institution with a bureaucracy…with a system that is putting an onerous burden on people to do everything and report they’ve done it. Inadvertently it creates a culture in which we have to tell a system what it wants to hear or it won’t get done.”
12:39: Wong recalls the old days and how easy it was to take a leave form (31) for travel. Today there is a complicated trips form, in which you have to specify where you are going, when you are stopping, any medications you’re taking, who is traveling with you, vehicle inspections.
13:51: “We’ve surrounded ourselves with an audit culture where we have to tell a system that something has happened when it really hasn’t.”
14:00: Ken comments these are typically for the benefit of “CYA.”
14:13: Wong cites the good intentions of the people behind these requirements.
14:40: Yet he questions whether this is the best system for the desired outcomes. “It’s well-meaning, yet the system we create encourages people to lie to it.”
15:00: Study’s conclusion was that process and paperwork are replacing leadership.
15:38: “We don’t want to replace leadership with a process because a process will always tell us what we want to hear…A leader might not. We can’t always trust leaders because leaders are human. That’s where we may prefer a process, which gives us a green light. But it may not be telling us the truth.”
16:30: Ken comments that the growth of procedures and lack of discretion left to leaders “almost presumes poor leadership, judgment, and I think is a step in the wrong direction.”
17:10: Wong says, “We grow leaders. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use leaders, but at the same time we can’t expect leaders to be perfect or their people to be perfect.”
17:43: Wong describes an Army storyboard: In the old days, after an event, someone had to brief an intelligence officer on what they saw/happened. Now the storyboard “allows us to create PowerPoint slides, derived from a template, that has pictures, a narrative and a map.” These have become burdensome to create.
18:30: “You stop focusing on what happened and start focusing on making the storyboard look correctly. It encouraged people to copy and paste; or ignore the storyboard. They would either omit it, or they’d duplicate it, and fabricate them.”
20:46: “There are many things that allowed them to think that they did tell the truth, and technology is one of them. The further you move away from the why…from a statement that you know is not truthful, it allows our mind to rest at ease, and technology allows us to do that.”
21:20: One example of this is annual ratings forms to council the rated officers, which is supposed to happen every quarter. “You have to show you counseled them every quarter. The clerk will fill in dates. They’ll agonize over picking the right dates so it doesn’t fall on the weekend. Tens of thousands are turned in every year.”
23:00: Ken observes that, “In many agencies and companies, and most particularly DoD, PowerPoint has become the defacto communication tool. PowerPoint can obscure the paucity of thought underlying a particular slide. In NASA we used to have a saying, ‘This guy is one slide deep.’”
23:53: Wong notes that PowerPoint is a double edged sword — perfect for briefings when used correctly, but it’s very dangerous when used incorrectly.
25:10: Ken comments that “Jeff Bezos famously banned power point on Amazon as a low information communication medium that often supports the illusion that the presenter actually has a coherent position or argument.”
25:35: Wong says, “PowerPoint when used incorrectly is a lazy man’s tool. But when used correctly, it’s a good stimulus for discussion.”
26:40: Ken talks about the APPP: anti-power point political party in Switzerland. Their stance: “Decreasing professional use of PowerPoint and other presentation software, which the party claims, causes national economic damage, and lowers the quality of the presentation in 95 percent of the cases.”
28:44: Some examples of ridiculous training compliance modules: Every Marine, including those that have never smoked, are required to take a smoking cessation class. This year Wong had to take training on fetal alcohol syndrome. “That’s when you get in the mind, ‘This is a dumb requirement,’ and that helps me breeze through it.”
30:00: “The danger of all these trivial examples is that added up, it creates a culture. Some reports are really important…so many reports people view as dumb. Because of this culture we’ve created, we give them permission to lie about what’s dumb.”
31:08: Dawn asks what is worse: the lying, or the pervasive perception that it’s not lying; and that we’re above lying.
31:20: Wong says, “The lying is a problem but can be corrected. If we don’t admit that we do this, then we’re headed for hypocrisy, for hubris, and that’s more of a problem.”
31:42: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
32:24: Wong describes ethical fading as “removing the glare of the bright colors of moral decisions. You make it so it’s not black and white, right or wrong. You make it so it’s gray. One way to do that is to numb us: We start psychologically disconnecting from the ethical part of it.” One example: Every year to use computer systems in Army, they have to sign a statement that says, ‘I have read, understood and agreed with the procedures …” Preceding that is a 1900-word document. “Every single person initials that, and I haven’t met anyone who has actually read it.”
33:26: Wong mentions that in the U.K. they did an experiment where they offered free Wi-Fi to people and one of the agreements was ‘I promise to give my first born.’ “They had to stop that because every single person signed up for it. We don’t think we’re lying to a person; we think we are lying to a system. That distance allows us to convince ourselves that we don’t lie.
34:20: Wong discusses the potentially more serious implications of the lies.
35:05: “You add up all these Iraqi units that were graded green, and we had a very good Iraqi Army on paper. Then we saw what happened when ISIS came in, and suddenly all these green units didn’t perform the way all our power point slides said they did.”
35:28: Wong reflects on his own experience with compliance measures in the Army: “I remember feeling pressured, but not to the degree that they do today.”
36:32: Ken calls Wong’s study “brave.” He asks about the reaction in the Army, and whether it was rank-dependent.
36:55: Wong says it was “eye-opening.” After some initial anger, “I started getting emails, calls, and notes from people throughout the Army: You’ve just exposed what everyone knows about. Senior leaders had a hard time acknowledging it.”
38:02: “The more senior you go in an organization, the less you have to comply with these trivial requirements.”
38:50: After the anger died down, the leadership came to realize people were not under attack, but rather a culture that had been created. “To see policies change because of a 34-page document…I’m glad to be part of that.”
39:09: Ken comments that the military has a track record of leading the way in cultural changes. The problem is much broader than the military; it reflects the culture of which it’s part.
40:18: Wong says the Army could do three things to improve its situation: First, acknowledge the problem…and that it happens at all levels. Secondly, exercise restraint. “Every level of Army likes to create requirements for those below them, but we need to allow those at the bottom to exercise their own judgment.” Third: We have to lead truthfully.
44:30: Ken notes the tendency to make up words so you aren’t committing a bad act; but rather referring to the word. Prioritize is an example. In the Navy, we used to call it, “Gun Decking or Pencil Whipping.”
45:10: Ken says it is often seen as a key role of a leader to provide “high cover” for subordinates. When you unpack that, it often implies that the leader took the hit; that’s who checked the boxes.
46:10: Ken says Wong’s work is not seen as a criticism of the Army or people; rather of the audit culture… “Little by little, it diminishes the integrity of the force.”
46:46: Dawn directs listeners to Wong’s IHMC lecture: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/
46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 28: Mike Gernhardt Discusses the Overlapping Challenges of Working Undersea and in Space
Mike Gernhardt’s career epitomizes the scientific overlap between the depths of the ocean and space. Prior to his career as a NASA astronaut, Gernhardt was a professional diver and engineer on subsea oil field construction and repair projects around the world.
As a child, Gernhardt vacationed in Florida, where he developed a love of the ocean. Like many children, Gernhardt dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, unlike most kids, he stuck with his dream and began taking steps to pursue it in high school when, in his own words, he “had already put together that working in space and in the sea were similar.”
Gernhardt received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, followed by his Master’s and Ph.D.—both in Bioengineering—from the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, he worked with his life-long mentor C.J. Lambertson, who is considered to be one of the godfathers of diving medicine.
Under Lambertson, Gernhardt received unparalleled field work experience, testing real-time the decompression tables that he’d developed and still constitute the commercial diving standard.
In 1992, Gernhardt was selected to be an astronaut at NASA, where he completed four space flights and space walks. He also started a company called Oceaneering Space Systems, where he transferred his subsea robotics experience to NASA. Gernhardt stated, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.”
Gernhardt has received numerous awards and honors, including the highly coveted NASA Distinguished Service Medal. To view his bios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L._Gernhardt ; http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/gernhard.html
In this episode, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, an esteemed diver and undersea expert herself, and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut, engage in a thought-provoking conversation.
1:35: Ken reads a 5-star iTunes review from Paula Olivet: “I wish this podcast aired everyday.” This show takes science as a personal, academic and professional venture, which it entirely is. It’s not all pipettes and mice. It’s ambition, and unquenchable thirst for answers. Even when I think the episode subject matter is not for me, I still find myself completely enthralled.”
2:32: Dawn recounts Gernhardt’s educational and professional background: He hold a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a professional deep sea diver and engineer on projects around world. He was a manager and Vice President of Special Projects for Oceaneering International, and established Oceaneering Space Systems to transfer subsea technology and operational experience to the international space program.
3:05: Ken adds: “His impact on the agency and how we do human space flight is really extensive.”
4:02: Dawn welcomes Mike and Tom to the episode.
4:31: Gernhardt explains his initial interest in diving: “As a four or five-year old I was always going fishing with my dad in Florida. At nine or ten, I was doing scuba diving on a family vacation. I got certified at age 12 and became a dive instructor at 18.” For the first couple of summers after college, he worked as a scuba instructor and boat captain at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Then he got into commercial diving, where he noted the limitations in decompression tables.
