March 22, 2018 • 50 mins
In the 1940s, a tiny town outside Boston volunteered to be test subjects in a study that would become one of the longest and broadest in the history of medicine. Originally designed to study heart disease, it's revealed things about plenty else too: everything from evolution to selecting a spouse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, Colorado. The States so nice. We're playing there twice,
two days in a row. Chuck, we added a second
show to our Gothic Theater tour. That's right, we're gonna
be there June seventh and June now sold out, but
one of those weird cases where you go see the
first show you were actually late buying tickets. Right. We're
(00:21):
also going to be in Boston April four, d C
April five. We're gonna be in St. Louis on May,
in Cleveland one, and then of course we're gonna wrap
this summer up on June at the Gothic Theater in Colorado.
So go to s Y s K live dot com
for all of your information and ticket needs. Welcome to
(00:43):
Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, There's guest producer Noel all of Nature, Wild
and Free. This is where you long to be. Stuff
(01:04):
you should know. So let's go ahead and admit that
we just did a rare retake of like the first
four minutes of the show. Yeah, and I still reused
the Madonna lyric joke. That's fine, but we have to
recreate the rest of the previous four minutes. No, I
don't think so. I think we should just kind of
let it flow. I was just I was saying to myself,
By God, that Madonna jokes getting in there. All right, Well,
(01:27):
maybe just a quick recap. Noel's dressed up and looks great.
He's it's because he's a snappy dresser. Uh. We mispronounced
words in the UK and got laughed at. And now
we're talking about the Framing Him heart Study. That's right,
which we h. I don't know what podcast it was on,
but years ago we called it the Farmington hard Study. Um,
(01:48):
every time we said it, we said Farmington's did we really? Yeah,
you don't remember that. No, I mean that definitely sounds
like us, but I don't remember it. Yeah. Yeah, that's
why I made that joke when you first came in
about the Farmington Heart Study. Okay, yeah, we said it
was years ago. It was one of our earlier couple
of years and we said the Farmingtons Hearts Study probably
(02:11):
twelve times. Yeah. Back in the day, the standards used
to be its head lower. Yeah, because we were low
hanging Fruit podcast. It was us Zyberglass was Ricky Gervais
and Jesse Thorn, and then Adam Curry was out there
somewhere and probably Adam Corolla. Sure, yeah no, but no
one else we had. There were eight podcasts. That was it.
(02:33):
That was all you had to choose from, So you
better like at least one of them. Do you know
how many there are? Now? I just saw today? Uh no,
do you like you have an actual number? Well, I
mean it's a it's an even number, so it's probably
not exact. But the latest hot pod newsletter said that
there are roughly three podcasts. Oh my god, that's nuts.
(02:55):
I know, man alive. That's pretty impressive, and probably only
like five of those are good. Well, we we went
from that was mean, we went from eight to three
fifty thousand and how many years? Ten? We're still hanging strong,
we are. That's great. That's what happens when you say
(03:15):
things like Farmington ten twelve times. He's long gone. Yeah,
he pronounced everything perfectly like guys washed up now yea,
So the reason we're talking about framing him, which, by
the way, yeah, yeah, it's gonna be tough to say
it the same way every time, but it's framing Ham
(03:39):
is the city of Massachusetts. I don't get the Framingham
as opposed to framing him Yeah, ok, yeah, the h
is a hard age or soft aged like, Whereas if
this were in Scotland they would just say you're right,
which is again why we were laughed at Manchester that
(04:01):
it's Germany sorry, right, which is landlocked. So again we're
talking about Framingham, Massachusetts, a very small town these days.
In two thousand and seventeen, I think the census, well
that the population estimate was something like seventy residents, not
a not a huge town. I think that qualifies as
(04:23):
a small, dinky town. Still. Yeah, but it's a suburb
of Boston, which is a huge metropolis. Sure it is, um,
but it is aside from being a suburb of Boston,
it is in its own right, uh, an internationally renowned
tiny town. Not because it's like a place where the
circus used to hang out during the winter, or because um,
(04:47):
they have some amazing kind of fudge. Right, Farmingham, Massachusetts
is on the map because that town back in the day,
actually two times over that town. Just I did that
they were going to present themselves as as test subjects,
(05:07):
study participants, for some of the most important studies ever
carried out in the history of medicine. Yeah. What one
of the largest and certainly most influential longitudinal studies ever
performed in medicine. Yeah, it's called the Farming hum Or
farming Ham Heart Study, the Framingham Oh my god, was
(05:29):
that an accident? Yes, Oh boy, The Framing hum Heart Study. Yeah,
which you know, we've we've had challenges, as has the
medical community in research community throughout study history, of being
frustrated with like bad studies and poor sample sizes. This
one is really set the standard. Yeah, it's it's the
(05:52):
gold standard for anything that has anything to do is
studying cardiovascular disease. And as we'll see it basically is
everything we you and I, just Joe Schmo walking around
on the street know about cardiovascular disease basically came out
of this study. Um. And even before that, there was
another study that the town participated in that helped lick tuberculosis,
(06:15):
which was which was appropriate because you know, framing framing him. Yeah,
I got it right. Is in Massachusetts, which is part
of New England, which was part of the vampire panic area, which,
as you remember, was the result of tuberculosis. So it's
it was appropriate that that little town contributed to humanity
in that way as well. Yes, so should we hop
(06:38):
in the way back machine? Oh yes, all right, let's
set the dial. Let's load up the flux capacitor with
Miller heavy beer and banana peals. Miller heavy. Yeah that's
what he used, nice, I think so, yeah, okay, that's
that's at the end with the more modern version right
(07:00):
right of the Dolorean. Yeah. I think he used some
sort of plasma waist incenterator. Yeah. Uh so, let's let's
set the dials for um, the World War two era.
