Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and this is short Stuff, and we finally
tackle one of the most important concepts of our time. Hungry.
It's real. It's a thing, Yeah, definitely is. It's not
just something people say in their marriage to poke fun
at their spouse or their partnership. It is something that
(00:27):
is real and it all has to do with physiological things,
the the makeup of your human body and the fuel
that it runs on, and the fact that when you
don't have it, things change. Yeah. They so we're not
exactly sure what, like how the mechanism, the physical mechanism
(00:48):
of being hungry translates into anger or hostility. There's some
really good theories, but there is like a physiological basis
for that, and that when you have me of glucose
blood sugar um, your your body uses that is energy
to power all sorts of stuff. But when that's low, uh,
(01:09):
systems start to get kind of shut down. On the periphyry.
And sometimes one of those systems, they think is um
self control, because self control can often require a tremendous
amount of energy, and when you don't have self control
sometimes it's difficult to be polite to some people. Absolutely. Uh.
The other thing that can happen is the hypothalamus, which
is the part of the brain, uh that you know
(01:31):
involves hormone production as well as a lot of other stuff. Uh,
it gets sort of out of whack and throws hormones
out of whack and can suppress serotonin, which is everyone
knows is the field good neurotransmitter. And if you're all
of a sudden not processing serotonin, then you're probably gonna
get the very least moody and maybe even angry. Yes, Supposedly,
(01:54):
for your serotonin um like production to really take a hit,
your blood sugar has to drop really quickly from like
a hundred milligrams a desci leader to fifty five milligrams
a desci leader, which that seems like a precipitous drop. Yes,
and by the way, quick In show correction, we said
grams of caffeine instead of milligrams in which one was
(02:17):
that the Energy Drinks Energy Drinks episode, So yeah, we
were saying people were drinking a hundred and sixty grams
of caffeine. Somebody wrote in and said, I'm just trying
to imagine what I would feel like before my heart exploded.
Uh So, anyway back to this, Um, Cortisol is another
thing that can be a culprit if you have too
much cortisol going on, which can happen when you have
(02:39):
low blood sugar. That's a stress hormone. So you know,
all of a sudden, you've got one thing being depleted,
which is serotonin. You've got the other thing in the
opposite direction, the cortisol being increased. And it's pretty obvious
where that's obvious, where that's gonna lead a big fight.
You know where it's gonna lead. Chuck, It's gonna lead
us right into a commercial break, all right, change to Chuck,
(03:12):
just like the stars the sky so much so, Chuck,
we should shout out our former friends and colleagues, well,
former colleagues, still friends. I'd like to think how stuff works,
(03:32):
UM for helping us out with this episode. There are
multiple articles on how stuff works about hanger or being angry,
and they basically created a study bonanza that just it's
a buffet of studies trying to figure out how to
prove that hunger turns into hanger UM, and some of
(03:52):
them are pretty lame actually, even though they've been published
in some pretty legitimate journals. Agreed, Um, I think what
they all do those a show that hanger is real.
But yeah, some of them are great, but let's let's
talk about them. Yeah, they're just trying to get the
design down and no one's really cracked the code yet. Like,
for example, there was one from two fourteen that appeared
(04:14):
in the p N A. Y S. The journal UM
that studied a hundred and seven couples. They measured their
gluecoast levels twice a day, okay, and then to measure
how aggressive they were, they said, hey, here's a voodoo doll.
Do what you will with it, right, Well, a voodoo
doll of your partner or spouse. I think they use
(04:35):
married couples, but I'm sure it's the same for for
non married couples. But uh yeah, they said, here's foodoo dolls,
here's a bunch of pins. Um, yeah, do what you want.
And what they found was, uh, when the person was
super angry, they were jam and pins all over the
face and body of their partner's doll. Right. And then
(04:57):
they also did a supplementary thing where they put the
part there's in separate rooms and gave them each the
ability to crank the volume up on some music in
the other partners chamber, and um, the ones who are
hungry or used more pins in the voodoo doll and
turned the decibels up higher than people who weren't hungry. Um.
And of course they made it so that the person
(05:18):
just thought they were turning the volume up, they weren't
actually affecting the volume, which is hilarious but man alive. Yeah,
like take this, Emily, right, like jamming pins in a doll,
like cranking a bad music. Yeah, here's some nickel Back
for you. Are we all still making fun of Nickelback? Yeah? Sure,
I think that's okay. Okay. I didn't know if there
(05:40):
was like a rehabilitation that I had not not noticed. Oh,
I don't know. Now they're still They're still terrible, Okay.
I feel bad for those guys at the same time. Yeah,
I think they're like multi multi, multi millionaires though, and
I get the impression they don't really care. Yeah, because
you can't feel sorry for anyone that has a lot
of money, right, No. Um. There were some other studies here.