5:38: These limitations inspired him to study the physiology and biophysics of diving. In college, he studied physics and math, and was a pre-med major. When he graduated, he wasn’t ready to commit to graduate or medical school, so he worked as a commercial diver.
6:40: Describing his commercial diving experience, he says: “Unlike the more sheltered college environment, here it was like: What can you do in the water at the end of the hose? That really inspired me.”
7:02: The Medical Director of Ocean Systems was C.J. Lambertson, who took him under his wing. Gernhardt decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study with Lambertson. “That turned into a 30-year relationship.”
7:43: “We would generate the new decompression tables, and then I would go out and use them…. We tested them real-time.”
8:05: Lambertson said his ultimate goal was to make the field a laboratory. “In this period of three years, we generated tables that became the Oceaneering standard.” Roughly ten million dives have been done on those tables.
9:09: Dawn calls Lambertson one of the godfathers of diving medicine and asks what it was like to work with him.
9:20: Gernhardt answers: “He was an amazing guy. I started reading his books as an undergraduate. When I then met him for the first time, he looked professorial, older, he had a beard…When you shook his hand, he could squeeze your hand off.” Lambertson was also influential during World War II. “He wrote undersea warfare tactics/strategy that influenced everything, on top of the physiological work he did.”
10:24: Gernhardt adds: “He was a personal friend and father figure. When I was there he would just make the time to sit and talk. He was also a great mentor.” Lambertson read “every word” of Gernhardt’s dissertation. “He was hard on me.”
11:10: Gernhardt explains that Lambertson had been an advisor to NASA for decades and sat on all the review committees. “He was reviewing my work. People at headquarters said that was a conflict of interest. I told them, ‘No one’s going to be harder on me than Dr. Lambertson.’ We kind of fought off the bureaucrats on that and produced stuff that has really enabled the assembly and maintenance of space station.”
13:04: Gernhardt started Oceaneering Space Systems in 1987, where he transferred his sub-sea robotics experience to NASA. He invented the Cryopak, which used liquid oxygen for breathing and cooling to handle issues in micro-gravity. They called it the magnetic intake dewar.
15:02: Of the company, Gernhardt says, “We won a large contract to build a sub-critical liquid oxygen storage system, and we beat out major aerospace contractors. That was exciting for our young company at the time. That transitioned us into the space world.”
17:11: Gernhardt says, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.”
17:34: Gernhardt recalls the aerospace contractors who would go to the shop and think that we were selling atmospheric diving suits that weighed about a ton. “I was selling the concepts, the operational knowledge, the design knowledge, and some of these folks thought they were going to buy a suit from us.”
18:15: His company initially included just him and a secretary. “I hired every commercial diver that I knew, that had gone back and gotten an engineering degree. He combined that with going up to the best universities and interviewing top talent. “We put together this magical combination of seasoned commercial divers and smart as heck MIT and JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA] grads and really did an amazing amount of work.”
18:55: Tom asks him how he gave that all up to become a “worker-bee astronaut.”
19:35: Gernhardt explains that becoming an astronaut had been a lifelong goal of his. “In my early teens, I had already put together that working in space and in sea were similar.” Athletic as well, he had “set the distant goal to be an astronaut.”
20:20: Of his first year on the job (as astronaut), he recalls: “There’s a pile of manuals that go up from the floor past your desk, and you’ve got to learn all this, and then you’ve gotta learn to fly a T-38 jet…and then next thing you know you’re flying in space.”
20:45: Gernhardt says he was different from most astronauts in that his area of academic expertise was directly related to EVA (extravehicular activity.) That allowed him to design tools.
21:25: Gernhardt had invented the body-restraint tether (BRT) for undersea diving that became useful in space, as well.
23:20: Tom describes his experience using the BRT: “It was a dream. It enabled you to scramble anyplace on the space station and then grab onto a handrail with your third arm, which you provided, and that left your hands free. And you could turn your body left, right, in and out, and then you could carry it around just by bending it over your shoulder, and it was out of the way of your other tools. It was a very handy device on the space station.”
24:25: Dawn asks about the similarities between diving and EVA.
24:40: Gernhardt replies: “What’s similar is you’re working in a three-dimensional hostile environment: no air in sea or in space.” Furthermore, the way you think about planning the operation is similar, in terms of A, B and C. But the mechanics are very different: “Underwater we’re not in pressurized suits, so you have more mobility and dexterity. You use your hands to feel, but you also have poor visibility…you tend to use all of your body senses. In EVA you’re in a pressurized suit with a similar inflation pressure as a football or basketball; so, every time you move, you’re fighting that inflation pressure.”
26:18: In space, Gernhardt explains, even though you are “weightless,” you actually are not massless. “You and the suit weigh over 500 pounds in space. If you go fast, you could tumble out of control. My motto was: ‘You cannot go too slow’. Never let your hands get ahead of your brain.”
27:24: Another difference between the ocean depths and space: “In space, you have unlimited visibility. You can see literally millions of miles.”
27:40: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
28:00: Tom asks about Gernhardt’s first EVA because a few weeks before launch, Gernhardt sustained an injury that might have prevented him from participating.
28:30: Gernhardt tells the story: the mission was delayed a week, so he went on a date in Galveston. It was pouring rain and, after dropping his date off at the Grand Theater, he slipped and dislocated his shoulder while running through the parking lot in the rain.
30:10: “I had a great attitude,” Gernhardt says about his recovery and prospect of missing the mission. “If I can do it, great,” he though. “If not, it’s not about me—it’s about the mission.”
32:00: Gernhardt shares an anecdote about how the doctors okayed him for the mission after he proved that he could get in and out of the space suit. “I was in about as much pain as a human can stand. It was a huge mental focus, but it all worked out.”
37:00: Gernhardt talks about the oxygen prebreathe protocol he developed with his team. Fifty subjects experienced no bends, and very few bubbles.
38:42: Tom says: You can see Mike doing the prebreathe protocol on an Imax movie called “Space Station 3D.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9X84b9t3Do
39:00: Dawn says she was a research assistant on prebreathe protocol at Duke University with Dr. Vann. She assisted with monitoring of subjects and measuring how much they were bubbling at altitude.
40:42: Gernhardt talks about the in-suit light exercise protocol that saves complexity over other exercise protocols. “We use that routinely on space station, and we’ve never had any bends—we’ve had close to 200 EVAs without any decompression sickness.”
41:28: He is working on developing the details of a Phobos Mission in Mars Orbit planned for the 2030s.
42:20: On those missions, he adds, “We would do excursions in a pressurized excursion vehicle,” another of Gernhardt’s inventions. This is a small cabin with great windows; two people live in it for two weeks at a time. The pressure of that cabin is 8.2 pounds per square inch, with 34 percent oxygen.” It puts us at a much better posture for not having to denitrogenate to avoid decompression sickness.”
43:10: Air-lock operations are not fun, Gernhardt says. Tom compares the compressed feeling to “two hippos in the front seat of a Volkswagen.”
43:45: Gernhardt also invented the work efficiency index: the work time you get outside divided by the overhead it took you to get outside. “On the station we spent about two and a half hours inside for every hour outside, and to me that was crazy.”
44:12: “The whole concept is that we have this cabin that is optimized for viewing and low-overhead EVAs. And we can combine that with different mobility elements.”
45:50: Tom characterizes Phobos as a “low-gravity body; the size of a big city.” He asks Gernhardt: “What advantages do we gain from being around Phobos (or Deimos)?”
46:08: Gernhardt answers that Phobos is “very interesting scientifically. It will tell us about the natural history and evolution of Mars… We can pick up pieces of Mars on the Moon of Mars.”
46:55: “It is so much easier to go to the Moon of Mars than Mars’ surface. Mars it the worst place on solar system to try to land because there’s just enough atmosphere to get you hot, but not enough to slow you down.”
47:19: “By going to Phobos, we develop the infrastructure needed to go to Mars.”
48:29: “Phobos is a stepping stone. Ninety-nine percent of everything we would use to go to Phobos takes us towards Mars’ surface.”
48:50: Gernhardt adds that “Mars is only 9,000 Kilometers from Phobos, so every exploration activity or public outreach event that we do will have Mars looming large over the horizon and keep our focus on where we’re going.”
49:10: “My hope is that we sign up to that [going to Mars sometime in the 2030s] and have a plan that we can close a budget around, and really have a focused exploration effort….”
49:50: Gernhardt’s advice to aspiring astronauts: “Get as much education as you can; do things that you like because, if you like them, you’re going to have a good life; you’re going to be good at them…” Do things, he adds, “that are directed towards being an astronaut, but don’t do things that you don’t like in order to be selected as an astronaut.”
50:23: “Learn to be a team player. It’s not about individual super stars.”
50:47: Dawn thanks Mike.
51:48: Dawn marvels at the overlap in the undersea world and space and Gernhardt’s own seamless transition from undersea to space.
52:02: Ken says: “It’s a smooth transition, and Mike depicted it beautifully. He’s a great guy, and a valued collaborator; in fact, he’s truly a man for all seasons.”
52:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 27: Robb Wolf Discusses the Paleo Diet, Ketosis, Exercise, Nicotine … and Much More!