We're not gonna be super specific here, No, sometimes we
(07:23):
rolled the dice in the way back machine. Let's see
what happened. Just say, spit us out anytime in the
nineteen forties, not in Europe or the South Pacific, that's right.
So in the nineteen UM here was a scene in
the USA, and I guess all over the world is
we did not know a lot about and all this
stuff seems so second nature now and like duh about
(07:45):
heart disease, But we didn't know a lot about heart
disease back then, and it was sort of just accepted
that once you reach a certain age, like, yeah, your
heart just may take you out. Nothing we can do
about it. Might as well not research it. And there's
certainly no preventative medicines for your to ensure that health. No,
certainly not like they could try to treat it or whatever.
(08:08):
But most of the time, once you came down with UM,
one of the cardiovascular diseases, you UM, you were a goner.
YEA of us deaths we're due to CBD, right, And
so there was a confounding factor that led to this
huge increase. There are actually two of them. One is
(08:31):
as far as percentages go. The cardiovascular disease deaths lurched
forward in the mid early mid twentieth century because what
used to be the big killers, which were infectious diseases
which we now consider highly treatable. They used to kill everybody, right,
And as we started to treat them thanks to the
(08:52):
discovery and use of penicillin and antibiotics, those things fell
into the background and and by by extend mention or
by proxy, cardiovascular disease was basically bear naked out there
statistics wise. Suddenly something that was just kind of like
a secondary problem was now that the leading cause of
(09:14):
death in the United States and in the West. I believe, yeah,
because I guess people were living routinely, living into their
fifties and sixties, maybe for the first time, I don't know, Yeah,
and they were saying, my god, I'm so glad I
get these extra couple of decades of eating raw steak
and smoking cigarettes at the dinner table. Grass. That is
(09:36):
so nasty. It's a it's a true story, though. I
saw my grandpa do it with my own eyes, smoke
at the table. Now. Actually, my grandpa was one of
the He went the other way. He was like like
subscriber number three to Prevention magazine and yeah, into like
coffee animas and all sorts of weird st He was
big time healthy guy. Is that what led your dad
(09:58):
to become the herbal Elviots? I think that that had
some had to have had something to do with it,
for sure. Luckily my dad didn't carry on the family
tradition of coffee animos down to me. So um alright,
So by of death or cardiovascular everyone's dying now from
their heart because they're living longer because they're not dying
(10:20):
of TV and their thirties and forties and then the
second big thing that happened that you teased was President Roosevelt.
Uh started to get really he got cardiovascular disease. He
started to get really high blood pressure. Uh. This was
compounded by UM. Now we understand that stress and anxiety
(10:40):
can compound these things, and he certainly had no shortage
of that UM as president. And you know Winston Churchill
of all people, when he says he seems to be
a very tired man. If Winston Churchill was saying that,
then you're in trouble. Yeah, because he wasn't the picture
of health. No, he certainly wasn't. But apparently f D
made him look like he was fresh as a daisy.
(11:03):
So FDR had high blood pressure when he went into
the White House to begin with. But by the time
rolls around right after the Yalta UM conference where they
divided Europe up between what Great Britain, the United States
in UM, Russia the Soviet Union, right. Um. He died
(11:25):
a couple of weeks after that, at age sixty three.
He had a stroke from hypertension, which is another word
for high blood pressure. And boy, oh boy, did he
have high blood pressure like off the charts. Chuck, Yeah,
three hundred, when when he died he had three hundred
over one. One more time, three hundred over one. So
(11:49):
I went and look that up. I'm like, even without
looking it up, I know that's high, but how high
is it? So? Ideal is between ninety over sixty and
one over eighty. That's how deal blood pressure. Anything over
one eighty over one twenty is what's called a hypertensive crisis.
And the chart tells you to go to your doctor
(12:09):
immediately for that if you have anything over one eight over.
FDR had three over one. Yeah, and I mean his
doctor said, I predict he's a very sick man. I
predicted will be dead within a few months. And he
was running the money, right Churchill's doctor. Yeah, FDR Zone
doctor was like, here, take this digitalis You'll love that.
