Issue 55 // Nov. 17, 2018
Hello friend! Welcome to Scrap Facts.
I'm a reporter covering health and science with insatiable curiosity. I love everything I learn, not all of which gets its own story. Each week, I'll bring you some of my favorite facts that I picked up on the job or while out living life.
This is the first issue sent out through Substack. Archives of from Tinyletter can be found here.
We owe a lot to the people who participate in metabolic studies.
Found while reporting: We now know when we burn the most calories, thanks to 10 volunteers in a brutal study.
A paper came out last week suggesting that, at complete rest, we tend to burn more calories in the afternoon and evening than in the morning. This is because of our body’s internal circadian rhythms, which are cycles of hormones that fluctuate regardless of “external time,” or what the clocks read. In total, these changes mean that we burn about 130 more calories in the afternoons at rest than we do in the dead of night.
The conclusion of the work was fairly straightforward. But the experiment designed to test it was insane.
This experiment required figuring out how a person’s natural circadian cycles works, which meant somehow hiding all external cues about time from him or her. So 10 brave men and women (five of each) committed to living for over a month in total isolation from the outside world—no natural light, clocks, internet, or phones. Instead, they lived entirely by the schedules dictated by the research team.
Some participants lived on a regular 24-hour schedule to serve as a control group. The experimental participants lived 28-hour days, kind of like they were flying to a timezone four hours behind them. This “extended day” meant that scientists could see fluctuations in their core body temperatures (taken through the rectum, no less) and the amount of carbon dioxide they were exhaling, both of which served as a proxy for their metabolisms. In total, they lived this way for 37 days, presumably with a lot of books and movies.
But it wasn’t just for the experimental period that these people had to alter their lifestyles. For three weeks prior to the experiment, they had to commit to not drinking any caffeine, alcohol, or taking any kind of medication. All of these factors can tweak our natural circadian cycles.
I was talking about this work with a friend earlier this week, and they brought up an interesting point: basically no one has a totally unaltered circadian cycle. Most of us drink coffee or tea, let alone a beer. Aspirin or other daily prescription medications are incredibly common. Plus, these people weren’t exercising—which also changes the way the body burns off energy throughout the day.
So although it’s interesting to see how we metabolize calories at certain times throughout the day, I’m not sure it’s actually applicable to the vast majority of people.
No one really knows what’s in all those flavored vape cartridges.
Found while reporting: Juul will stop selling teens’ favorite e-cigarette flavors in stores.
E-cigarettes don’t don’t contain tobacco, which the main ingredient that causes so many different kinds of health problems associated with smoking. They do contain nicotine, though, so originally when they came on the market, manufacturers they’d be a great alternative for people trying to quit smoking.
Although adults enjoy e-cigs, teens love them.
The US Food and Drug Administration has decided to make it its mission to stop teens from smoking. One way to do that, the organization figured, was to crack down on vaping. There’s some evidence that suggests that smoking e-cigarettes leads to smoking real cigarettes.
This week was the end of a 60-day period the FDA had given to vape companies to figure out how to get teens to stop smoking. Rumors had been circulating that they’d ban the sales of all the flavors of vape cartridges other than mint, menthol, and tobacco (which are available in cigarettes).
There are thousands of vape flavors. Companies figured out that teens love sweet things, so a lot of them have names like “cake,” “cinnamon bun,” or “candy.”
But no one really knows what’s in these combustible flavorings, and some studies have suggested that they could contain harmful substances. One paper from earlier this year found that when you burn some of these flavors, you end up smoking some totally unknown compounds that aren’t on the ingredient list. Another found that these sweet flavors are damaging to white blood cells, causing them to swell up, which could conceivably lead to asthma, COPD, or even dental disease.
Sure, these studies aren’t on actual people yet. But to be fair, scientists can’t know the long-term studies of vaping because it just hasn’t been around for that long.
On Thursday of this week, the FDA said they wouldn’t ban flavored vapes from being sold in stores—which came as a bit of a surprise. Now all flavored vape cartridges will have to be in a separate part of retail stores inaccessible to people under 18. Instead, the organization is pursuing a ban of flavored cigars and menthol cigarettes.
At one point, a (male*) doctor thought a good way to cure PMS would be with a nice dose of radiation to the ovaries.
Found while reading: Gross Anatomy, by Mara Altman (special thanks to Corinne Purtill for introducing me to the book!)
Throughout medical history, there’s this pattern of scientists discovering something, and then doctors trying to use it to try to cure everything.
Scientists discovered radioactivity in the late 1800s. By the early 1900s, doctors were trying to use it for all sorts ailments like lupus and tuberculosis (it didn’t work). Although they quickly figured out that things like radium were toxic, there was lingering hope it could be used medicinally in some cases.
Back in the 1930s, a doctor named Robert Frank thought that maybe the “reckless” behavior some women exhibited just before their periods—“premenstrual tension,” or PMT, as he called it—could be from too much estrogen in the ovaries. So maybe if you just irradiated the ovaries to stop them from producing estrogen, you’d get rid of the PMT! And if you didn’t have any radiation handy, you could also just try cutting the ovaries out, or loading up the body with a crap ton of testosterone.
He was right about one thing: all of the above did stop menstruation, so you got rid of PMT. But that definitely did more harm than good to any of his poor patients.
Bonus fact: I was surprised to learn that the term “premenstrual syndrome” actually coined by a woman—a gynecologist named Katharina Dalton in the 1950s.
On the one hand, Dalton was a feminist hero: She was acknowledging that some women experience really severe symptoms of PMS or periods themselves. These symptoms totally merit medical study and intervention.
But on the other, she gave people a reason to think that women are inherently less stable than men—an idea that still persists in sexism today. In the 80s, Dalton testified in a couple of court cases saying that women should be given lesser sentences for their crimes because they performed them before their cycles. Because, you know, they couldn’t help it.
Super bonus fact: At first, it was super fishy to me that scientists had tried so hard to to save or transplant damaged penises, but not ovaries. Turns out, it’s not sexism—it’s futile medicine. Given the position of a woman’s ovaries, if they’re that badly damaged, the rest of her body is probably beyond repair.
*is anyone surprised?
Stuff I learned from others:
Bats can swim, which means that we too can do anything we set out to do with enough determination, from Sarah Todd for Quartz at Work.
Scientists are creating a whole Journal of Controversial Ideas, and it will offer the option of writing with a pseudonym for those who are worried about retribution from their peers, from Annabelle Timset for Quartz.
A walk in the woods led biologists to discover a microbe unlike any other kind of life, from Emily Chung for CBC News.
Animal of the week: HEDGEHOGS. DC is getting really close to passing a law that would allow hedgehogs to be legal pets. These little goofs got their name because they snort like pigs when they rummage through hedge roots looking for snacks.
Long read of the week: Last week, Quartz reporter Olivia Goldhill published a huge investigative feature on Compass, the shady nonprofit turned for-profit company quietly building a monopoly on magic mushrooms.
That’s all for now. Stay curious, friend! <3
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