For fitness and Paleo Diet aficionados—and perhaps regular STEM-talk listeners—Robb Wolf is the type of esteemed guest who needs no introduction. Many people already know him by his best-selling book, “The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet,” (http://amzn.to/2gB6N4c) or his top-ranked podcast by that same name. (http://robbwolf.com/podcast/)
But what some people may not know is that Wolf also started the world’s first cross-fit affiliate gym; that he’s raising his young daughters on a paleo diet—which may account for their mouths having a similar phenotypical expression as hunters and gatherers; and that nicotine—yes, nicotine—can actually be good for you (just not delivered by cigarette) in some contexts.
STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford talk to Wolf about these and other fascinating insights in this episode.
Wolf hailed from a relatively unhealthy family, which pushed him towards discovering good health on his own terms. A keen interest and aptitude in science (he was a biochemistry major at California State University-Chico) set Wolf on the path of evolutionary medicine.
He began thinking seriously about pre-agricultural diets in response to his mother’s poor reaction to her consumption of grains, legumes, and dairy. Since that time, Wolf has become an expert, researcher, and self-experimenter of the Paleo Diet. His expertise has led him to become a review editor for Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism; co-founder of The Performance Menu, a nutrition and athletic training journal; and co-owner of NorCal, one of Men’s Health magazine’s top thirty gyms in America. He is also a consultant for the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program.
Wolf recently gave a lecture entitled “Darwinian Medicine: Maybe There IS Something to This Evolution Thing” at IHMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg
2:10: Dawn reads iTunes review entitled “No Bro Science Here” from someone nicknamed “Leafy Sweets:” “Science-based interviews with experts, post-docs and department/lab heads on relevant topics. No Bro Science here! Interesting discussions relevant to one’s well-being and interests.”
3:46: Dawn welcomes Robb and Ken.
4:10: “I was raised by two well-meaning, but quite ill parents. Both of them smoked, neither of them exercised, both of them developed Type-2 Diabetes pretty early in their lives, and I’m not really sure why…but somewhere along the line I suspected that if I ate better and exercised, that I could maybe have a better outcome.”
5:00: “They really kind of acquiesced all their health to the medical establishment, and I went just as opposite that vector as you can possibly imagine.”
5:30: “I had a pretty good interest in science in general… I got into an organic chemistry class (in high school) and loved it like I had never loved anything before, and actually discovered that I had an aptitude for spinning molecules in my head and thinking about bonding and stuff like that.”
6:55: After his degree in biochemistry, Wolf considered medical school, but he had some personal health problems. That’s when, “The evolutionary approach to health/medicine got on my radar.”
7:28: Plus, he says, “Academia seemed to move at glacial speeds.” “Around 2000-2001, I found this weird thing called Cross-fit. I opened a gym, and it happened to be the first cross-fit affiliate in the world, and I opened a second one (the fourth in the world) … That was kind of the medicine that I wanted to practice. I got to talk to people about sleep, food exercise; and build community.”
9:15: Wolf describes his entry into evolutionary medicine: He was vegan, he was not sleeping and he had moved to Seattle, into a tiny basement where he didn’t see the sun for several months. He had a lot of gastro-intestinal problems, as did his mother, whose rheumatologist told her she was allergic to grains, legumes and dairy.
10:47: Around 1998, Wolf learned about the Paleo Diet through the work of Arthur De Vany and Loren Cordain (who would become Wolf’s mentor). Lauren had written a paper called “Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-edged Sword.” (http://www.directms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf)
12:00: Dawn asks about the “contemporary collision between foods we’re wired to eat and what we find on the shelves of local supermarkets.”
12:15: Wolf responds: “We’re set up for failure. I half-jokingly say that if you live in this modern environment and you’re not diabetic and broken, then you are kind of screwing up. You’re not paying attention to your evolutionary history.”
12:45: “We have limitless caloric input. We don’t need to expend effort to obtain these items. We have limitless palate options.”
15:00: Wolf’s short definition of the Paleo Diet: “You’re generally not eating a much in terms of grains, legumes, and dairy. You eat everything else: meat, fruit, roots, shoots, vegetables.”
16:27: He also cautions against the trendy uptake of the diet: “Paleo became this thing where people were asking: ‘Is this Paleo or not?’ instead of ‘Is this a good item for me?’”
17:00: Wolf decries the use of the term “Paleo,” which was used early on in the anthropological literature to describe the diet.
17:25: Wolf says that he has been low-carb for a long time; he currently eats 100-150 grams of carbs a day. “I’ve really enjoyed ketogenic diets in the past. That’s where I get my best cognition from.”
17:35: “I am playing again with a ketogenic diet again because I am being leaned on by folks like you (Ford) and some other people to see if I can fuel my Brazilian Jujitsu activity.”
17:49: He can eat lentils, beans and corn…but not gluten. “I am highly reactive to gluten and gluten-like grains.”
18:45: Wolf discusses the role of genes in what we ought to eat, and the gut microbiome in modifying those genetics…He cites the studies of the Weizmann group in Israel, in which 800 people were given a sub-cutaneous glucose monitor and then fed a battery of meals. “The glycemic response was all over the map.”
20:00: “One person would eat a banana and have virtually no blood glucose response …Another person would eat a banana and get into nearly diabetic ranges… It’s clear in my mind that there’s massive variation in folks, and that a one size fits all approach is really, really problematic.”
21:00: Ken comments: “It would be surprising to me if Northern Europeans and Kitavans would both be ideally suited to eat exactly the same diet, particularly for genetic reasons, but also for gut microbiome reasons.”
21:50: Dawn asks if anyone has looked at the impact of ancestral diets on people doing manual labor jobs or professional athletes—since our ancestors were more active than we are.
22:00: Robb answers that most of the studies have been done in disease populations, such as people with cardiovascular disease, Type-2 Diabetes, insulin resistance or stage I/II renal disease.
23:43: “Both coaches and elite performers tend to be ahead of academia in empirically figuring out what works well.”
23:55: The Paleo way of eating has reached the Navy’s Special Warfare community.
25:05: “In college, most of us had some sort of horrific diet like pizza and beer for months on end and it didn’t kill us, so my greasy car salesman pitch is why don’t you give it [the Paleo diet] a shot for a month and see how you look, feel and perform; do blood work before and afterwards and see how it works.”
26:30: Dawn asks if an obese individual following a cleaner, healthier diet is enough to shift his/her phenotype to a healthier place.
27:11: “I think for the optimum human experience we need some sort of vigorous physical activity at least occasionally.”
28:00: “Ketogenic diet plus fasting can actually mimic a lot of the physiological processes that we see with exercise, but I’m not sure how much mileage we can get out of that. There’s some indication that a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting can enhance certain elements of our metabolism, like mitochondrial density [along with] pro-apoptotic and autophagy benefits.”
28:50: “We need periods of relative abundance and some scarcity, and that is then sending signaling that is possibly most consistent with health and longevity.”
29:10: Wolf discusses who food and the metabolic byproducts of food and exercise are often signaling molecules. “There’s an expectation for a certain type of cadence and beat to our physical activity and nutrient intake, and if we get out of step with that, then I think that we’re pre-disposing ourselves to a transcriptome that may be pathogenic at some point.”
30:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
31:15: Dawn asks about studies comparing unprocessed, whole-food diets to comparable Paleo diet.
31:46: Robb cites a Lynda Frassetto study comparing the Mediterranean and Paleo diets. (http://jn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/04/20/jn.115.224048.) The two groups were fed at a level so they would not lose weight. It was hard to get the Paleo group to eat enough food so they would not lose weight. Absent weight loss, they saw dramatically improved blood lipids and systemic inflammatory markers in the Paleo diet group.
34:26: Dawn talks about being vegetarian for 22 years, an emotional decision rooted in growing up on her grandparents’ farm during the summer and being uncomfortable eating what had been killed and that she had helped raise. “When I was seventeen, my grandfather told me who I was eating at the dinner table. So I called it quits…. But a lot of us are interested in the Paleo diet.” She asks about recommendations for vegetarians interested in the Paleo Diet.
36:08: Robb says, “If we’re doing eggs and dairy, it really is pretty easy to make that work. Properly prepared legumes are a great background, primary energy source; lots of coconut, coconut oil; cheese and butter.”
37:38: One possible caveat for those on vegetarian diets is to avoid a monochromatic dietary pattern. We need to be better about rotating foods in and out, like eggs.
39:50: At Wolf’s house, he does 90 percent of the cooking. His wife, who is Italian, was vegan when Wolf met her—and he impressed her with his cooking. She switched to his diet.
41:22: We really don’t eat much in the way of gluten. Many people think it’s just a fad. I’ve spent twenty years studying this from an immunological perspective, and there are a lot of folks that benefit from gluten free.
42:05: The preponderance of what they eat is sweet potatoes, fruit, fish, seafood; both of Wolf’s little girls eat homemade sauerkraut, homemade kimchi; liver.
42:22: His kids’ dentist has noticed that the kids have a lot of space between their teeth—and broad jaws, a notable phenotypic expression. This likely means they won’t have crowding of their teeth. Wolf attributes this to their nutrient-rich diet. On the contrary, lower nutrient-dense foods cause a shortening of the dental arch and crowding of teeth. “That would kill us were it not for modern dentistry.”
45:10: Still, his kids express the same attraction to sweet foods as everyone else. “We have to find some way …so that we aren’t on the losing end of food intake.”
