Straighten Up!

Jack found a study that says everything we've heard about posture is basically fake news! 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Came across this in the New York Times over the weekend.
I thought it was some of the funniest fake news
I've ever seen in my life. From a researcher, I
have a feeling you're going to push back against this.
I don't actually know this. Woman says she's done the research.
She's a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Confronting the conventional wisdom about the importance of posture. She

(00:21):
is re examining all the data over the last century
or so and says the posture panic of the earlier
twentieth century is not based in anything, and it's just
fake news.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm curious. I mean, how bad can my posture be.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
It kind of got started in like Victorian England and
then transferred to the United States, and it just kind
of became an elitist thing about sitting up straight and
standing up straight. But there's no like real data or
science around it at all about it really being important,
and it was just kind of became a like a
stratification culture class thing. But there's no there's no according

(01:01):
to her, there's no real data about posture.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Well, indeed, I'm not going to push back I'm just
curious you've misunderstood me. In your defense, I'm very complicated,
but yeah, I mean, intuitively, you'd think humans pretty much
sit the way we're supposed to sit. We walk the
way we're designed to walk. When we lie down, we
lie down the way we're supposed to lie down.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's kind of funny if you think back, think that,
like some at some point cavemen were just sitting up
and straight and standing up straight, and.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
We will say pass me, like of antelope, which you please.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, Armstrong and Getty