Eating alone may be secretly spiking your blood sugar

0:00Support for this podcast and the following message come from Henry Ford Health. What if medical expertise could travel far beyond the hospital? This led Henry Ford Health doctors to develop remote ultrasound diagnostics used by astronauts. More at Henry Ford dot com slash science for the win. Hey Regina Barber here to ask if you'll follow shortwave on the MPR app or whichever one you're using. It's a little action that goes a long way for our small team. Okay, here's the show. You're listening to shortwave from NPR. I'm here with Ari Daniel and Sasha Fyfer. Hey Ari. Hey Sasha. Hi Regina. So I have a question for you. What are your guys habits around eating? Like do you do it purely for fuel like for your body and your mind or do you like to treat it as a ritual? Well, it's certainly a source of fuel Regina, but I do think of it as a kind of ritual, both the making of it and then the eating of it. Family meals are really important where we eat all together with our kids.

1:04I don't know that I'd call it a ritual, but I do love to eat and I'm certainly aware that how I eat can make my brain or body feel or look different. So I think of food in all sorts of ways. Yeah, I think of it as a ritual, but like a fun ritual. You know, like I'm looking forward to this thing that we always do to keep me grounded. I love it. So the reason I ask about food habits is because our first story in this biweekly science news roundup episode is about how eating with friends and family could actually lower your blood sugar. Oh, that's an interesting one. I'm interested to hear if there's something about communal eating that has some physiological effect. Yeah. And we also got two others, very different stories, one about how loud birds can get and what contributes to that variety. Plus, how samples from the asteroid Bennu could help us answer questions about life origins right here on Earth. You're listening to shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

2:07Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's Flex Path Learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at Capella.edu. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at MintMobile.com slash switch, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from Bull and Branch. Change the way you sleep with soft 100% organic cotton sheets from Bull and Branch. To help you fall asleep faster. With airy blankets, cloud-like duvets and breathable sheets, experience pure comfort on night one and feel your sheets get softer with every wash. Discover the difference with 15% off your first order at bullandbranch.com with code NPR.

3:09Exclusion Supply. See site for details. OK, Sasha, as promised, we're going to start with the eating with or without company and how it might help your blood sugar. Yes, tell us why in the world those two things are related. Yes, so researchers in Israel gave participants the same amount of carbs to eat. So in this case, it was bread. Then they measured their blood glucose levels. And they found compared to people who ate alone, people who ate together were better at regulating their blood sugar. Regulating like it didn't spike as high. Yeah, and their blood sugar came back down to baseline quicker. Basically, they recovered faster from the sugar high. Researchers calculated the social group was 24% more efficient at clearing glucose from their blood. The results are published in the journal Science Advances. And why? Why would eating not by yourself but with other people or another person make a difference? Yes, so lead author, sheer ad seal. Things one possibility is that our brains associate other people with eating and that social cue might push our brains to start the metabolizing process earlier, like by releasing insulin

4:14sooner, which helps regulate blood sugar. And behavioral neuroscientist James Cohn offered another idea to support these results. That our brains could interpret company as help is here if we need it. And so your body may not require as much sugar at the ready and you could use it elsewhere, like to grow hair or store it. You can do other things with it, then dump it into your bloodstream. You know, this is very relevant to me today because I went to NPR's in-house cafeteria, a little cafe. I got food, brought it to my desk and ate it all by myself. And it sounds like you're saying, maybe I shouldn't do that all the time. Maybe? Yeah. Both James and Sheer say this is a reason to prioritize our friendships and social lives. And Sheer also thinks this is evidence that our social nature as humans is rooted in our biology. Maybe social bonds are actually rooted in the most basic physiological processes or what I call homeostasis. So what I'm saying, Sasha, I'm happy to eat lunch with you when I see you.

5:15Next time we'll go to the cafeteria together, Regina. Yeah. All right, tell me about your next topic, which is loud birds. Right. So scientists have been studying bird vocalizations for well over a century, Sasha. And there's a ton of variation between species, says Jeff Potos, a behaviorally-collegeist at UMass Amherst. Because they're all communicating about the same sort of stuff about being territorial or trying to attract mates. That raises questions as to why we have all that diversity. Most studies have focused on pitch and rhythm, but hardly ever on volume. I would have thought that maybe volume would be the first thing they study. It seems like it's so straightforward. It's the thing we most focus on. Yeah, you would think, but it hasn't been easy to do it in the wild until recently, with devices like sound level meters and laser rangefinders. All right. So if scientists can figure out the volume of bird song, what can they learn from that? Well, what they want to do is they want to try to figure out how some birds sing louder than others and perhaps why. So several years back, Potos and his PhD student at the time, Jouaumez is set out to do just