45:48: Ken comments that the neuro-regulation of appetite is currently of huge interest and asks Rob to discuss it.
46:11: In the last fifty years, there have been a lot of macro-nutrient wars such as those between high and low carbs. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is some ability for people to eat an appropriate amount for their energetic needs and not much more/less. [It] boils down to the neuro-regulation of appetites.”
47:10: “The state of ketosis is incredibly satiating, and seems to be disproportionately so relative to caloric intake.
47:22: “One takeaway that I would love for folks to noodle on is that within medicine and dietetics, there is only one disordered eating that they acknowledge, and that is trying to limit palate options in some way. If you show up eating a big gulp and Twinkies — you are good to go.”
48:00: In every study that’s ever been done comparing the American Dietetics recommended diet with the vegan diet, or the high protein diet, etc. … the diet that fails consistently is the moderate, don’t-exclude-any-food-groups diet.
49:42: Ken asks Robb how he felt in ketosis initially, post-adaptation period.
51:22: Robb says when he first clicked into ketosis, around 1998, “It was amazing. I had incredible mental focus. I could go hours or even days without eating. It just didn’t phase me at all.” He was also very active at the time, doing gymnastics and Brazilian Capoeira.
54:30: Robb says exogenous ketones are “reasonably impressive.” Ketone salts give him GI upset. He is getting ready to play with ketone esters. He mixes MCT oil with soy lecithin and nut butter (as a carrier.) That mitigates his GI problems.
59:30: Robb comments on the cultural tendency to over-train. “We hold elite athletics on a pedestal. We assume their training should be emulated, and I haven’t seen that to be the case. And I see a lot of people break themselves as a consequence of that. Endurance athletes especially are neurotic about training.”
1:01:40: Ken comments: “Marathon running has been a sacred cow, and a symbol of personal virtue…We hear more and more of negative consequences associated with long-term, extreme endurance activities.”
1:04:12: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
1:04:50: Robb used to recommend high dose Omega 3 supplements. Now he recommends getting as much of it from your diet as you can, with deep water fish that are smaller on the food chain such as mackerel and sardines.
1:06:40: He says Omega 3s are “highly reactive poly-unsaturated fats: if we dump that into an already inflamed individual, that could be a disaster.” In certain people, other issues need to be tackled first before using Omega 3s as an adjunctive therapy.
1:08:30: Ken says nicotine gum seems to provide focus and a productivity boost, especially during activities demanding focus such as writing a book.
1:09:09: Robb started researching nicotine when he was giving talks on sleep, nutrition, alcohol and nicotine for the Navy SEALs. He found that nicotine enhances dopamine status; and is beneficial for gastrointestinal issues. The culprit (i.e., cigarettes) is the delivery system.
1:11:03: Robb tried nicotine gum, about which he says: “It was a whole other layer of peeling back the fog, and the focus. Plugging into the matrix for 45 minutes to an hour. I shared this information with the SEAL community. The flight docs just wanted to barbeque me alive.”
1:11:54: He recommends lozenges and gum, not cigarettes.
1:13:55: Dawn says her dad smoked when he did fine-scale modeling.
1:14:27: Ken comments that nicotine is among the most addictive drugs in common use. Nicotine has a 90 percent addiction liability (90 of 100 people would become addicted). Opiates are 50 percent; and alcohol, about 10 percent. With nicotine, there is not much of a list (unlike for opiates and alcohol) of societal or personal health hazards.
1:16:45: But one should probably be cautious regarding nicotine in cold weather. Robb once did long bow hunting in very cold weather and chewed nicotine gum, and because of the vascular constrictive effects, he went from being completely comfortable to his hands and feet turning into blocks of ice.
1:17:17: If you’re prone to Raynaud’s disease, nicotine would not be a good idea; or in a situation where your extremities need to be warm, it’s not a good idea.
1:18:04: Robb talks about the Lazy Lobo Ranch and the work of Allan Savory, who developed a process to reverse desertification by using smartly controlled grazing animals.
1:19:15: Robb moved to a three-acre ranch in Reno. Comments that Nevada used to be a giant grassland.
1:20:58: He uses a mob grazing technique with electric fencing. Because animals are bunched up tight, they compete to eat everything. The before/after photos of this piece of desert land are just stunning.
1:23:14: Allan Savory makes the point that one third of all the land masses on the planet are grasslands; this is amenable for growing grass/animals, and we’ve shied away from using these areas in these ways.
1:24:15: “I think there’s a real opportunity to produce lots of food, address some soil carbon issues, and heat sinks and water utilization. When you re-establish these grasslands, the water doesn’t just run off; you don’t get flooding. It actually re-fills aquifers.”
1:25:11: Ken says, “Allan Savory is a person that more people should know about and pay attention to.” (http://savory.global)
1:25:49: Robb’s new, upcoming book, “Wired to Eat,” is looking at the evolutionary biology story again. “The thing that seems to pop up again and again is sense of guilt and failure of morality around eating.” He diffuses that in the front of book.
1:28:24: “My hope is that both on a cognitive level and an emotional level people can plug into this and understand: ‘I’m not a failure because this stuff is hard.’” The back part of book contains a 30-day re-set for the neuro-regulation of appetite and getting your insulin in line. The final chapter is titled ‘Hammers, Drills and Ketosis: The Only Tool Your Doctor Will Never Use’. A carpenter wouldn’t argue about whether to use a drill, saw or ax — they each have specific and well-appreciated purposes. Ironically in medicine, the use of ketosis and fasting as tools is a controversial topic.
1:30:20: The book will be out in March or April, 2017. Amazon is taking pre-orders. (http://amzn.to/2hqfJJE)
1:30:46: Dawn asks about the genesis of Robb’s popular podcast. At first, the podcast was about answering questions from the audience and over time he shifted the podcast to an interview format. Currently, Dobb is thinking about adding a “news round-up” section to the podcast.
1:33:19: Dawn and Ken thank Robb for the interview and his recent IHMC lecture, available for viewing at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg
1:34:38: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 26: Richard Moon discusses deep-sea and high-altitude medicine
Dr. Richard Moon had an unusual inspiration to practicing medicine: a television show, in black and white, entitled, “Medicine in the ‘60s.” He remembers being blown away by watching live surgeries performed on the show. This eventually led him to a career in the operating room—not as a surgeon, but an anesthesiologist.
Like many STEM-Talk guests, Moon wears many hats. In addition to being a physician, he is a renowned researcher in the hyperbaric and diving medicine. He is currently a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at Duke University, and the Medical Director of Duke’s Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=828766
In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis, herself a rising research scientist in undersea medicine, as well as a highly experienced diver—earlier this year, she was inducted to the Women Divers Hall of Fame—talks with Moon, one of her mentors. Dawn met Moon when she participated in one of his research projects as a diver, and she went to him with research ideas as a potential research intern. She eventually became one of his graduate students at Duke University.
In this lively and informative mentor-mentee discussion, Dawn and Moon talk about the history of hyperbaric medicine, including the establishment of Duke’s world-renowned Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. They talk about medical conditions that can occur in deep sea diving, such as high pressure nervous syndrome and immersion pulmonary edema, as well as high-altitude sickness.
Moon shares insights about his experiments in both high altitude and deep sea medicine, as well as his own expedition in climbing Mount Everest.
Check out Moon’s home page at Duke: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?portfolio=richard-moon-md ; as well as his lecture at IHMC last January: “From the Ocean Depths to the Mountain Tops: How Do Humans Adapt?” https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160121/
00:15: Dawn introduces Ken and describes Moon as a world-renowned physician and researcher who works in hyperbaric and diving medicine.
00:40: Dawn says she was “very lucky to have Dr. Moon as a mentor.” She participated in his research projects, as a diver. She then went to him with research ideas, and he accepted her as a graduate student, and he’s been a mentor and colleague ever since.
1:45: Ken reads a five-star iTunes review from “GTG2010” called “Exploding Kid:” “Dear STEM-Talk, I like your show. The super telescope looking at asteroids is cool. I like it so much I’m going to explode. Love, Griffin, age 6.”
2:38: Dawn runs through Moon’s bio. He holds an M.D. and a C.M. from McGill University in Canada, and a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, as well as the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed publications.
3:48: Dawn welcomes Moon to the podcast.
4:06: Moon describes what sparked his interest in medicine when he was in high school. He watched a television show, in black and white, called “Medicine in the ‘60s.” “It showed operations. It was mind-blowing, so I decided that I had to go into medicine.”
4:49: In medical school, Moon’s first interest was in pulmonary medicine—simply because in the first-year lecture series on organ systems, the one on the pulmonary system was the best. Yet, he felt compelled to do something different and took a couple of years off to study biomedical engineering.
6:20: Moon went to Duke University with a fellowship in pulmonary medicine as well as an opportunity to undergo scientific training in diving physiology. One of his mentors, Enrico Camporesi, encouraged him to go into anesthesiology.
7:20: “Eventually he [Camporesi] won me over. That’s where I am today.”
7:46: Moon’s interest in diving physiology initially came from the television program “Sea Hunt.” He also read the Jacque Cousteau books, which talked about decompression sickness and carbon monoxide poisoning. “When it came time to figure out where I was going to go after internal medicine, since Duke had this mega lab, the best in the world, and some leading lights in diving physiology, I just couldn’t resist.”
