@GaryAndShannon - #StrangeScience

#STRANGESCIENCE – A single exercise session may slow cancer cell growth, new study shows.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well on Thursdays at this time, we'd like to get
into some of the you know, the weirdness, the crazy,
you know, the strange science. Strange science. It's like weird
science but strange. Well, we're going to start with a
couple of good wellness stories because everybody needs to feel

(00:22):
a little bit better. There is a chance that exercise
can suppress the growth of certain cancer cells. This is good.
There's an important new study on exercise and cancer, specifically
cancer survivors. This study, published last month, involved thirty two
women who survived breast cancer. After a single session of

(00:45):
interval training or weightlifting, their blood contained higher levels of
certain molecules and that helped put the brakes on lab
grown breast cancer cells. Deputy Director of Exercise Medicine Research
down in Australia said that the experiment adds to the
evidence that they have that exercise can not just upend

(01:07):
the risk of developing, but also surviving cancer, and that
exercise can help some cancer survivors actually avoid recurrence of
their disease. Then, this new study offers an explanation of
how showing that exercise changes the inner workings of our
muscles and our cells. They say more study is obviously
needed in all of this, but it does offer clues

(01:30):
about the specific kinds of exercise that could be most
effective against cancers, against malignancies, and shows us how important
just even a single session of exercise can be for
your health. So what they did was a pretty widely
discussed study that was published a couple of months ago

(01:50):
showed a large group of colon cancer survivors began a
supervised exercise program that included frequent walks, very fast paced walks,
and some more intense workouts like that, and a second
group didn't exercise. Three years later, those who exercise were
thirty seven percent less likely to have experienced a cancer

(02:11):
recurrence than those who didn't work out, and they said
the outcome was better than that was that was seen
with many of the preventative drugs that people are prescribed
in the event that they're diagnosed with cancer. The other
story comes from one of the blue zones. You ever
heard of a blue zone, it's an area in the
world where people live for a long time, well above

(02:35):
average for the rest of the compared to the rest
of the world. And they said it's a combination of
factors physical activity, low stress, social interactions, low disease incidents, etc.
But one of the big factors is local whole foods.
I don't mean whole foods like the one across the street.
I mean the food that you get is a whole

(02:56):
food that you eat as a regular part of your
Diet's point to a specific Costa Rican area called the
Nakoya Peninsula in one of the original Blue zones. As
wellness chasing jet setters are learning more about this place,
they are actually flocking to a resort like the w

(03:17):
Costa Rica Reserva Conchal. It's a five star spin on
this whole Blue Zone thing. They draw these tourists into
this thing and try to give people the longer, healthier
lives that they're looking for, at least a week at
a time. I mean, if you're there just for a resort, right.
One of the executive chefs there at the resort said,

(03:39):
the Costa Rican culinary culture has always been natural, honest,
health focused. It's rooted in tradition, food that's preserved the
old fashioned way, et cetera. But the average lifespan in
that peninsula, the Nakoya Peninsula is eighty five years old,
but a lot of people live well beyond that, well
over one hundred in some case. In fact, they said

(04:01):
that the share of people over one hundred is about
three and a half times the global average. They track
the diets of people in these areas and they found
the traditional diet they had a significantly lower risk of
death from any cause. And again the foundation, they said,
lies in a very specific and simple ingredient, whole food ingredient,
corn beans and squash. So much of their diet is

(04:26):
made up of just corn beans and squash, and they
said it's a very balanced mix of the complex carbs,
the plant based protein, and the fiber that's good for
all of us. And for that they live longer. They
don't need a whole lot of red meat, they don't
have a whole lot of animal fats that complement the diet.

(04:47):
They instead go for things like avocado and seeds and
things like that. So corn beans, squash, avocado, seeds, that's
the way to eat, that's the way to do it.
Strange science. There's another weird story to tell you about,
and I'm a little bit weirded out by the people
who gave me this story. Producing Michelle and Kiana. A
spotted ratfish is a two foot long fish with a

(05:10):
big oldhead, long skinny tail lives in the northeastern part
of the Pacific Ocean, and it belongs to a group
of fish called chimeras that are pretty closely related to sharks.
The chimeras are sometimes called ghost sharks. And like most vertebrates,
it's got teeth in its mouth. Okay, that's not crazy, right.

(05:34):
Not all fish have teeth, but this one does. Unlike
other vertebrates, it also has teeth on its forehead. Okay, now,
that I guess in and of itself is not the
weird part. The weird part is the teeth on the
forehead are actually used for sex. Okay, again, I apologize

(05:56):
for this. The ratfish is extra teeth line is in
a cartiliginous appendage called the tenaculum that in males can
stick up you know what, I'm okay, I won't even
do that again, deployed to grasp a female fish during mating.
Many of the fish have clasping appendages near their pelvis.

(06:17):
This one has it on its forehead. The scientists have
known about this the tenaculum the actual forehead piece for
a while. They just didn't know exactly how the teeth
originated or how they ended up in the weird location
outside of the mouth. Some of the closer relatives like
sharks and rays and skates, they do have tooth like

(06:37):
structures in the skin made of the same material as teeth,
but they're not actually teeth. I told you earlier about
an octopus and the study of arm movements. They don't
really have a left handed right handed. They're not dominant
one side or the other when it comes to octopus appendages.

(06:58):
But they said that these biomechanical marbles actually use their
front arms and their back arms differently. They use their
front arms to explore, They use their back arms for locomotion.
Each of these arms is capable of a bunch of
different movements, a bunch of different behaviors, and a study
out of the Florida Atlantic University Marine Science Laboratory actually

(07:21):
shows that they believe there is kind of a language
that is spoken one arm movement at a time by
these octopuses that they can use the there's so many
muscles in different ways that they can use their tentacles
tentacles arms that they can actually use them as a

(07:42):
kind of way to speak to each other. And if
you could imagine researchers examined a couple of hours of
video footage of each of twenty five wild octopuses, so
fifty five zero hours of octopus habits, and then determine
four basic ways that an arm can move based on
the muscles that exist in it. You can bend it,

(08:05):
you can torsion it, you know, twist it, you can
shorten it, and you can lengthen it. And they said,
after looking at all those different behaviors, they were able
to come up with a sort of a uh octopus dictionary,
if you will,