6:19that. They recorded birds in western Massachusetts, in fields, in swamps, in suburbia, and all across Brazil, Joua's home country, from the top of a more than mile high mountain to his balcony in Sao Paulo. Even in your backyard, you feel like an early naturalist measuring something for the first time. In a paper they published in the journal Evolution, they collected the volumes of 123 different species. So they got a really large range. It was staggering. There was an 800-fold difference between the softest species, a kind of hummingbird you can barely hear all the way up to a very loud trio. Comparable to the level of a jackhammer. Having two species that are new contenders for world's loudest bird, the bear-throated bellbird, and the red-legged Sariema. They really did their homework, didn't they? Yeah, and they found that larger species and those with wider mouth openings tend to sing louder.

7:19All right, I get if you have a wider mouth opening that anatomically, maybe you can belt it out more, any idea why there is so much variety among all this? They don't have the answer just yet. The scientists couldn't find any clear patterns, but here is a cool fact. Some of these birds are actually louder than the published values of certain mammals, like lions and wolves and elephants. You know that initially seems hard to believe, but then I think about the times I've been woken up by crows in the morning. So yes, maybe birds can outloud and elephant at certain times. Yeah. Better than being woken up by a lion. That's true. So we chatted with Sue Anne Zollinger, an ornithologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK who wasn't involved in the research. She was impressed with the study, but acknowledged its natural for such a broad survey to have its constraints. You can't really go into a lot of detail about the mechanics that might underlie these differences. Oh, scientists study such interesting things, don't they? Yeah.

8:20All right, for our last topic, it was something to do with asteroid samples. Tell us about that one. Yeah, it's something that truly boggles my mind, a NASA sent a spacecraft to Bennu. This is an asteroid that comes pretty close to Earth every six years to collect samples. And they brought those samples back to Earth. The samples landed in the Utah desert in September of 2023, and these precious rocks and dust grains were sent to scientists around the world to study. We talked to one of those researchers, Larry Nittler, at Arizona State University. Literally, I get in the mail box and inside it is a little glass container with a tiny, tiny black rock. And I'm like, this came from outer space. And so what do those little black rocks tell them? Yeah, a lot. Another chemist named Maria Schoenbeckler also got a little stash of these rocks. She and her team looked at the chemical signatures and compositions of these samples, and they determined that Bennu actually formed a lot closer to the sun than previously thought.

9:21And this has huge implications. It goes back to very, very basic questions, where are we coming from? How did life emerge on Earth? And if we want to answer this question, it can actually, but we need more of this material. That's why we need these samples here on Earth in the labs. They wrote about all of this in the journal Science Advances. We just heard her say that these samples could help answer the question of how life emerged on Earth. How could it tell us that? Well, the origins of this asteroid could give us some hints. The study suggests Bennu formed in the part of the solar system called the water ice line, basically right before you hit Jupiter. If that's true, that could mean that when the solar system was just forming, asteroids like Bennu could have brought water and possibly organic material to the young Earth. And Sasha, I want to say that getting these samples from Bennu and another asteroid, Ryu-gu is crucial. Because the only space rocks that scientists have studied before were meteorites that

10:21survived the fiery journey through our atmosphere and the crash into Earth. But just studying stuff that falls to Earth means we might be missing a huge part of the picture of what's really going on out there. So as is often the case with science, a lot more still to be learned. We just need more space rocks. Sasha, thank you so much for spending time with us. And you know, being a science enthusiast with us just for a little while. It's always fun. Thanks. Good to talk to both of you. You too, Sasha. You're always welcome here. You can hear more of Sasha on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Berlin McCoy and Kai McNamy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher and Taliatta. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Kelly, Ilwyn Fane and Tiffany Vera Castro with audio engineers. I'm Marie Daniel. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Sherwave, the science podcast from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

11:26The following message comes from NPR sponsor Henry Ford Health as chairman of surgery and CEO of their innovation institute. Dr. Scott Dolcevsky knows their mission requires training future health innovators. I love the mission of Henry Ford Health. It's to improve people's lives. And health is a part of that, but it's also employment opportunities. It's education. It's innovation. So about six years ago, we embarked on a audacious goal of being the best training site in the country for our trainees of the future, our factors of the future. How do we do this best? Robotics is an enabling technology for so many surgical diseases. Now, it's not just urologists that use this almost everybody. This week we've got a STEM to Stern robotic boot camp for all of the trainees who are going to be a future surgeons here. And then we're giving them the tools to not just be as good as us, but better.

12:27Learn more at Henry Ford dot com slash science for the win. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's Flex Path Learning Format lets you earn your degree at your pace. Without putting life on pause, learn more at Capella.edu.