Dangerous Foods: Adverse Additives

As is tradition, Stuff to Blow Your Mind prepares for seasonal feasts with a look at dangerous foods -- this time with a focus on peculurial and sometimes frightful additives such as lead, mercury and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick in his feast time. That's right, Thanksgiving season
here once again, and in the United States at any rate.
So we're continuing a tradition, a tradition of dangerous foods,

(00:26):
in which we highlight foods that at least can be
dangerous or deadly under the right conditions. I mean, we
were trying not to alarm anyone, but we find that
there's there's a lot of a lot of fun to
be had in exploring the dangerous side of our culinary
creations and our culinary instincts right now. This can range
from such a strange exotic chemical adventures in the past

(00:49):
as the hallucinogenic seabream of the Mediterranean, or or like
toxic honey that was chronicled in the ancient world as
leading to victories in battle when when one side ate
the honey and the other could take advantage of that.
But it also goes into the mundane world where where
just like normal food items that we all take for granted,
if not prepared the right way could go very bad

(01:12):
for you. For example, normal dried beans, kidney beans and
so forth, you need to boil those, you don't just
soak them and eat them, and if you do, you
can experience some some extreme gastro intestinal problems. Yeah, a
lot of it comes down to, Okay, here's the thing
that human beings can eat. But under what circumstances can
humans eat it? What do they have to do to it? First?

(01:32):
Do they have to remove certain parts of it? Are
only certain parts edible? Is it only in and then?
Or those parts only edible after the content has been
cooked a certain way. Likewise, is there a certain time
during which a particular vegetable item should be harvested? And
is it dangerous to harvest it or and or consume
it at another time? Or do leave it sitting around

(01:52):
too long? Is that we talked about cases with potato
poisonings in the past where potatoes were just left in
the sack for got a little two wisened, and then
that they made some schoolboys sick in England at that
unhealthy green color. Right. Yeah, but of course humans don't
just eat this vegetable or that invertebrate. We we also
combine all of these things, we add a small dosage

(02:15):
of various spices. For instance, spices which in their natural
form are chemical weapons and might prove very uncomfortable or
dangerous to consume, you know, especially if you're consuming them
at a quantity beyond that. What that which is advisable
when when cooking and the culinary palate becomes quite vast
this way, and out of this complexity, many of the

(02:37):
most magical of culinary possibilities emerge. Yeah, I was just
your note here made me think about the fact that,
of course I love spicy food. I think you like
spicy food too, right, Yeah? Uh that that so many
of these compounds that we so desire in our foods
to liven them up, are of course defenses there, as
you say, you know, their chemical weapons. That what makes
the garlics so hot and wonderful. It's got these compounds

(03:01):
that come together when it's sell walls or ruptured and
produce this pungent odor and flavor that we love. But
this mention of spice was also making me wonder a
question I don't think we've ever addressed on the show before.
Maybe you got into it many years ago, which is
can you be killed by hot peppers? You know, I'm
not sure. We may have covered a little bit of
that in the past. I know we did an episode

(03:21):
on nutmeg once. It was really interesting that got into
a little bit of you know, the question of what
is a lethal dose of nutmeg? What happens when when
you consume too much nutmeg? Um, and and one of
the things that was really emerged in that research was that, yeah,
most spices, most household spices, if you consume too much
of it, you will hurt yourself. Right. Um, that's just

(03:41):
that's just kind of a fact no matter what you're
grabbing out of the spice cabinet. But with a lot
of these things, you would have to consume an amount
of it that is not a reasonable amount that would
ever be used in cooking, right. It would be the
food would become inedible, Like you would have to really
force yourself to choke it down. It would have to
be a very deliberate act. Uh. Yeah, And I think

(04:02):
this actually turns out to be the case with this
question about hot peppers. As a lover of spicy food
and as somebody who has taken a bite out of
a raw Carolina Reaper pepper for an on camera experiment,
which I mean that was a horrible experience. Is that
what you're calling a YouTube challenge is that it wasn't
a YouTube challenge. It was just it was just Rachel
videoing me with her phone. Her dad showed up at

(04:23):
the house with one of these. It was one of
the spiciest peppers in the world. One of you did
something here, No, no, no, no, it was it was
in Tennessee. It was like, you know, so one of these, uh,
like ten billion Scoville units peppers. Uh. He showed up
and he was like, he knows I like spicy food.
He's like, you want to try it? So I took
a bite of it on camera, and yeah, that was
like I love spicy food. But that became a problem.

(04:46):
It was just more like I had a disease for
the rest of the day. Uh. And I tried to
fix it. As you know, one thing you can do
if you've eaten too much spicy food is you can
try to neutralize it with some milk in your mouth.
But then I ended up drinking some spoiled milk so
that it even worse. This sounds like a comedy bit.
The comedy was all in my body. But yeah, so
I was wondering, well, okay, so that felt pretty bad,

(05:08):
even though I love really spicy food. Is it possible
to eat food so spicy it kills you? Technically yes,
but under practical circumstances not really. Uh. The active compound
in chili peppers that makes them spicy is called cap sasan.
Eating large amounts of capsasan can cause. Of course, you know,
all the symptoms were familiar with gastro intestinal distress, even vomiting, sweating, flushing, irritation,

(05:30):
and the mucous membranes and all that, which those symptoms
themselves could potentially harm someone maybe if they're saying a
very sensitive cardio pulmonary state. But as for just like
somebody in normal health being poisoned by too much peppers. Uh.
I did find some cases where people had aspirated peppers,
and and that was dangerous. But normally you're not like

(05:52):
breathing in peppers, uh, when you're eating them, you're just
swallowing them. So I found one article by someone named
Katherine Gammon, who consulted less an authority than Paul Bosland,
a professor of horticulture at New Mexico State University and
director of the Chili Pepper Institute. They've got this whole
chili pepper lab there where they like breed new strains
of chili's um and Boslin cites a study from nineteen

(06:14):
eighty on the acute toxicity of cap sasan. So how
much does it take to just kill you? By his estimation,
the research revealed that to kill a one hundred and
fifty pound person with cap sasan, you need to serve
them about three pounds of the powder form of one
of the spiciest peppers known to human kinds, such as
the boot Jill Lochia or the ghost pepper. Uh. And

(06:35):
this would need to be all in one sitting. So
you get them to eat three pounds of the powdered
form all at once. Uh. And he notes that your
body just probably would not allow this. Some things would
happen to stop you on the on the course of
the suicide mission. Yeah that. Yeah, you would have to
be an act of madness to eat that much much
of the pepper. Yeah. So, unless you're already in very

(06:57):
delicate health, or you're doing something very unusual and extreme
eating spicy food, even really really spicy food is perfectly safe.
But hey, that's all that's all the organic world. Well,
I mean, I guess it's actually not, because we're breeding
these peppers hotter and hotter. That is sort of agricultural technology.
But still, you know this is coming from a plant, right, right, Yeah,

(07:18):
So we get into this situation where we're we're taking
these plants, we're taking spices, we're taking other things, the
vast palate of things from our natural world, and then
using them to create food. And it's one thing. If
we're creating that food within the household or within say
a close, tight knit community, uh such as you know,
it would have been more or less the you know,

(07:39):
the archaic normal for for humans. But of course we
ascend past that, right we we begin developing much larger groups,
and we begin specializing the creation of various things, various
food products, especially various technologies, and we end up engaging
in trade, uh and and the stockpiling of foods as well.