8:48: Dawn comments that the F.G. Hall Laboratory, which is now part of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology “is considered to be one of the best and prestigious environmental physiology labs in the world. Especially back then, there was research being done that wasn’t being done and hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world.”
9:18: Moon talks about the history of the lab. People have always asked, ‘How did this undersea lab get to be in a place that isn’t near the ocean?’ “It was a confluence of interests at Duke at the time. Herb Salzman was a pulmonologist interested in diving; F.G. Hall had been of an earlier generation and interested in altitude physiology; a surgeon named Ivan Brown was interested in cardiac surgery under hyperbaric conditions. This was an era before heart and lung machines were developed. So, the notion of drenching the tissue with oxygen was very appealing – if you could hyperoxygenate tissues in a hyperbaric chamber during surgery, you would have longer available time to perform surgery.”
11:07: One of the chambers at the Duke Hyperbaric Center was built as a hyperbaric operating room. Enough money was put together to create the facility. By the time the chamber was open, heart and lung machines were in place, so the whole concept of surgery in a hyperbaric chamber was out of date; however, the Duke Hyperbaric Center remained a nice facility to treat patients.
12:03: In 1968, after the nuclear submarine disaster, the Navy realized that it didn’t have a facility to do deep diving. So, Saltzman was asked to develop a deep diving program for salvage operations at 1000 feet of seawater.
12:35: In the late ‘60s through mid-70s, there was a perceived expiration of oil. Several labs were created around the world (two labs in the U.S. (University of Pennsylvania, Duke), one lab in Europe, and one lab in Japan) to study the physiology of humans during exposure to relevant depths for oil exploration (1000-2000 feet). Several problems were identified for humans at these extreme depths, including high pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS, where a diver gets tremors, difficulty standing up, nausea, vomiting).
14:08: Part of the Duke endeavor, called the Atlantis Dive Series, was to work out how HPNS could be overcome. One idea: to put a little bit of narcotic gas (nitrogen) in the helium-oxygen breathing mix; it was felt this might offset HPNS. It did work, but it had other effects such as an increase in breathing gas density.
15:00: With an increase in gas density, did lung work to provide enough oxygen to the tissues and remove carbon dioxide? Duke was the first to measure blood gases, such as oxygen, and pH under those conditions. They found that the lungs actually worked pretty well breathing a denser gas, contrary to common belief. The Duke researchers provided the boundaries on what the lungs could do under those circumstances.
16:15: To get to 2,000 feet, it takes several days: one way to offset HPNS is to add nitrogen to the mix, Decompression is slow – it takes 2-3 weeks to get people to the surface from depth due to decompression issues.
17:10: The Atlantis Dive Series conducted four experiments—each with three male study participants living inside the chamber. “They were stuck inside. If one of them had developed an acute illness, say appendicitis, it would have taken us three weeks to get him out.” They were also in tight quarters and slept in bunks in layers. Food had to be locked in.
18:10: Our part of the experiment was to have each person exercise on an exercise bicycle. The other guys had to place an arterial catheter in the wrist. The blood samples then had to be analyzed in a blood gas machine. “It was an adventure not only in biology, but also in engineering. “
19:10: Dawn compares it to telemedicine, and asks about the psychological issues of the men in the experiment.
19:40: Moon says there were areas of friction: “Three is worse than two or four because one person is always the fall guy. It was a challenge. They were carefully chosen, and they were up to it, and ultimately did a great job.”
20:00: Dawn mentions linking to Duke University’s F.G. Hall Center: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=1061
20:48: One of the benefits of Duke’s chamber is that it is actually within a hospital. “We can expose people to high or low pressure to simulate altitude and have all the accoutrements of medicine available.” Moon adds they’ve been able to do some very interesting studies. He mentions one, led by Dr. Jake Freiberger, which looks at nitrogen narcosis and any cognitive effects of additional carbon dioxide.
22:21: Another study is looking at immersion pulmonary edema, which is basically “drowning from the inside,” or when divers’ or swimmers’ lungs fill up with fluid. They’ve shown: People who are susceptible to pulmonary edema have higher pressures for a given amount of exercise than others. This issue reached public consciousness because Navy Seals have experienced this malady. “These are young, healthy, exceptionally fit individuals who start coughing up fluid/blood in the middle of what would otherwise be a normal swim.”
24:00: Moon explains that the hearts of people susceptible to pulmonary edema are normal, but just a little bit different. Their left ventricle is a little stiffer than normal when the heart fills up with blood. Therefore, in order to fill it, the pressure is a little bit higher; adding to that is extreme exertion, which raises the pressure even higher. That’s enough to break the barrier between the blood within the lung and the air spaces within the lung, and cause fluid to leak.
25:18: To deal with it, a lot of people (including the Navy) have recommended pushing fluids. Dehydration is a bad thing; overloading with fluid tends to make the problem worse. Some potential drugs could be taken.
26:10: Navy SEALs tend to get it; and triathletes—especially during the swim part of the race – can also experience it. “Triathletes are go-go people; want to win the race. They often see it, not as a health problem so much as something that just slows them down.”
26:54: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
27:40: Problem with altitude boils down to one thing: low levels of oxygen. Because pressure is lower, the partial pressure of oxygen is lower as well…low oxygen has a variety of effects on human physiology. People who go to high altitude often experience acute mountain sickness, which is nausea, vomiting. It can cause high altitude cerebral edema or high altitude pulmonary edema, where lung fill up with fluid.
29:07: If you go to 10,000 feet and then exercise, you realize at altitude you really can’t do it as well as you can at a lower altitude (e.g., you are short of breath). One of the mysteries of altitude is people who have lived there, such as Sherpas…on Moon’s trek to Mount Everest, they were continually surpassed by Sherpas with 80 kilos on their back. They were small guys—150 pounds at most.
30:50: On their way to Mount Everest, their blood oxygen saturation started off in the 70s when their place landed; they were often down in the 60s. If you ask the average physician what would happen if blood oxygen is in the 60s, they would say brain damage. It’s also difficult to do field research. On the other hand, you can do things in the field that you can’t do in a lab-based facility. “It’s always a balance, and you get incremental pieces of information from each type of research.”
32:27: Moon mentions a study that was propelled by John Andrews, a Green Beret before medical school, who had experienced altitude issues. They studied a new drug, called Riociguat (for people for pulmonary hypertension); they are interested in whether this drug would increase exercise performance at altitude.
33:50: They found that pulmonary pressure did go down; the drug worked as advertised; but, unfortunately, it didn’t change exercise performance or improve oxygenation. Had it worked, it could have been a very useful drug for special forces deployed in mountainous areas throughout the world.
34:40: Moon discusses hyperbaric oxygen therapy, calling it “essentially a dive in a hyperbaric chamber breathing 100 percent oxygen at double the atmospheric pressure.” It has therapeutic applications for diving injuries and carbon monoxide poisoning. You can wake people up more quickly, prevent long-term complications, and make people feel better very quickly. It can also be used to treat gas gangrene—an infection of soft tissues that is highly lethal. Hyperbaric oxygen facilitates the killing of those organisms. It is also therapeutic for healing wounds in people with atherosclerosis and diabetes (related foot injuries).
37:14: Moon talks about career paths for people interested in studying diving or high-altitude medicine. He says there are several routes: one is doing expeditionary medicine in the Armed Forces. Another is going into a related field such as surgery, internal medicinal pulmonary medicine or anesthesia, and using altitude medicine as a sideline.
38:25: To do it full-time, Moon suggests programs at Duke or the University of Pennsylvania; or the military.
38:48: Dawn adds there are close ties (and opportunities) between both academic and military research centers.
39:30: Moon says he has read a lot of books written by people (like Jacque Cousteau) and many of the mountaineers. In terms of the medicine of diving, the book that really got him into it was edited by Peter Bennett and David Elliot. It’s a classic called “The Physiology and Medicine of Diving.” Fred Bove also edited a book called “Diving Medicine” for several editions.
40:41: Moon talks about his own expedition to Mount Everest, first noting that during the earliest “Hillary” expeditions, they had to walk from Katmandu. Now people fly into Lukla (in Nepal), “the most dangerous airport in the world. There’s no second chance for the pilot. You’re flying in with wingtips close to mountains…the runway goes cliff, runway, cliff…You have this little landing strip, so there’s no way to turn the aircraft around if you miss the landing.”
42:00: “The first day, you have to go down 1,000 feet, and then up 1,000 feet. At the end of that day, you think: ‘If this continues, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it.’ But the scenery is spectacular: It starts off tropical. [Then it becomes] almost like a hike in a U.S. National Park. The higher you go, eventually it becomes barren, as trees drop away. Eventually it is snow and ice. By the time you get to base camp, it’s totally snow. But it also has a huge diurnal variation in temperature. When you wake up, you’ve gone through minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. By lunchtime, you’re sitting with very little clothing on. Once the sun goes down behind the mountain, it becomes very cold again.”
43:36: “The Sherpas are delightful people. There is usually one room only that is warm; with a stove in the middle burning yak gum. Food is pretty good. “Despite eating like crazy because you’re hiking, and you’re hungry, we lost weight … It seems to be an altitude effect.”