(06:04):
One was UM from O how State that basically UM
and a lot of this is correlation, of course, and
not causation. But uh, they found that UM self control
was linked to glucose levels in the brain, so people
who drank a beverage high in glucose was less aggressive
than people who didn't. UM. I don't know if that's
(06:26):
like any sort of suggestion, like to drink a sugary
drink to keep you sort of chilled out. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure about this one. I'm with you. There
was also one that UM I think linked diabetes to
glucose metabolism obviously UM, but that it's they tied it
to aggressiveness and decreased self control as well, so that
(06:48):
that kind of supports the previous study. But it's kind
of surprising, actually, I guess I wonder if people who
have type two diabetes are more prone to hungry nous
than other people. Yeah. Maybe. Uh. This two thousand eighteen
study was published by the American Psychological Association in the
journal Emotion. This one I think I understand, but I'm
(07:13):
not positive. Uh. Here's what they did, and maybe you
can explain the kicker for me. Uh. There were a
couple of experiments, and these were online experiments, so it's
always a little bit jankie. But they showed four hundred
participants in image that was supposed to kind of clearly
be either positive, negative or neutral. Uh, and then an
ambiguous image in this case they use Chinese pictographs and
(07:37):
then said rate that according to like how pleasant it
is to you on a scale of one to seven,
and then tell us how hungry you are. Uh. And
this is where I just don't quite get what it
was as far as being primed. It wasn't very well explained.
Can you explain it? I can't actually, So so what
they did was they found that the hungry year the
(07:58):
people were, um, the more likely they were to give
that ambiguous image like a terrible rating right like they were.
They interpreted it as like negative or something like that
rather than neutral or positive. But only they really only
saw this effect when the people who were hungry had
seen that negative image first. So, so what the what
(08:22):
the researchers are saying is that when you're angry, um,
you feel like, um, you're you're mean to somebody. But
it doesn't just come out of the blue, like if
your spouse comes up to you and tells you how
much they love you and gives you a hug, you're
probably not going to react with hostility. But if you're
hungry and your spouse comes up and criticizes you, there's
(08:42):
a good chance you're going to overreact and like be
a jerk in response, and that is angry. So that
was kind of the the upshot of what they were saying. Okay,
so there's like a context basically, that's to it. Yeah,
exactly that there there needs to be a primer for
angry nous to come about. But yes, still, if you're hungry,
you're more likely to be hostile if you're primed with
(09:03):
something negative. First, all right, well that makes sense. Um.
There was one in Europe that is to me, these
speak to me a little bit more because they're just very,
very rudimentary, and that they asked people to track their
emotions very simply track your emotions five times a day
for three weeks on this app and let us know,
like you're eating habits at the same time. And they
(09:27):
basically said that like fifty six of your sort of
negative feelings or irritability is due to the fact that
you your blood sugar was probably low. Inn't that nuts?
Fifty of your jerky nous over that week or month
or whatever. Three weeks um can be attributed to just
being hungry at the time. Yeah, I find I'm most
(09:49):
critical with myself as a father and like when I
just don't do the right thing as a dad, as
when I'm busy doing something else and I'm like being interrupted.
Like if I'm like just trying to get this work
email out or something, I can like be a jerk. Um.
But I'm curious to see if food is also playing
a part there, yeah, because I mean it could be
(10:10):
stress or being under a deadline. But yeah, I wonder too.
You're gonna have to create your own study with the
app and pretend you're from Central Europe too. But it's
weird though, because I'm also Emily has more of an app,
is more apt to be angry than me. Uh, food
is more um, not important, but it has that effect
on her more than it does for me, and that
(10:32):
for an overweight guy. I can skip meals all day long.
I can even do a fast and I don't feel
like it really affects my emotions that much. I mean
that sounds to me like Emily is just more sensitive
to blood sugar. Probably you are, you know, yeah, yeah,
or maybe HER's just drops more precipitously than yours does.
(10:54):
Who knows. Yeah, there may be like a literal physiological difference.
But the upshot of all of these buddies seems to
be that, um, we lose self control when we're hungry,
and that's that's a big trigger for angry nous. But
at the same time, they've kind of shown that you
can defuse being angry by just being self aware. Studies
(11:16):
have kind of investigated if you show somebody that they're
mad and hungry, are they going to like, are they
more likely to lash out? And they found no, Like,
if you know, I'm being a jerk right now because
I'm hungry, then you're probably less prone to actually follow
through on your jerky behavior. Yeah, and I think that's
probably true for most reasons, Like if Emily was like, hey,
(11:39):
you're trying to get something done and you're being very
impatient with ruby, has nothing to do with hunger. I
think just about self awareness, which is always a good
thing to try and model. Definitely, just ask yourself, why
do I feel this way? Be curious about yourself. There's
all sorts of neat stuff you can learn. Yeah, or
stick your head in the sand and never grow. That's right. Uh,
(12:00):
Chuck just laughed charmingly, and I've got nothing else, so
that means it's the end of short stuff. Stuff you
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(12:22):
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