(08:01):
So given this, you know, there's this increased complexity allows
us to work kind of a dark magic here as well.
Not only can we enhance the flavor of our ingredients,
but we can also hide, defending smells, not merely in
a you know, in a household sense, like well, this
fish is a little off, but we need to eat
it more. In the this fish is bad, but I

(08:23):
really need to sell it way, right. But they are
all kinds of tricks like that. I mean, another thing
you could do if you've seen one of those crime
movies where somebody's like they cut the dope, you know,
putting baby powder in the brick of heroin or whatever.
People do that with food products too. Yeah, and we'll
get into some some wonderful, wonderful examples of that. Uh yeah.
Basically it opens the door for all manner of cuts

(08:45):
and shortcuts and cheats, all predicated on the fact that
in an industry of food, the maker doesn't have to
consume their own food product, right, and perhaps they'll be
down the road by the time somebody does. Now, So
we are going to be talking about food adulteration and
food adjectives today. But I don't want to contribute as

(09:07):
we always do in these episodes. We don't want to
contribute to food panic, and I don't want to contribute
to additive panic. I think there are some people who
have this attitude, like I don't allow any chemicals in
my food or something, which I think we've discussed that
attitude on the show before. It doesn't really make sense.
I mean, your food already has chemicals and it is
made of chemicals. Uh, just looking at a something with

(09:29):
a synthetic sounding name doesn't necessarily mean it's going to
hurt you, right, And we we'll touch a little bit,
very very briefly on sort of the current state of additives,
in the in the future of additives, and and just
the level of like legitimate concern and sometimes panic that
that comes with discussion of these things. But for the

(09:50):
most part in this episode, we're gonna be talking about
older additives, additives that we can safely say we're a
bad idea, that it's not a matter a matter of opinion, uh,
you know, regarding whether you should put this particular ingredient
and say a candy or not. Um. Yeah, we're and
we're largely talking about the deliberate adulteration of food. And

(10:10):
this has actually been with us since ancient times. There
are ancient laws and rules that that that that govern
how we handle our food, how we prepare food in
order to ensure food quality. This almost seems to me
like it would be one of the earliest concerns of civilization.
You know, like, once you're no longer making your own

(10:31):
food or having your own food made by a family member,
your food is being made by somebody maybe that you
don't even know, you don't even know their name. It's
being made in some place you can't see. You would naturally,
I think, have people start to worry and wonder, like
what's in my food? Yeah? Yeah, So I was looking
at a source on this from one Marcia a. Ecoles,
who have Food Safety the Interplay of culture and science,

(10:54):
of culture, science and technology, and the author points out
a number of cool fact about sort of the ancient
history of of food safety. So the Assyrians established weights
and measures for grains because and we're getting this is
one of the I guess one key way that you
can you can cheat a system of weights and prices

(11:15):
based on weights is to put something in with your
grain to weight it down. UM As early as two
b C. In uh residents of India punished economic adulteration
of grains and oils. During the same era, the Chinese
combated consumer fraud. The ancient Athenians had purity standards for
both beer and wine. The Romans had a system to

(11:37):
control fraud and bad produce, and there are various other
ancient laws, religious or otherwise that governed the handling of
meat in ways that we're concerned ultimately with with purity,
which of course is we've discussed many times in the shows.
It's a tricky concept because in purity you're getting ideas
of sort of hygiene mixed up with with with less

(11:57):
um a matter of fact, statements about out of food.
But you know, as we discussed with pork recently on
the show, there's always this argument that the purity is
at least partially grounded in health concerns. Sure, uh, And
you can maybe make arguments like that about the mixing
of different types of foods that are forbidden in some
religious customs. Maybe not that there's actually anything wrong with

(12:19):
mixing those types of foods, but perhaps there was a
perception in the ancient world that that it could be dangerous. Now,
another source that I was looking at here is is
a wonderful right up by Adam Burrows J d uh
and it's titled Palette of Our Palettes Clever, A Brief
History of Food coloring and its regulation from Comprehensive Reviews

(12:39):
and Food Science and Food Safety, and this is from
two thousand nine. Uh. Burrows points out that the ancient
Egyptians wrote of drug colorance, but archaeologists think food coloration
itself dates back to roughly C. Saffron, for example, is
mentioned in the Iliad, and plenty of the elder wrote
of colored wines and four D B C. And I

(13:01):
looked into this little more and it seems like it's
possibly talking about the use of squid incu in the wind.
I guess, you know, give dark in it and may
give it this thicker appearance. Squid ink is still used
as a food additive today. Yeah, yeah, Like if you
ever have squid ink pasta, that's right. Yeah, they're beautiful,
like charcoal black color in the food. Um, I don't

(13:22):
know if it really contributes a flavor. I've never looked
into that. Yeah, And likewise, I don't know if putting
squid ink in your wine is I'm sure it's It
would be frowned upon at a roll restaurant today. But saffron,
of course contributes both color and flavor. It's got a
distinctive kind of aroma. But yeah, you put a little
bit of saffron and say a pot of rice, and
it takes on this beautiful golden hue. Yeah. In addition

(13:43):
to saffron, a few other spices and elements that have
long been used to color food paprika um, fabulous, tumeric.
Beat extract is a big one because you know, you
get that bright red coloration. Long used food dyes. All
of these, but one that was particularly popular in the past,
Tyrian purple, was derived from several species of predatory predatory

(14:04):
sea snails. Oh yeah, And if you want to learn
more about the way that the Roman Empire and particularly
made use of naturally occurring substances, check out our previous
episode on Roman extinctions. Oh yeah, there we talk about
the cultivation of like silphium and things like that. Now,
another source that we looked to here was Deborah Bloom's
book The Poison Squad, and Bloom points out that as

(14:28):
the Industrial Revolution washed over the world of foods during
you know, particularly during I think the eighteen seventies, she's
pointing out here, new food processing approaches provided even more
new ways and new ingredients to commit just lavish food fraud.
And this included artificial flavors, artificial coloring, and chemical preservatives.