45:00: Dawn observes that whenever they bring the tools of the trade into the field, whether deep divers or free divers, there’s always always a lot of interest peaked in terms of the research being done.
45:31: A British group had a full-blown lab at 12,000 feet at Namche, and another group had one at base camp: they were doing muscle biopsies, exercise tests…that data is still being crunched. “Climbing community is like the diving community: it’s a very elite group of people. Everyone’s got their own theory on how to do it, how best to prepare for it. There’s a relative lack of science because the experimental conditions are so tough.”
46:25: Dawn thanks Moon.
46:37: Dawn commentates on being able to interview her mentor, and Ken calls Moon “a broad and fascinating fellow.”
46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 25: James Briscione discusses the art & science of food & flavor
James Briscione’s stellar cooking career began humbly: As a teenager, he washed dishes at a now defunct restaurant (named Jubilee) on Pensacola Beach. He quickly rose through the ranks, at age 24 becoming the chef de cuisine at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, which is considered one of the best restaurants in the South, and later the sous chef at the prestigious New York City restaurant Daniel.
Today Briscione, who lives in New York City, is a top-tier chef, author of three books on cooking, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, and a three-time champion on the Food Network’s cooking competition series Chopped. So what is he doing on STEM-Talk, you might ask? Briscione is also versed in the science of cooking and flavor. He partnered with IBM in creating the “Chef Watson” project. This computer-based program generates hundreds of novel flavor combinations based on the compatibility of chemical compounds in food.
In this episode, Briscione talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC Chef Blake Rushing about the art and science of food, and Briscione’s career as a chef. Briscione’s three books include: “Just Married and Cooking” (with his wife Brooke Parkhurst): http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD; “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson”(http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0); and “The Great Cook: Essential Techniques and Inspired Flavors to Make Every Dish Better.” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr). He also has his own, new television show on the Food Network called “Cooking with Dad.”
Briscione, his ideas on cooking and his own culinary creations have been featured in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, Time Magazine and hundreds of other media outlets throughout the world. Briscione’s recent talk at IHMC, entitled “Who teaches the cooks to cook?” can be viewed at https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/
Dive into this delicious interview—an entertaining and informative conversation between three foodies.
00:32: Ken introduces Blake Rushing as the guest co-host of this episode of STEM-Talk. Rushing is IHMC’s chef, as well as the owner of Union Public House in Pensacola.
1:00: Ken introduces James Briscione as, “Working in the boundary spaces between the science of food, science and taste and even AI systems, such as Chef Watson.”
1:49: Dawn reads 5-Star iTunes review from “Beautronical:” “I am continually enthralled by the variety and depth of ideas presented here. Also, it is rare that one finds great minds matched by great voices. Given the ketogenic bent of certain interviewers, perhaps mellifluous is the wrong term, but I’ll use it nonetheless.”
4:42: Ken introduces himself and Blake Rushing as hosts of the interview; and then welcomes James to the interview.
5:05: James says he remembers the food made by his Italian grandmother. Among them: chicken cacciatore (although the mushy carrots bugged him.) The “greatest mashed potatoes… Sunday red sauce; sausage and meatballs loaded down with pecorino cheese.”
6:55: “True learning doesn’t often happen until you’re in the kitchen every day,” Briscione tells his students. He didn’t go to culinary school, but has been in the kitchen since he was 16.
8:15: At 16, he was a bus boy washing dishes for two restaurants: fine dining upstairs and casual beach dining downstairs.
9:33: As a teenager and at the beginning of college, Briscione thought, ‘There’s no way I am going to spend the rest of my life in a kitchen.’ He was working on a degree in sports medicine in Birmingham, and worked summers at the restaurant [in Pensacola]. After his second summer, something clicked: he changed his course of study from sports medicine to nutrition.
11:00: James knocked on the back door of Bottega Cafe [in Birmingham] http://www.bottegarestaurant.com/cafe/ and said, ‘I want to work here.’ He got a job as pizza maker with a wood-fired oven. He remembers stretching the dough and putting the toppings on it, then handing it off to the next guy. “That and lugging firewood to store underneath giant hearth oven.”
12:54: Briscione talks about working with Frank Stitt, owner and chef at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham http://www.highlandsbarandgrill.com , whom Briscione calls “a great leader.” He fosters a great sense of family in all of his restaurants; his cooks go and work in the farms for harvesting veggies. Briscione attributes his success to the fact that, “I showed up everyday. I was there, and I was there early.”
16:08: Briscione won on Chopped three times. “I always just try to do a little bit more than everybody else. I always want to out-hustle the other guy.”
17:05: He recalls one Chopped experience: “It’s insanely hot in that kitchen; four stoves; four ovens. No hoods pulling the heat away. It’s a warehouse essentially. I was mincing an onion as fast as I could. You could hear the judges say, ‘It seems like Chef James already has something’…I heard that; everyone else heard that. I at least gave the impression that I knew what I was doing. I never touched that onion.”
19:30: Another theme of Briscione’s career has been “being in the right place in the right time.”
20:00: Ken discusses fat as a taste receptor, and one of many taste receptors that humans have. Our tongues have receptors for detecting fat; he asks Briscione if he considers fat a taste or an oral sensation, or both.
21:00: Briscione says that he thinks it’s both.
21:36: “The tongue is a detector of nutrients and toxins. All of these different nutrients that are essential—I think we have receptors for all of those.”
22:10: Ken remarks that people make a distinction between having a receptor and taste; sensitivity of the fat receptor is modulated by a protein called CD36. People vary in their ability to sense fat, and it’s related to the level of that protein.
23:55: Ken adds that “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,” by Jean Anselme Brillat-Savarin, and translated by M.F.K. Fisher) (http://amzn.to/2f4QkQw) is among the greatest works on food…largely because of the emergence of the wonderful notion of flavor.
24:24: Briscione on taste: When you take a bite of cake, you start to identify it because you smell it. It hits your tongue, which loves the sugar. As you begin to chew, the volatile molecules make their way to the back of the throat and cheeks.
26:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
27:00: Chef Watson sifts through data in a way that puts new flavors together. (https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community)
27:48: Examples include salmon and licorice; pineapple and blue cheese.
29:00: Watson also understands different cultural ingredients.
30:22: Briscione talks about his favorites: gently cooked (sous vide) apples, surrounded by olive oil and fresh sage. Olives and cherries (a jam out of that—the best condiment for a cheese plate.)
31:50: “Mushrooms, strawberries and chicken didn’t make sense. But it works really, really well…. This [Chef Watson] is a great thing: it shows the true collaboration between man and machine.”
33:37: One of Briscione’s favorite compounds: 4-methylpentanoic acid, which is found in pizza. “We have scientific proof that pizza is delicious.”
35:02: A strawberry has 383 compounds that make up the smell of that strawberry; they may not be the ones we recognize right away. The body is still sensing all of those. A lot of matching happens.
35:40: Mesifurane is a key compound in strawberries; on its own, it smells like baked bread.
36:51: Ken and James discuss Chef Watson as a kind of “cognitive orthotic” enabling increased creativity and efficiency in the kitchen.
37:10: “Creating recipes usually means sitting down with a stack of cookbooks; it’s a long and complicated process, and I liken it to decision fatigue.”
38:48: Chef Watson removes this burden by providing a list of ingredients that will work together, so that chefs can focus on the creative process of putting those ingredients together.
39:40: Briscione talks about using the Golden Ratio in cooking; just as in painting, there are those born with an intuitive understanding of the proportionality in the Golden Ratio, and those that learn it. “[Chef] Watson helps you get to that point: I can find hidden pattern in food that helps me be better at what I do.”
40:40: Ken comments that the Golden Ratio is seen elsewhere, such as in mathematics, with the Fibonacci sequence.
41:56: “One of the strongest pairings is between olives and citrus: they have about 60 percent of compounds in common. Wherever olives grow, so do citrus fruits.”
43:27: In Briscione’s upcoming book, he features a lemon curd dessert with an extra olive oil (not butter) finish. The crumble top is a sort of streusel made with oil-cured olives, a bit of rosemary, brioche crumbs and sweetened almonds. “It’s a beautiful savory-sweet interesting dessert.”
44:37: “Computational creativity can break through the bias/blindness in the cultural underpinnings of cooking.”
45:15: In the Watson method, “We’re looking at ingredients with a complete blank slate.” For example, in looking at a tomato, break free from the basil. “Erasing those pre-conceived notions was key to project.”
47:30: More information on Chef Watson can be found at: www.ibmchefwatson.com.
48:40: Briscione talks about sous vide cooking: ‘under vacuum’ is the literal definition. It is very precise low-temperature cooking held at the exact degree of doneness that we want [whatever food] to be.
52:30: Ken talks about how when he was in the Navy, in the late 70s and 80, he invented a super crude version of sous vide. He vacuum-packed food in the same machine used for electronics. It was “seal-a-meal,” but much better than the green mess-hall food.
54:10: Briscione says the next thing in cooking will be precision temperature control, such as Control Freak (an induction top) from PolyScience Culinary; Combi ovens; and CVap (Controlled Vapor Technology) ovens.
