Learn about why it might actually be healthy to gain weight as you get older; the alkaloids responsible for why our pets can’t eat chocolate; and how small a minority can be to reshape society.
Learn about why it might actually be healthy to gain weight as you get older; the alkaloids responsible for why our pets can’t eat chocolate; and how small a minority can be to reshape society.
Gaining weight as you age may be healthier than staying at the same weight by Grant Currin
Why can’t our pets eat chocolate? by Cameron Duke
Research Shows How Small a Minority Can Be to Reshape Society by Mae Rice
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/gaining-weight-with-age-might-be-healthier-than-staying-slim
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why it might actually be healthy to gain weight as you get older; why our pets can’t eat chocolate; and how small a minority can be to reshape society.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Researchers have just found some surprising patterns lurking in one of the coolest datasets we’ve got. The TL;DR? Slowly putting on weight may not be as unhealthy as you’d think.
The dataset I’m talking about is the Framingham Heart Study. It was a longitudinal cohort study — that’s a kind of study that uses participants with some trait in common and follows them over time. For this study, the investigators recruited more than 5200 participants who lived in Framingham, Massachusetts. They kept track of them from 1948 to 2010, and also followed their children from 1971 to 2014. This gold-standard research led to some important breakthroughs, and it’s still a rich source of data for scientists asking questions that are hard to answer using more common methods.
A recent study used the dataset to examine how weight changes over a person’s lifetime affect how long they live. It’s an important question because people in the US, on average, gain weight consistently from their 20s through their mid-50s — and maybe even longer.
With that in mind, the results from the Framingham study are pretty good news.
The researchers divided participants of that first, older generation into six categories based on their pattern of weight gain or loss over time. Then they looked at how long people in each category tended to live. You might expect the people who stayed at a normal weight for their entire lives to be the group that lived the longest on average. And yeah, they did pretty well: they had the second-longest lives of people in the study. But it was actually participants who started at a normal weight and slowly got heavier over the years who lived the longest.
The same thing was true for members of the younger generation. That said, the younger Framingham participants tended to be more obese than their parents, and they started gaining weight earlier in life.
The good news is that doctors got a lot better at treating obesity-related health problems between the 1940s and the 2010s, so for an individual obesity is less deadly now than in the early years of the study. However, rates of obesity increased so dramatically from the first generation to the second that despite better treatment options, more of the younger Framingham participants still died of obesity-related causes than members of the older generation did.
But don’t let that distract you from the big takeaway: gaining weight isn’t the worst thing in the world. Researchers have some very solid data to prove it.
Everybody loves chocolate... including your dog. While you might have no problem literally inhaling handfuls of M&Ms, your puppy won’t handle it quite so well. Why is something so delectable so bad for your pets? It all comes down to a chemical called theobromine.
Theobromine is a member of a class of chemical compounds called alkaloids. Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing chemicals that plants make, and they typically make them for one reason: defense. Turns out that even though they can be delicious, plants don’t always want to be eaten. Basically, theobromine is a cacao tree’s attempt to thwart any animals who want to eat their seeds. Once these seeds are roasted and fermented, they become cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate.
But theobromine isn’t the only chemical defense to worry about. There’s another alkaloid in chocolate that can also cause problems: caffeine.
So why can we eat chocolate and they can’t? That probably comes down to our ancestry. Our primate ancestors survived almost exclusively on plants, and the vast majority of them probably produced compounds like alkaloids to defend against being eaten. Because of that, we inherited all sorts of metabolic enzymes that can easily disarm this stuff. But dogs are descended from long lines of carnivores, so they spent more energy evolving claws and sharp teeth instead.
So if you have a pet, make sure to hide your candy. But if your curious pupper does get into some chocolatey mischief, how much is too much? Well, it really depends on how big your dog is. Chocolate starts to become a problem if your dog has consumed more than 20mg per kilogram of body weight. For a small 5-kilogram or 11-pound dog, as little as 70 grams of milk chocolate can make him very sick. (That’s about one and a half Hershey bars, or three quarters of a typical European chocolate bar.) Half that for dark chocolate: it’s riskier because it’s more concentrated. Worse still is cocoa powder. A teaspoon of that stuff is too much.
I know I’ve spent this whole time talking about dogs, but cats are actually more sensitive to the effects of theobromine than dogs are. But because their tongues can’t taste sugar, they’re less likely to inhale chocolate left out on the counter. Toxic houseplants are another story.
So enjoy your chocolate, but be sure to keep it where your pets can’t get to it. No matter how adorably they beg.
It’s totally possible for a minority of people to change the majority’s opinion. Just look at issues like women’s suffrage or gay marriage. But how big does a group have to be to shift mainstream views? Researchers have studied this question, and the answer is smaller than you’d think. A 2018 study from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that all you need is a 25-percent minority.
The study focused on something much simpler than voting rights: a stranger's name. The researchers put 194 people in 10 groups of 20 to 30 people each. Then, the group members were randomly paired up and shown an image of a stranger’s face. Each participant had to decide on a name for the stranger without consulting their partner — and if both participants’ names matched, they’d receive a cash prize. Then they moved onto another partner and repeated the game until they’d been paired with every member of the group. Even though they only ever interacted with one person at a time, the whole group quickly settled on norms that helped them assign the same name to each face.
Then, the researchers "seeded" the groups with a few rebels who advocated for a different norm. The researchers varied the number of these rebels from one group to the next. Eventually, they found that when the rebels made up 25 percent or more of a given group, they could upend the group consensus. This held true even when researchers doubled and tripled the size of the cash prize the group would get for reaching consensus. In some scenarios, one person was all it took to hit that tipping point.
Of course, this was an experiment, and real life is complex. The researchers simplified the issue to build a theoretical model for how social norms shift, but they don’t expect it to work in every situation: for instance, where the minority group is systematically disadvantaged, or when the belief is an important part of a person’s identity. The biggest takeaway from this study is that when it comes to changing mainstream views, there’s a tipping point: a movement might make very little progress, when all of a sudden the tides shift.
So if you’re working for change, don’t despair. Even if you don't have nearly the majority on your side, your group could be a hair's breadth from a tipping point.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin, Cameron Duke, and Mae Rice, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Get 25 percent of your friends to join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. That’s all we need! I believe in you.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!