(14:49):
And in this book she she makes a case for
the importance of U. S D. A chemist, Harvey Washington
widely in his white Hat efforts to use our advancing
knowledge of chemical science to stay on top of these
mini frauds. Yeah. This all in advance of the Meat
Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of
nineteen o six, which widely helped to bring to fruition. Yeah,

(15:10):
he's sort of the central character in this book. And
it's funny that I feel like some of the main
chemicals and preservatives that he investigated with his famous Poison Squad,
which was a a group of men who would who
would essentially meet to eat meals together that were contaminated
deliberately with certain common additives used in food to see

(15:32):
how their health fared from repeatedly eating things like borax
or boric acid or whatever that kind of thing that
was used to produce stuff. I feel like some of
the things that the Poison Squad investigated, the jury still
kind of out on exactly how harmful they were. Maybe
they weren't as harmful as he thought they were, but
clearly at this time some food additives were harming and

(15:55):
killing people. I think especially there was some danger from
certain dies. Yes, and by the way, the Poison Squad,
it sounds like it would make a wonderful television series,
you know. I mean the public loves a good police procedural.
This is kind of like a little bit of police procedural,
also a little bit you know, the flavoring of say
The Nick, except with with a food um focus. So

(16:17):
I really hope it's been optioned. One thing audiences love
is people in the past not knowing things that we
know now. It's like the scene in Madmen where the
kid is playing putting the dry cleaning bag over their head,
and like the scenes in The Nick where people are
just like sitting in front of an X ray machine.
Why does that give us such pleasure to see the
people of the past punished by their ignorance. I don't

(16:39):
know one thing I will I think that The Nick
did a great job with it because they were able
to They had those moments, for sure, but at the
same time, they had plenty of moments where they I
think we're able to effectively convey this sense of modernity
in in the show that showing you that that even
if we can look back in hindsight, these various techniques

(17:01):
in in the show, in the time frame, they're occurring
at the just the bleeding edge of our understanding of
the human body, and it's like retro science fiction. Yeah,
so obviously I guess it's you know, it's a it's
a it's a delicate balance to maintain in a show.
But like I would, I would love to see the
same people who did the nick like do the Poison Squad,
at least for one season, maybe many limited series maybe,

(17:22):
but still so. The frauds during this time were many.
But I think one of the more terrifying examples to discuss,
just to kick things off here is UH is something
that just on the face of things will seem like
a terrible, if not a nefarious idea, and that is
lead colored candy. So in our past episode on the Lead,

(17:44):
UM I believe it was cupids lead in arrow it
was a Valentine's Day special. We pointed out that even
though lead is quite poisonous, UH, it tastes uh. Its
taste is also sometimes described as sweet, and the ancient
Romans used leads salt as a sweetener in their syrup.
This was known as soap, I believe, and plenty of
the Elder once again describes the use of lead in

(18:07):
vessels with sappa to sweeten the taste. Right, Yeah, You've
got to boil down your sapa, which was like it
was a syrup made by reducing some kind of wine
product I think, um. And so you boil it down
to make it sweet, and it takes on the lead
from the pot that it's boiled in to become sweeter.
He says, don't boil it in a copper pot. That's
gonna taste bitter. You've got to boil it in a

(18:27):
lead pot so it tastes nice and sweet. So when
it comes to candy, obviously, candy is generally sweetened through
a much more conventional means, namely sugar or or some
sugar substitute. But during the time of Wiley's Wars against
Dangerous Foods, children's candy was routinely laced with lead and
other heavy metals to color it. Yea to impart this

(18:48):
kind of you know, often describes a kind of an
orange coloration, which is just you know, terrifying to imagine,
because I'm just imagining like one of these red suckers
that you get at the supermarket nowadays, and just imagine
that being laced with lead and being handed to a child. Now,
as the CDC points out, lead was and in some

(19:08):
parts of the world still is added to foods not
only to impart an inviting orange color, but also indeed
to sweeten it or to increase its weight. Again getting
back to the idea that oftentimes food, especially in bulk,
is price based on weight. That you cut the dope
of candy, but it's with lead, So so that's like
three different levels of poisonous deception. They're possibly in play

(19:32):
in any given piece of lead laced candy. Make it
cost more via way, make it look more attractive via color,
and artificially enhance the flavor to some extent as well.
And this applies not just to candy but to other
food stuffs with lead, often introduced via a spice blend. Now,
of course, there are other ways that lead can get
into candy as well. Uh and still can get into candy.

(19:55):
There's a there was case I was looking at in
which a six year old boy was a led really
poisoned by lead containing uh Tamarando candy jam products purchased
on a visit to Mexico with his aunt. However, it
seems like a case in which the lead contamination was
linked to the fact that it was quote candy packaged
in ceramic jars from Mexico at the time, and as

(20:17):
the California Department of Health points out, it is quote
not entirely clear where the lead in many of the
products is coming from, but products containing tamarind, chili powder,
or salt that is mine from certain parts of the
world may have a higher likelihood of elevated levels of lead.
Lead may also be introduced into the candy through improper drying, storing,
or grinding of the ingredients. Now, as we know from

(20:40):
our our our old alchemist friend Paracelsus, it is of
course the dose that makes the poison, and this applies
in multiple ways. It can apply to some things, can
be can accumulate in the body and their effects over
time with chronic exposure. Sometimes it also just has to
do with an acute dose. It's possible that, you know,
lead compounds have been used in many food products over

(21:01):
time that if they're in small enough concentration, there's not
much of a noticeable effect on the people who eat them.
But I bet in many of these cases, the the
concentration of lead in the products is probably not very
tightly controlled, especially in the past and the nineteenth century
and stuff. So you might get suddenly a gumball or
candy that's got a lot more lead than usual, leading

(21:23):
to you know, high levels in an acute sense. But
also eating this candy over time could lead to effects
that people don't even necessarily associate with the candy. Right. Yeah,
and then another factor that was brought up in the
case study of the child is that obviously, like children
are going to be more susceptible, uh, individuals with smaller
body weight, etcetera, which of course is all the more

(21:44):
troubling because we are talking about candy which is inherently
for children. Alright, time to take a break, but we
will be right back with more. Alright, we're back. Should
we talk about some more weird color additives? Alright, So
these are some more examples that come from Adam Burrows
j D's palette of our palettes. Uh, some of these