56:15: Briscione talks about hydrocolloids or gums: “People have had them in their kitchens for as long as they’ve lived.” Examples include flour and corn starch, or anything that forms a gel in the presence of water. Xanthan gum is the gateway drug to hydrocolloids. Others are derived from seaweed.
1:00:00: Ken comments on the irony of the public perception that chemicals in food are a bad thing, when food is made up of chemical (compounds.) He shares a funny anecdote about walking in and out of popular restaurant in Atlanta that boasted of no chemicals in their food.
1:01:36: Ken asks Briscione what he eats, and he says, “So far, a muffin and coffee today.” As for Briscione’s favorite foods: “Any piece of the pig is going to make me really, really happy.”
1:02:15: “I can eat a large watermelon by myself in minutes. Vegetables make me really happy.”
1:03:00: A favorite recipe using modernist cooking techniques: Vegan ramen broth, with smoked tofu and dried Shitake mushrooms, ginger, garlic and scallions. With soy sauce and pork.
1:04:15: His own favorite restaurants: The NoMad in NYC: for their “wonderful vegetable entrees. They take a single ingredient and present it to you on the plate in three or four forms.” He’s also a fan of the Gramercy Tavern.
1:06:10: His favorite daddy-daughter date is Dominique Ansel’s bakery in NYC.
1:07:00: When Briscione and his wife Brooke Pankhurst (also a Pensacola native) come home to the South, they enjoy good fried seafood such as fried mullet, snapper throats and mullet backbones — as offered at Chet’s Seafood.
1:09:44: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
1:10:25: Briscione talks about his first cookbook, “Just Married and Cooking” (http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD): “The thing I love about that book is that I can open to any page in that book, and point to a recipe, and tell you a story about the first time we cooked that.” He characterizes the recipes as “everyday meals for ourselves.”
1:11:43: Talking about his book, “The Great Cook,” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr) which came out last year: “It’s really kind of all these great dishes that all cooks should know.” It reads as if Briscione, a great cooking teacher, is sitting there at the kitchen counter and coaching them through dishes. Plus, it has really beautiful photography.
1:13:34: Also last year, the Chef Watson cookbook came out, “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson:” http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0. Briscione talks about one recipe: Spanish almond crescent, conceived as a pastry for a breakfast meeting. “I love Spanish food, and Spain. The almond is a seed for Watson to build the flavor pairings off of: saffron, black pepper, cocoa and coconut milk.”
1:16:30: Ken and Briscione talk about their favorite places in Pensacola, including Joe Patti’s fish market, and Chet’s and Jerry’s Drive-In.
1:17:28: Ken says: “When I have people in town, from NYC or San Francisco, food writers or chefs, I don’t take them to our fine dining restaurants. I get an excellent wine and good wine glasses; and we have a whole feast at Chet’s.” Ken’s favorites: marinated flounder or grouper.
1:19:20: Briscione talks about his new television show on the Food Network, “Cooking with Dad:” (http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/dad-and-daughter-pasta-0251005.html). He describes it as: “What it looks like for a chef to cook at home with his kids…Or what’s it’s like to just put dinner on table every night. Or snack after tap class. Or Sunday morning brunch.”
It includes Briscione and Brooke, their 7-year-old daughter Parker, and 14-month-old son.
1:21:31: Ken thanks Briscione for the interview as well as his IHMC lecture, which gathered well over 300 people and can be viewed at: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/
1:21:58: Ken says this episode “this episode combined two of my favorite topics: the science of food spiced with a touch of AI.”
1:22:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.
Episode 24: Doug McGuff talks about resistance training, myokines, strength and health
One could say that Dr. Doug McGuff is one of the pioneers of BMX motocross bike racing in Texas. He built the state’s first race track, having gotten hooked on the sport as a teenager in the 1970s.
The sport also triggered a deeper interest in fitness. As McGuff tried strengthen his core for bike racing, he discovered Arthur Jones’ Nautilus training technique and bartered janitorial services for a Nautilus gym membership.
McGuff’s interest and aptitude for studying the body led him to pursue medicine at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He specialized in emergency medicine, was chief resident of emergency medicine at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and a staff physician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Hospital in Ohio. McGuff is currently an ER physician with Blue Ridge Emergency Physicians in Seneca, South Carolina.
The other side of McGuff’s career is dedicated to fitness, or as he says—helping people never have to go to the ER. Realizing a lifetime dream, he opened up his own fitness facility in 1997 called Ultimate Exercise. The gym is dedicated to the type of high-intensity fitness training using the Super Slow protocol.
In this episode of STEM-Talk, McGuff talks about why this type of exercise is better for the body, safer, and able to prevent age-related conditions such as sarcopenia.
McGuff is the author of three books: “Body by Science: A Research-Based Program for Strength Training, Body-building and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week,” http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN (co-authored with John Little), “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the “Sick Care” Sinkhole,” http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl (co-authored with economist Robert Murphy), and “BMX Training: A Scientific Approach.” http://amzn.to/2fUhqPd
He is also featured in several YouTube videos on high-intensity training. His recent IHMC lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” is available at https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/.
2:03: Dawn reads an an iTunes 5-star review from “Guy who likes Chipotle,” which is entitled “Interesting and just complex enough.” “STEM-Talk does an amazing job of delivering high-level information on a variety of topics, without making it too complex to understand.”
4:21: Dawn introduces Doug and Ken.
4:47: McGuff says that as a young teen, shortly after getting interested in BMX bike racing, he started working out with his brother’s weights, which was transformational. “It is still the closest thing to magic or a miracle that I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
6:44: Also as a teen, Doug McGuff bartered janitorial services for a membership to a Nautilus gym, where he found a copy of a book by Nautilus founder Arthur Jones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jones_(inventor)) about training principles. “It was the first book I ever read cover to cover. To say that book changed the course of my life would be a massive understatement.”
8:13: During the summer of 1994, McGuff met Arthur Jones, who greatly influenced his thoughts on exercise resistance training.
12:00: McGuff went into ER medicine because “It was rare to find something that I felt that I had intrinsic talent in. I felt like I functioned very well in that environment.” His career has focused on two things: taking care of people who fall down and get hurt; and trying to prevent it from happening in the first place.
13:00: McGuff talks about being a pioneer of BMX in Texas, as he built the first track there and went back to racing in the late 90s and won the state championship. He also trained some world champion level BMX racers.
14:30: Now he characterizes himself as “a practicing physician so busy with the chronically sick and massively debilitated; the chasm between day to day life and actually thinking about prevention is such a wide chasm that it’s hard to imagine.”
15:00: “I would love to see the day where the commercial says, ‘Ask your doctor if diet and exercise are right for you….’ Instead of whatever pill of the day.”
15:44: McGuff notes the idea of physiologic headroom, which economist Arthur De Vany came up with. “Physiologic headroom is the difference between the least you can do and the most you can do.” See De Vany’s book, “The New Evolution Diet”: http://amzn.to/2ewDOJ8
17:50: “The better part of our lives, in terms of our functional ability, are much less than what they should be.”
18:45: McGuff says that high-intensity interval training is what appears to reverse the biomarkers of aging, according to the literature on the topic.
21:00: In McGuff’s book, “Body by Science,” (http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN), he presents the concept of Super Slow training: lifting and lowering weights very slowly. This protocol emerged out of Nautilus, after Arthur Jones commissioned a University of Florida research study on osteoporosis. Ken Hutchins, an employee of Arthur Jones, was the primary person who defined and popularized the Super Slow form of resistance training exercise.
22:40: The protocol applied to younger subjects resulted in similarly good results.
23:18: More important is the style and intent (of lifting weights). “If your intent is to as intensely and deeply fatigue the muscle as you can…if you start weight-lifting with as gradual a load as possible, and then you just try to lift and lower with high effort, during that initial phase, depriving yourself of initial momentum allows the speed to express itself organically.” In one person, that cadence might be 4 seconds up, 4 down; or 8 up; 8 down. In most people that ends up being 10 seconds up; 10 down.
25:03: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
25:23: Ken talks about the importance of avoiding injury when exercising and posits that Super Slow should be good in this respect.
25:48: McGuff says that he opened his gym, Ultimate Exercise, in 1997. They average 100-120 workouts per week. “We’ve never injured anyone in the facility…. That gives some credit to a slow cadence protocol. You can still get hurt [during a slow cadence protocol] if you don’t observe good biomechanics.”
26:40: The mastermind of “congruent exercise” is Bill DeSimone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_DeSimone), which is based on using biomechanics to prevent injury.
27:45: At his gym, McGuff tells his trainers: “train ‘em hard as hell, don’t injure anyone, give them adequate recovery.”
29:00: “When we talk about sarcopenia, the population has it in their head that it’s a natural consequence of aging. And it’s not. Sarcopenia is a natural consequence of aging with our modern Western lifestyle injected into the equation.” McGuff notes this did not happen in hunter gatherer societies. “That doesn’t mean modern tech cannot be exploited to leverage those evolutionary adaptations.”
30:10: Age-related sarcopenia occurs when there is atrophy in the type II muscle fibers. “When you recruit muscle to do work, that happens in an orderly and sequential function.” You start with lower-order muscles to do work. Finally, you recruit higher-order muscles, which produce a lot of force output, but they fatigue very quickly. The latter are hard to get at, so you have to produce fatigue in a disciplined fashion.