(22:07):
are a number of these are not nefarious, but I'm
just going to touch on them anyway because it gives
I think a broader understanding of how and why we
color our food and what we used to do it.
Um cocuineal insects have long been used to make the
dye carmine, Traditionally used in fabrics, it also pops up
in cosmetics and food coloring. Again, not deadly unless you're

(22:27):
one of the insects that gets ground up to in
part of a reddish coloration, but it's still interesting. Saffron
we already touched on, also not deadly, though of course,
with any spice you'll run into adverse reactions if you
consume too much of it. A little saffron tends to
go along long way. It's derived from the saffron crocus flour,
and it's long been used in cooking, both for its
flavor and for its strong yellow coloration. Now we mentioned

(22:50):
earlier like cutting the dope, adding something that's not the
dope to the dope that you know, bulkes it up
and makes it more attractive initially. And this this to
a famous quote from a giant. I'll grind your bones
to make my bread. Oh yeah, that's from what Jack
and the Bean saw. Yeah. Yeah, So he climbs up
there and the I don't get it. Why is he

(23:12):
grinding his bones. I yeah, I always troubled me as
a kid because I'm like, I don't know not much
about bread making. I'm not a baker, but I know
you don't make bread out of bones that are ground up.
It makes a little more sense, though, when you understand
that a typical medieval baker's trick was to brighten up
bread by using ground bone, lime or chalk. Whoa In fact,

(23:37):
King Edward the first outlied this practice, and uh, and
here's a here's a reading of the law. If any
default shall be found in the bread of a baker
in the city the first time, let him be drawn
upon a hurdle from the guild hall to his own house,
through the great street, where there be most people assembled,
and through the streets which are most dirty, with the

(23:58):
faulty loaf hanging from his neck. If a second time
he shall be found committing the same offense, let him
be drawn from the guildhall through the great street of
cheap Ee to the pillory, and let him be put
up on the pillory, and remain there at least one
hour in the day. And the third time that such
default shall be found, be shall be drawn, and the

(24:21):
oven shall be pulled down and the baker made to
forswear the trade in the city forever. Whoa, the shame
walk with bread around your neck. That's what you get
if you put bone or something else in the bread.
Victorian era Europe saw copper salts used to turn pickles
and vegetables of a brighter green color. Apparently, and as

(24:41):
described in eighteen twenty by English chemist Frederick Acum, a
key individual in the crackdown on illucid ad additives at
the time. Uh He said the following this quote comes
from Burrows uh right up as well. Quote. Vegetable substances
preserved in a state called pickles wholesale frequently depends greatly
upon a fine, lively green color, and sometimes intentionally colored

(25:05):
by means of copper. A young lady amused herself by
eating pickles impregnated with copper. She soon complained of a
pain in her stomach in nine days after eating the pickle.
Death relieved her of her suffering. Whoa and Acam also
pointed to the use of these coloring additives in candies
uh and in which she pointed out vermilion would contain

(25:26):
mercury red lead. It was another one white lead verdigris,
which is a copper salt blue vitriol which contains copper,
and then sheelds green, which contains copper and arsenic. Fields
green is a massive historical case of I think primarily
not used in food, right, primarily used in like I

(25:47):
don't know, coloring walls and stuff like that, but I
think you see that with a few of these different things,
Like there'll be a dye and it's fine if you're
dyeing fabrics with it, but then to turn around and
use it in food is either you know, is at
least ill advised, if not like a nefarious act. Oh,
I'm not saying siels green is fine. I think shields
green is famous for poisonous people in history, like even

(26:08):
through fabric it was one of the real bad ones.
In addition, iron compounds were sometimes used to redden up foods,
and then the dye Prussian blue, along with yellow gypsum,
were often added to Chinese green teas to make them
more green and inviting to foreign markets. Uh in in
Prussian blue contained arsenic. This reminds me of the uh

(26:29):
the situation with absinthe um. When you when you see
like a selection of absence at a you know, absinthe bar.
Generally speaking, if I remember correctly, you're gonna want to
go for the ones that do not look as much
like storybook absinthe like. The more it looks like mouthwash like,
it's a sign that some sort of coloration has been added,
probably not arsenic. I'm not saying it's arsenic, but but

(26:52):
something has been added to enhance that coloration and make
it more attractive to at least the casual audience. I
see it, make it uh to use a tokenism, look
fairer and taste fowler yes. And then there's the coloring
of butter and butter like products. Burrows points out that
there was a thirteen nine French edict against coloring butter,

(27:12):
and later a fifteen seventy four law preventing the use
of colors and pastries to simulate the presence of eggs.
And then there were the Then there were the margarine wars,
which we've touched on on the show in the past,
in which butter manufacturers sought to protect their turf by
seeking laws against yellow dyes and margarine. And and even
though adding the requirement of pink dye to make it

(27:34):
clear that margarine was not butter, and in fact the U. S.
Supreme Court had to intervene and overturned state laws in
thirty two pro butter states, according to the Butter wars
by published in nat Geo, and this was by Rebecca Rupp. Now, again,
while it is clear that some compounds used as dyes
in history have turned out to be dangerous in one

(27:56):
form or another, this is certainly not to suggest that
all or even most of these compounds have any kind
of negative health effects. But concerns about such have definitely
continued into the modern area era, whether founded or not. Yeah,
And if you want to learn more about this sort
of the modern state and recent history of of of
die considerations, die outraged, die pendents, etcetera, I'd refer you

(28:19):
to Burrows for more on this, because he gets into
a lot of the concerns over modern dies and sometimes
the urban legends about their dangers, such as the notion
that Mountain Dew's yellow in our five reduces sperm count,
which which is not the case, but that was like
that was an urban legend that was making the rounds
at one point. However, I will leave leave you all

(28:39):
with this quote from Burrows on the history and future
of color additives. I think he sums us up nicely. Quote,
it is hard to believe that only a century ago
our ancestors were eating food died with highly toxic color additives.
From that auspicious starting point, we have come to a
time where a food colorant with a one in nineteen
billion chance of causing cancer is legally considered too dangerous.

(29:03):
What we used to die our foods and how we
regulate it may continue to change, but there is no
end in sight to the timeless practice of coloring our food.
This is interesting, like the idea that I don't know,
whenever you're making a ruling on this kind of thing,
you can't you can't ever say that something is you're
sure one hundred percent safe. So like, what's the threshold

(29:25):
you're comfortable with You're like, okay, if maybe if we
use this die in fruit loops for a hundred years,
one person will be killed by it? Is that like
do we just decide, Okay, if it's just one person
every hundred years getting killed by the die, then it's okay. Yeah.
And I wondered to, like to what, like, what is

(29:46):
our ultimate relationship with the idea of adding die to
a food product, is it one of I mean, if
we're oblivious to it's just oh, it's this is super red.
I'm very attracted to it. I must have this candy
or apple or whatever the product is what we with
the eyes first. But but then if if there also
seems to be this this this this broad category of

(30:07):
just distrust associated with food coloration as well. Uh, this
this idea that and properly instilled, you know, pretty early
on via some of these frauds that were perpetrated, the
idea that if there's some sort of artificial color there,
there's something in the food that should not be there. Uh,
they're like the understanding that this food is super red
in an unnatural way. Um, why is that the case?

(30:30):
Something is trying to fool me with this food. It's
the post Watergate era of relationship with foods. I mean,
you know, it's are just general, uh distrustful attitude in
the modern world. I think, you know, there there are
reasons for us to feel that way, even if we're
not necessarily correct about perceived dangers in industrial additives to

(30:50):
food products. And another thing I wanted to clarify, I
know that when you say that, you know, when you're
talking about a one in nineteen billion chance of a
die killing somebody, I understand that's talking about like confidence intervals.
That doesn't literally mean that like one person will die
for every you know, it's just a way of expressing
how confident you are generally that something is safe. And

(31:12):
again I recommend everyone to check out that Borrows article
if you want more, you know, in depth consideration of dies.
But I think that's that's probably enough for for food
additives for dies. At this point, we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we're going to
open up some beer. Alright, we're back now. I want

(31:34):
to start with we we've done these in some of
the Dangerous Food episodes in the past, to to do
a little sort of epidemiological detective story where there's a
sudden outbreak of symptoms and then people are trying to
figure out what caused it. Uh So we're gonna go
back to the nineteen sixties to the mid to late
nineteen sixties, and in this period, doctors in hospitals and

(31:57):
clinics across a number of metro areas in Europe, in
the United States, and Canada began to notice a strange
pattern of cases, patients showing up with a sudden onset
of an unusual form of cardiomyopathy, which is a disease
of the heart muscle in which parts of the heart
can become enlarged or stiff, or just generally aren't working properly.

(32:23):
Uh So, between August nineteen sixty five and April nineteen
sixty six, a rash of cases appeared around the area
of Quebec City in Canada, enough to signal that there
was some kind of pattern going on to local clinicians
and pathologists who at first thought, well, maybe the epidemic
is viral in nature. But a study of thirty patients

(32:44):
could not isolate a viral cause for this strange kind
of cardio myopathy. Uh and this was described in the
nineteen sixty seven report I'll sight in a minute. Instead,
what the patients seem to have in common was that
they were all heavy beer drinkers. Um. So, alcoholic beverages
are an interesting case to explore when you're talking about,
you know, dangerous foods, because alcoholic beverages already contain a

(33:08):
perfectly powerful and dangerous active ingredient which is alcohol, according
to itally by the U s c DC, and about
people in the United States die every year from alcohol poisoning.
And that's just alcohol poisoning, which is an acute overdose
of alcohol leading directly to death. If you expand that

(33:29):
number to alcohol related deaths such as you know, deaths
from from chronic alcohol abuse, or include stuff like you know,
traffic collisions caused by people driving under the influence, the
number is obviously going to be a lot higher. Yeah,
among other things. That is a great insight into the
the uneven way in which we uh we we we
we we govern the consumption and purchase of various dangerous substances.

(33:53):
Oh absolutely, but for yeah, so for alcohol poisoning alone,
people every year as of that's an average of six
people who die every single day, and just in the
United States, and an overwhelming majority of the people who
die from alcohol poisoning are adult men. Seventy six percent
of deaths from alcohol poisoning occur among men, and seventy

(34:15):
six are also between people of the ages thirty five
to sixty four. And of course, the primary cause of
death in these cases is suppression of the life sustaining
functions of the brain and the central nervous system. Alright,
so the basic scenario is you have a a population
of people who are already drinking something that is arguably poison,
but something else may be involved. Right, These cases of

(34:39):
cardio myopathy did not seem to stem from the acute
or chronic effects of alcohol itself. So look at a study,
the sort of breakthrough study on on the first big
look at this it was by Eve's Marine and Philippe
Daniel called Quebec Beer Drinkers cardio Myopathy Ideological Considerations that
means considerations for the origin of this outbreak. It was

(35:02):
published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in nineteen sixty
seven and the authors here mentioned that there was a
similar outbreak of sudden cardio myopathy in Omaha, Nebraska. I
was also looking at a nineteen seventy two paper by
a doctor named Carl S. Alexander describing an outbreak of
cardio myopathy in twenty eight patients admitted to the VA

(35:23):
Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota between nineteen sixty four and nineteen
sixty seven. So again mid mid to late sixties, especially
in these Midwestern and northern cities, sudden outbreak of of
strange type of heart disease. Uh. And again, what these
cases seem to have in common was heavy consumption of
beer and sudden unusual cardio myopathy. So, according to Alexander,

(35:46):
a total of forty two patients with acute cardiac distress
were admitted to the hospital in Minneapolis, but the study
focused on just twenty eight of them because those twenty
eight admitted to drinking up to thirty bottles of not
just beer, but one particular brand of beer, Brand X
in Alexander's paper, and denied drinking any other alcoholic beverages.

(36:09):
The other fourteen patients were excluded from the initial study
because they drank other kinds of alcohol as well as
Brand X beer. Actually, now brand X is just to
cover the name of the actual manufacturer, right right, And
that's just in the literature. I will name one of
the culprits that we get too log on. But yeah,
Alexander's paper was published in seventy two in the American

(36:31):
Journal of Medicine. And again this is looking at a
broader study of of this phenomenon. Here. Now, Alexander mentions
that there are types of cardiomyopathy that you would otherwise
expect to find among patients with alcoholism, and these cases
were different in their symptoms and onset. Like Alexander says, quote,
the syndrome differed from alcoholic cardiomyopathy and berry berry which

(36:55):
again that's another related disease caused by a deficiency of
vitamin B one also known as thiamine. And Alexander says
the way it differed from these other known conditions was
quote in its rather abrupt onset of left ventricular failure,
cardiogenic shock, and acidosis. So cardiogenic shock is when the
heart suddenly fails to pump enough blood to provide circulation

(37:17):
to the rest of the body, often happens as the
result of a heart attack. Acidosis is an imbalance in
the pH of the blood in which the blood plasma
becomes overly acidic. Alexander also mentions two other unique features
of these apparent epidemics, as identified in Belgium by a
doctor named Kes salute Uh and these were pericardial effusion,