32:54: An elderly person loses balance because if you go off the vertical plane (not on bone and bone tower), the only way to right yourself is by activating very powerful muscles to correct that posture deficit. “They fall because they don’t have the fast-twitch IIB fibers to yank them back into corrective posture. That’s why they go down like a tree in the forest.”
34:00: McGuff defines exercise as protocolized strength training; disciplined and aimed at achieving a deep level of fatigue rapidly. You can’t stand more than 12-15 minutes of that intensity. You want the minimal effective dose.
35:07: “Most people think of exercise as directly causing the adaption. The exercise produces the stimulus; your body receives it and makes a physiologic adaption.”
35:40: “I make a clean distinction between exercise and activity.”
36:41: “Once you create this physiologic headroom, you want to use it. It’s like having a Ferrari and being restricted to the school zone. It just doesn’t work. That’s not a bad thing.”
37:30: McGuff talks about muscular failure, a term coined by Arthur Jones meaning lifting and lowering weight, and getting to a point where you are trying to lift weight, but it won’t go. The problem is that failure in and of itself does not necessarily define an adequate stimulus. The desired stimulus is a meaningful depth of fatigue, or a substantial reduction in one’s starting level of strength. In the gym, one may reach muscular failure in a particular exercise without reaching an adequate depth of fatigue.
41:25: Ken notes that the Super Slow protocol, as described in McGuff’s book, is performed exclusively on machines, and asks whether this training transfers to what are sometimes called “real world” functional movements and basic movement patterns (squat, hinge, push, pull, carry).
41:50: “When people talk about functional movements and movement patterns, I find that they are fairly ill-defined. Human movement in a functional sense is inherent to our physiology and anatomy. What is necessary for those to express themselves in real world applications is that you have to have a motor that is able to drive the movements of that appendage.”
43:00: “The notion that you have to recreate those functional movement patterns in the gym under load for those functional movement patterns to be expressed out of the gym is a little bit of a false construct. Some of those natural movement patterns, when done under load, are very joint incongruent.”
44:47: Ken and Doug note that confusing “sport” and “exercise” can be dangerous.
44:55: Dawn asks Doug about low intensity training as typically prescribed for the elderly.
45:15: Exercise recommendations for the elderly are often off-base. People making them don’t understand how to invoke high-intensity and low force at the same time. Being physically active at a low level of intensity is part of our evolutionary and biological background. If you get at those IIB fibers, that type of activity expresses itself organically.
46:40: What happens is that you carry out a type of long-term, low-intensity activity that says: This animal is carrying out chronic low-level activity. This becomes interpreted as a negative thing—the stimulus to lose type IIB muscle fibers rather than gain them. “In the long term, you’ve jettisoned one of largest glucose reservoirs in your body, and you have therefore undermined insulin sensitivity.” This accelerates sarcopenia.
47:20: Ken notes that one often sees this adaptation in marathon runners. McGuff, says, “That is why marathon and ultra-endurance athletes look cachexic … because they delivered a biological stimulus to their organism that says these type-IIB fibers are unnecessary for this activity and we need to get rid of them.”
48:12: Dawn asks about exercise while traveling and without good access to good equipment.
48:30: Doug, replies that “We’ve gotten the notion that weights are a necessary part of the equation, and they really aren’t. Through infimetrics, I can provide an intensity of workout that exceeds one with weights. It’s hard to describe in a podcast, but Google McGuff’s name and timed static contraction protocol or infimitric YouTube videos.
50:00: Ken notes that Blood flow restriction training, such as Kaatsu, increases localized IGF-1 levels and sensitivity via accumulation of metabolites, particularly lactate and H (+) and asks if McGuff thinks this type of training is useful.
51:53: Doug discusses blood-flow restriction training, which can produce equal hypertrophy and strength adaptions using a much lighter weight. The theory is that you are concentrating the by-products of metabolism that occur during exertion locally within the muscle, for example the entrapment of local IGF production.
52:46: “I think it is of benefit from several standpoints, one is the fact that it requires less resistance to get an equal result — that increases the safety margin and increases the safety margin for extremely strong people.”
53:37: When you use a slower-cadence protocol, that creates a high degree of sustained muscular tension that produces vascular congestion within musculature that traps metabolites in the same way blood flow restriction does.
54:48: Ken says he’s had good results using blood flow restriction (using the Kaatsu system). He particularly appreciates blood flow restriction training for those with painful or compromised joints given the very light weights. Also, hotels often have a very limited selection of relatively light weights, which are no problem with blood flow restriction.
55:18: Dawn asks whether electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) training might offer promise as a way to safely hit fast-twitch muscle in all age groups and whether McGuff has experience with EMS?
55:40: Doug discusses his experience with EMS and thinks it does let you hit the fast twitch fibers.
57:07: When you lose motor units, body starts to disconnect enervation of motor units.
57:52: Elderly with sarcopenia also have deconstructed this neuro-motor connection to higher-order motor units. “Where EMS is useful as a therapeutic modality is being able to activate type IIB motor units at the end of the set, so when they reach fatigue, that’s not fatigue like a younger person who still has that connection intact. You could invoke EMS at the end of the set to wake back up those type II motor units. The enervation of those motor units wakes up as well.” He says this is a “stop-gap measure to rehabilitate the enervation of higher-order motor units.
58:55: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.
59:20: Ken mentions that Brian Caulfied at University College Dublin has been doing interesting and important work on EMS in both athletic populations and older cohort groups.
1:00:00: Ken says he’s optimistic about the future of EMS as new companies, such as PowerDot are offering systems that run on smart phones, etc.
1:00:39: Doug notes that people often “conflate athleticism and health.”
1:02:26: Ken notes that myokines have both local actions within the muscle tissue but also hormone like effects that target distant organs. He asks McGuff to discuss the role of myokines in exercise and the adaptations that occur as a result.
1:03:00: Resistance training is much greater than the sum of its parts.
1:04:30: Skeletal muscle is not just a tissue that produces movement. The muscle is the biggest and most active endocrine organ in our body; there’s a whole host of myokines—probably only of which a handful have been discovered. They are signaling locally and remotely—skin, hair, nervous tissue, cardiovascular system.
1:05:27: “The signals are going everywhere, and very few of them have been delineated thus far…. but the health benefits are becoming more and more obvious.”
1:05:46: The cytokines released by muscles have profound anti-inflammatory effects: they are the antithesis of metabolic syndrome and have anti-neoplastic effects. They are protective and reversive of neoplastic changes. “There’s a treasure trove there.”
1:06:30: Dawn asks about the role of myokines in tumor growth/suppression.
1:08:30: Doug says myokines have been found to arrest tumorigenesis for different types of cancer.
1:09:20: Different myokines are invoked by different forms and intensities of exercise.
1:10:35: Dawn asks how insulin sensitivity influences the production and sensitivity of myokines and Doug discusses their interaction.
1:12:11: Ken observed that recently the ketone body acetoacetate has been shown (in an animal model) to serve as a signaling metabolite in mediating muscle cell function and growth. Specifically, acetoacetate potentiated the stimulatory effect of IGF1 on muscle cell proliferation and antagonized the inhibitory effect of myostatin. Ken asks McGuff whether he sees a role for endogenous (or exogenous) ketone bodies in augmenting myokine-induced hypertrophy.
1:12:47: “The answer is yeah, I think so. It is just now becoming evident that those two operate by a similar mechanism.” Myostatin is a myokine that acts as a negative regulator of muscle growth.
1:14:00: With a sedentary lifestyle you can develop an overexpression of myostatin, one of the players in sarcopenia. It is upregulated in HIV, and certain cancer cells involved in cachexia.
1:14:18: “Acetoacetate has been shown to blunt its (myostatin) effect.”
1:15:10: Ketosis is when food supply is dwindling, and you tend to hunt and gather. The highest levels of physical output occur during hunting and gathering; it seems natural that ketosis and high level muscular activity would tend to occur/run in tandem. Those two things are running on parallel tracks biochemically.
1:16:17: Ken comments that both exercise induced myokines and ketone bodies appear to inhibit myostatin … yet pharma has spent decades looking for a safe and effective myostatin inhibitor.
1:17:00: McGuff refers to the Simon Melov paper which he found that 196 genes are expressed differently in youth and the elderly; they found an extensive reversal (back to their youthful levels) of gene expression in the elderly after physical training. Link to paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000465
1:19:42: Dawn asks Doug about his thoughts on nutrition and to what extent does he see nutrition playing a role in skeletal muscle adaptation to exercise?
1:20:10: McGuff is a proponent of the Paleo diet: “You can never exercise your way out of a bad diet.”
1:22:28: Ken and Doug discuss how obesity is a recent phenomenon and that poor nutrition is at the heart of the problem.
1:28:08: Doug talks about his book, “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the Sick Care Sinkhole,” co-authored with economist Robert Murphy (http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl). It talks about the ER as the de facto safety net in the American healthcare system.
1:31:08: “[Writing the book] has given me a front-row seat to decay and collapse of medical system in this country; how it happened; and how recent attempts to address through ACA have put it on steroids, and made the medical system impossible to navigate.”
1:33:10: Dawn closes out the interview. She mentions McGuff’s lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” which can be viewed at: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/.
1:34:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.