(37:39):
and this is when there's an excess of fluids surrounding
the heart inside the pericardium, which is a kind of
sack that surrounds the heart muscle. So you've got the
heart is inside its sack, and then there's a bunch
of fluid in that sack, and then there is UH.
There were also elevated hemoglobin levels. Hemoglobin is the protein
in red blood cells the body uses to transport oxygen

(38:02):
molecules from the lungs to the rest of the body. UH.
And you might see elevated levels of hemoglobin in any
kind of condition where the body is struggling to supply
itself with enough oxygen. So this could range from high altitude,
say right, because you know you're not getting enough with
each breath, so you see increased hemoglobin in the blood,
to various lung and heart diseases. Alexander mentioned that among

(38:25):
the patients he reviewed, acute mortality was eighteen percent, but
the disease was associated with lingering symptoms and disabilities that
led to a total mortality of forty three percent. So
ultimately forty three percent of the people he saw with
this condition died from it, and so it took a
bit of work to isolate the cause of these outbreaks.
Especially it was in the first one in Quebec City

(38:47):
in the years nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty six.
The investigating physicians established that it probably was not caused
by a virus, that it seemed to be associated with
heavy beer drinking, but that it didn't look like nor
more alcoholic cardiomyopathy, and they discovered something else similar to
what Alexander discovered later in his study about the Minneapolis patients.

(39:08):
In Quebec city, it wasn't just that the patients were
heavy beer drinkers. They drink a lot of one specific
brand of beer. Uh Moren and Daniel speaking of this
brewery that made this beer quote, it's excellent tasting. Brew
was and still is very popular in Quebec and accounts
for approximately eight percent of the local market. Later reports

(39:28):
revealed this to be the Tao Brewery. So quick question,
does this have Does this have any uh? Did this
inspire the movie Strange Brew? Is there anything I haven't
seen Stranger I've never seen it either. I just okay, well,
I'm just familiar with it by you know, reputation that
it concerns some sort of strange Canadian brew of beer
and it's you know, cinematic powers. I kind of doubt

(39:51):
it because I think that movie is a comedy and
this ultimately is not that funny of a story though
it does have I don't know. I guess it has
some funny tragedy plus time comedy. Right. Yes, of course
what happened to the people who drank it is not funny.
But like when you when we find out what was
causing this, it is actually kind of strange. So Moren
and Daniel mentioned that they were inspired to look more

(40:14):
closely at the constituents of the beer made by this
brewery because of a specific historical analogy, and that's the
Great English Beer poisoning of nineteen hundred. Uh. This was
an incident in which thousands of people across Middle and
Northwest England, especially in the city of Manchester, were poisoned
by beer. Of the thousands who were poisoned, at least

(40:36):
around seventy or so died. And I think it was
originally believed to be nothing more than a bunch of
you know, known pathologies affecting alcoholics. A Royal commission in
Great Britain investigated the incident and discovered that the outbreak
of symptoms was due to contamination of these batches of
beer with the chemical element arsenic and known poison. Now,

(40:57):
given the isolation of this beer, source and a bit
of historical analogy. Finally a theory started to come together,
and it starts with beer foam and dish detergent. So
you ever seen a beer commercial on TV? The kind?
I know you've seen one at least. Sometimes you know
you're hanging out by the pool party and with the
bottles or the cans, but sometimes you're a giant amid

(41:20):
the mountains and the ball back and forth. Which was
the beer company that had the had the big like
transformers monster, I don't know, see they all they all
going to run together for me, and I was never,
you know, a customer, but you know, sometimes you're partying
with a dog. Just about anything can happen in a
beer commercial, Okay, So I'm trying to get you to

(41:40):
picture a specific kind, which is the one where, uh,
somebody is pouring a nice frosty glass of beer straight
from the tap into a mug or or a pint
glass and handing it across the bar to the earthy
Marlboro man who's off work and ready to relax with
his friends. You know this kind, right with the ball
are with the glass with especially the frothy head at

(42:03):
the top of the glass, right and the marble man
is going to drink from it, and he's gonna have
the foam stuck on his mustache. Yeh got foam? Yeah.
And so in this genre of beer commercial clearly one
of the most important is that equalities of that glass
of beer is the foamy top. Some people call it
the head, some people call it the collar. This foam

(42:23):
is caused by the quick rising of bubbles from previously
dissolved gas. Usually it's gonna be carbon dioxide, but I
think some brands actually dissolved nitrogen in there to help
with the foam. Guinness or some brands might do that.
But these bubbles form at nucleation points in the glass
of beer as it's poured, and they shoot up to
the top of the glass where they collect in a
mesh of bubbles and proteins from the malt in the

(42:47):
beer and bitter hop compounds. I was looking at an
article that interviewed a professor of biochemistry at Cornell named
Carl Siebert on the subject of what constitutes beer foam,
and Siebert mentioned that one of the important proteins and
beer that collects in these bubbles and this matrix of
bubbles and proteins in beer foam is albumen, which I
thought I would just add, is also the same primary

(43:09):
family of proteins that you find in egg whites. So
is there something shared in common between your logger head
and that egg white omelet a little bit or your
ramos gin fizz, which of course is going to have
that nice, creamy, frothy consistency because of the egg whites
that are part of the recipe. Oh that's right, yeah.
But but in the beer, like the head of the beer,

(43:29):
I know that you're not supposed to have too much
of it, right, Like that's a sign of a bad
poor right. Yeah. So I think it's widely agreed by
beer drinkers that a glass of beer without a correctly
proportioned layer of head is wrong. If you get too
much head, if it takes up like half the glass,
or if you have none at all, you have failed
to beer. But it's I'm assuming you still need a
certain amount of foam at the top for it just

(43:51):
to feel like you're drinking beer, right, And and the
beer industry has studied the chemistry of beer foam extensively
to meet the perceived customer demand for the right kind
of frothy head on a glass of beer. But the
researchers Moran and Daniel note that by the mid nineteen sixties,
beer manufacturers were encountering a problem that beer wasn't looking

(44:11):
right in a lot of bars. It didn't have that nice,
frothy head that they believed the customers were looking for,
and this was believed to be the result of the
use of synthetic dishwashing detergents used to clean beer glasses,
which after cleaning and insufficient rinsing, would leave a layer
of film on the inside of the beer glass that

(44:32):
interfered with the beer's ability to foam up and create
a nice head. Interesting. I never thought about that. So
around July nine, some Canadian brewers and presumably brewers elsewhere
found a solution in modern chemistry in an additive chemical
compound that Moran and Daniel originally identify as cobalt sulfate,

(44:54):
but which later authors I think more correctly identified as
cobalt chloride. Uh. But the main thing here is that
it's a cobalt compound. This cobalt compound was added to
draft beer batches to stabilize the beer head and overcome
any anti foaming influence of detergent residue left in the
beer glass. So obviously we know where this is heading.

(45:17):
But and so it's probably coloring my judgment. But already
it sounds like if you're fighting detergent film uh through
the food product itself, through the beer itself, Like that's
a bad sign, right right? Uh? And and again this
would be something that they were only really supposed to
be dealing with through draft beer, right and it's going
to be poured into a glass in a bar or something.

(45:38):
It wouldn't be the same in a bottle because it,
you know, number one, the head doesn't really matter in
the bottle as much. And then presumably that bottle is
going to be completely clean and not have any kind
of like you have control over what you're you're pre
cleaning the bottles with exactly. Yeah. But it turns out
that at least in this Quebec City brewery, this stuff
was being added to both the draft beer and the

(46:00):
bottled beer batches because they didn't make them separately. They
made them all in one batch and then split them
up later. So so they're putting cobalt in the beer.
I wonder how that's going to turn about. Let's talk
about cobalt. Cobalt is a chemical element atomic number twenty seven.
It's one of the transition metals of the periodic table.
It's essentially never found in its pure form in nature.

(46:21):
It's always bound up with other elements in compounds and
compound minerals and other stuff. Very cool etymology. Fact. The
English name cobalt comes from the German word cobalt, which
in its general sense means goblin or imp or demon.
More specifically, it refers to a breed of German household

(46:43):
or subterranean goblin. Uh, there would be ones in your house,
ones sometimes I think in ships, and definitely in minds.
And these goblins could be full of tricks and mischief
if you offended them. Yes. So, the cobalt ore was
rarely sought out for its own sake at this time,

(47:03):
but it was usually a byproduct of mining for other
metals like silver or copper. And it seemed some miners
and refiners and metal workers that this other element in
the ore carried impish or demonic qualities, since it was
believed to make workers sick with its fumes and degrade
the quality of silver. Now I think it seems actually

(47:25):
with historical perspective that what was really making people sick
during this refining process was the arsenic content of the ore,
but the Goblin name stuck with cobalt. Cobalt remains the
Goblin metal. Cobalt was first chemically isolated in the seventeen
thirties by the Swedish chemist gae Org Bronte. But the
use of compounds containing cobalt goes back into the ancient world.

(47:47):
Going back to our dye discussion, it appears that it
was often for the use of coloring. It was to
pigment or color statuettes in ancient Egypt, or beads in
ancient Persia, and cobalt was used in ceramics in China.
But what happens when you start eating or drinking it? Well,
Cobalt appears to have a very complex range of biological

(48:08):
effects uh At the same time, of course, it is
not a pure poison. In fact, cobalt compounds in small
quantities are important for good health in a number of animals.
Or I said compounds plural. I think there's at least
one known one I can think of, which is vitamin
B twelve, also known as kobalaman. It contains cobalt and
UH and B twelve is of course essential for good health.

(48:30):
It sustains functions like cell metabolism, red blood cell formation
or the i think, the maturation of red blood cells,
and in DNA synthesis. And in fact, there were already
by the nineteen sixties known therapeutic uses of cobalt. But again,
to revisit Paracelsus, it's the dose that makes the poison.
While some small amounts of some forms of cobalt are

(48:51):
necessary in the body, humans are also extremely sensitive to
large doses of cobalt. So, to come back to the
Quebec city outbreak in nineteen sixty five, according to Morin
and Daniel, the myocardial toxicity of cobalt was already known
to medical science in the nineteen sixties. Studies had already
shown that metabolized cobalt is deposited in the muscle tissue

(49:14):
of the heart and it will reduce the ability of
the heart muscles to contract, which of course they need
to do to pump blood. So the detectives here looked
into the timing of when cobalt was added to the
beer and the appearance of patients with beer drinkers cardiomyopathy,
and it was clear that the cobalt in the beer
was primarily to blame. After a pattern was discovered in

(49:35):
in nineteen sixty six, breweries in the United States and
Canada and elsewhere were ordered by their governments to stop
using cobalt additives. And this appears to have stopped the
the you know, people showing up at hospitals and clinics
with this unique type of cardio myopathy in the following months. Robert,
I've attached a little timeline for you here, but you

(49:55):
can see quite clearly a pattern where basically the cobalt
is introduced and and the patients start showing up, the
cobalt is removed, and the patients stopped showing up. Oh yeah,
it is a there is a clear correlation there. Now,
there are some peculiarities here, and one is that in
both the case of the nineteen hundred beer poisoning in
England and the outbreaks of beer drinkers cardiomyopathy, it seemed

(50:17):
like at least some patients, maybe a lot of patients,
displayed symptoms that were more powerful than you would expect
from the doses of arsenic and cobalt alone, respectively. That
they received. So it also looks like the negative effects
of alcoholism, along with poor diet and nutrition, maybe contributing
to making the arsenic and the cobalt more potent poisons

(50:40):
than they would have been on their own. Nevertheless, I
think it's totally clear that the cobalt was primarily the cause.
Uh and Moren and Daniel also add a really stern,
pretty harsh addendum to their paper. Uh. They point out
that the a chelating agent called E d t A
quote has been shown to prevent cobalt in toxic cation

(51:00):
in the animal. Had this metal been known to be
present in beer at the time of the epidemic, the
prompt administration of E d t A might have saved
some of our patients. The clinician accustomed to knowing the
exact composition of the drugs he uses, will therefore seriously
question the necessity for the secrecy that surrounds the use
of food or drink additives. That makes sense again, it

(51:21):
comes back to to to the the fact that in
the modern world we have such a robust palate from
which to create our various food products. Uh. Well, if
you're going to be treating an illness, that maybe due
to your particular food or drink product, you need to
have the secret ingredients fully listed so that medical personnel

(51:41):
can respond appropriately. Yeah, and I mean it's known here
that they're saying, if we'd known about the cobalt earlier,
some people who died might have lived. Uh, that's a
tragic reality. Um, this just that seems to be this
unfortunate side effect of the the idea of protecting recipes
and industrial secrets and stuff. But anyway, after the link

(52:03):
between the cobalt additive and the cardiac disease was discovered,
the use of cobalt, of course was suspended, as we said,
But there must have been plenty of cases around the
world of undiagnosed cobalt cardio myopathy, which doctors just mistook
for more common forms of heart disease. Eves Morin emphasizes
this point speaking to the CBC article about the cobalt poisoning. Quote,

(52:27):
you can't imagine the number of patients everywhere who died
from that disease because it wast mortality. But the story
doesn't in there. I was reading article from the CBC. Uh,
that was the one I just cited, and and the
occasion of this article was that there was another case
of cobalt poisoning that was recognized by a group of
doctors in Germany that year with the help of an

(52:50):
episode of the TV show House, which I've never seen before,
but apparently the doctor said the fact that cobalt poisoning
had showed up on an episode of the TV show
led them to along with the this historical case of
the beer outbreak in the sixties, led them to diagnose
correctly what was happening to fifty five year old man

(53:11):
who showed up in a hospital in Marburg, Germany with
severe heart failure, deafness, blindness, fever, hypothyroidism, and swollen lymph nodes,
and the doctors eventually pinpointed the cause of his sudden illness,
which was cobalt poisoning from metal hip implants. A common
use of cobalt today is in is in special like

(53:31):
alloy is like magnetic metals and alloys. And apparently this
patient had I think part of some kind of ceramic
object with part of it with his hip replacement rubbing
against the metal alloy element of the hip replacement, and
it was the rubbing was releasing cobalt into his bloodstream.

(53:51):
But the doctors figured this out. The patient had his
hip pros thesis removed and replaced with a new model,
after which the concentrations of cobalt and chromium in a
blood decreased and he recovered from some of the worst
of his symptoms, but not immediately from all of them.
Well that's that's that's very interesting. And as far as
house goes, I've never watched either. I love the lead actor.

(54:11):
But this is a great example of why it's it's
not a bad thing to get the science at least
mostly right in some sort of you know, popular form
of entertainment, because people are going to you know, they're
going to learn from it, uh, for better or worse,
you know. And here's an example of of of them
getting the science right or even mostly right, helped investigators

(54:34):
go in the right direction on this particular case. Yeah,
but I think this is such a bizarre and fascinating story,
going from like the aesthetics of what beer looks like
in a glass to to these outbreaks of metal poisoning. Yeah, yeah,
and and and like and again it's clearly a case
where the the individuals who did this, they were they
were thinking, well, we just we want to make the
beer look nicer. What can we add? Here's something that

(54:57):
we can add, and it's gonna it's not gonna hurt
anybody like that was clearly far from their minds. And
uh and yet these were the unforeseen consequences. Yeah, but
again that's the complexity of of of food in our
modern world of processed food and uh and and certainly
beer is a it's a as an artificial product. It
is processed. I mean, it's stories like this that can

(55:18):
make you. Normally you don't stop to to appreciate the bureaucrats,
but it's stories like this can that can really make
you say, like, hey, wow, it's it's actually amazing that
that modern societies have come up with things like food
and drug testing organize, you know, like a Food and
Drug administration or something that looks at products that are
going out to mass markets in an organized way to say,

(55:41):
can we be pretty certain that this is safe before
releasing it on the public. Right. We didn't always have that.
I mean, yeah, it's easy to say, you know, I
don't want the government. You know, I'm saying what I
can and can't put in my body. But if the
thing we're talking about is a say, a lead laced
UH sucker for a child or or or or a
cobalt and used beer. You don't necessarily know what you're

(56:03):
putting in your body. When I'm all for big Brother
jumping in and weeding out you know, poisonous products like that.
But that's just me. You may have a different opinion
of poison. So anyway, I don't know if this was
going to really help anybody out this Thanksgiving. Uh don't
don't put cobalt on your turkey, right right? You don't

(56:26):
just don't use any like hard heavy metals to uh
to flavor or weigh down anything. But I don't know.
I guess in general, you know you're going to use
some processed foods during you know, whatever kind of feast
you might be having, You're going to use additives or
something that has added is added to it. And so
it is I think inciple to understand the history of

(56:47):
these things and UH and the Carol careful balance that
is in play between you know, finding a nice color,
enhancing a flavor, and potentially poisoning somebody. Can we end
with just a food coloring hip? Sure you sort of
mentioned earlier when you were listing natural foods that are
sometimes used for their their dying properties or pigments. One

(57:08):
that I think is a great substitute for saffron. It
doesn't get the flavor there, but it also creates a
wonderful yellow orange hue is just to use a little
bit of turmeric. You don't have saffron at the house,
but you want to make a nice yellow pot of rice,
a little bit of turmeric in there. It goes a
long way. Oh yeah, I love I love turmeric. All right, Well,
we're gonna go ahead and call it here for this
year's Dangerous Foods. But I think I think we'll probably

(57:31):
be back next year with another Dangerous Foods episode. We
did not exhaust the the the larder of poisons this time,
so I think we'll be able to come back with
some new angle next year. In the meantime, if you
want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, going over to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's we will find them. That's the mother ship. Uh,
And you can also find the show wherever you get

(57:52):
your podcasts wherever it is. Just make sure you have
subscribed and give us a rating and review that really
helps us out. If you want a little horror fiction,
check out the second oil age that's out wherever you
get your podcast. You can also check out our other
nonfiction show that being Invention. Invention is a journey through
human techno history, one invention at a time. Uh. This month,

(58:14):
there have been a number of food episodes, a two
part look at the microwave for instance. Use a microwave
every day? Do you know how it works? Well? You
should listen to these episodes and and make sure you're
on top of that. Uh, let's see what else? Oh? Yeah.
On on the social media, there's the Facebook group the
Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module. That's a good
place to chime in and chat with other listeners. I'm

(58:35):
sure some folks are going to chime in about Strange
Brew too, and to let everyone know exactly what that
film is about and what extent it may or may
not tie into our topics today. Rick moranis in it. Yeah,
it was written Rick moranis. And uh, the other guy
from was this was the Second City. Dave Thomas. Dave
Thomas was Dave Thomas, Yes, Dave Thomas, Rick moranis and

(58:57):
probably some other names as well. But those are the
two leads. Uh. I just want to emphasize again if
you haven't checked out Invention yet, check that out. If
you haven't checked out the second oil age, you must
do it. I think you're gonna love it. It's so
much fun. Oh and t shirts. The Stuff to Blow
your Mind merch store is still active, and i'd just
mind understanding that there is a new shirt in there

(59:18):
for Thanksgiving and there is also some manner of like
there's like you know, there's always Black Friday deals and
Thanksgiving deals, so just be advised this is a good
time to get merchandise from that store if you so desire.
Totally by it all huge thanks as always to our
excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this

(59:39):
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,

(01:00:00):
this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.