Churchill's guy, Yeah, okay, yeah. At the y'all take conference.
(12:33):
I guess he just travels with I would think, so,
I thought, I mean, I would imagine all those guys
would travel with their doctors, you know, just just for fun,
like what kind of pills you got today? Yeah, and
again I'm watching The Crown now. I talked about that
in the TV h well, in the episode but when
we talked about it and John listcal As Winston, Churchill
is grow great. What he's awesome? When he and FDR
(12:58):
like half two part ways after the y'all to conference,
does he punch FDR in the face and say O,
FDR hasn't actually he hasn't been in it. Okay, well
look for that scene coming up. Yeah, but it's crazy.
Churchill's all over the place. He had the Gary Oldman
movie and then there were dual Churchill movies. Brian Cox
was on another one. Oh, he's in it's quality. He's great,
although his Hannibal lecture was it was fine until Anthony
(13:23):
Hopkins got his hands on that role. Yeah. The rare
case where the second actor totally owns the role usually
like the first actor. Will you know, just probably by
the fact that the first Although I liked Um, What's
the to Live In Diane l A's guy's name who
was the lead guy in Manhunter? William Peterson. Yeah, I
(13:45):
liked William Peterson's character. That's a great movie more than
Um Edward Norton's version. Oh, in Red Dragon, because Red
Dragon and Manhunter they're based on the same book. Yeah, yeah,
it's the same thing. Yeah, yeah, you're really right. William
Peterson a way better than Edward Norton in that role,
but Jodie Foster better than all of them, is closed, Yes, yeah,
(14:06):
all of them put together. Man. I just watched the
end of that again the other day, and oh, you're
gonna appreciate this. Uh. Emily was in the other room, um,
in the bathroom or something, I can't remember, and she
didn't know what. I turned it on and I passed
it right at the moment of the Penis Tuck Buffalo
Bill when he had his arms out in the Jesus
(14:28):
Christ post and Emily came in and just got in
bed and looked up and was like, oh my god,
what a great movie that was. Had everything, the perfect
race Rain did everything, had Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and
a Penis Tuck scene. We should probably take a break,
all right, We're off the rails here, are you ready? Yes?
(14:50):
Break starting now? Okay, Chuck. So we were talking about
(15:23):
Penis tux right. FDR famously did that at the Yalta conference.
Oh my god, so he you know the reason the
reason FDR's death from hypertension really factors into the stories
because it was extremely public, okay, And what FDR basically
did without using these last words, he basically said he
(15:48):
pointed at at modern medicine and said, I beseech you,
and then keeled over right, So modern medicine was like,
who us, we don't know what we're doing when it
comes to cardiovascular disease ease. And shortly thereafter, the framing
him heart study was born. No, you can almost coming.
(16:09):
The framing of heart study was born because Harry Truman
signed the National Heart Act, which is probably the thing
that he's most famous for. Its president. Yeah, and that
included and that included five thousand dollars in the form
of a grant for this study for twenty years to
cover twenty years for the study. And um, I think
(16:32):
initially Public Health service physician Uh Gilson or Gilkin Metters
uh said, it sounds like you messed that up, but
you didn't. I think you hit it right on the head.
Gilson Metters. It matters sounds like a weird you think
it'd be meadows or something. It sounds like you're drunk
and saying meadows. Uh. And this was the original quote,
(16:55):
which is actually a pretty good mission statement for the study.
Their mission was to study the express and of coronary
artery disease and a normal or unselected population, and to
determine the factors predisposing to the development of the disease
through clinical and laboratory examined long term follow up. So
there you have it. Not bad, it's got a clinical ring,
(17:16):
it's got a it's concise. You can dance to it. Yeah, exactly.
So this this framing Him heart study was a heart
study before it was set in framing him. And they
went to framing him for a number of reasons. One
they said, well, this is a pretty pretty standard UM
middle America, middle class UM community, at least of the
(17:40):
kind that we pay attention to in this day and age, right,
meaning it was almost entirely white people, which will see
as a huge criticism of this study that UM the
study directors over time have tried to work on. But um,
they said, aside from the the the complete and almost
complete and utter of UM diversity. Yes, in this study,
(18:04):
it's a pretty good slice of America. It's a small town,
most of the people their middle income. It's it's got
a big enough population. At the time, this is the
nineteen forties or something like twenty eight thousand people that
we could get a pretty decent, like random sample of
the population going. But the town itself is small enough.
There's only like two hospitals and in time there would
(18:26):
only be one hospital that we can actually easily keep
track of the people in this town. And it's not
too far from Boston University, which would win the contrast
to UM carrying out the study on behalf of the
National Heart Institute. Well, yeah, and they had also, like
you said, earlier, proven that their game for this kind
of thing by participating in that uh to what was
(18:49):
called tuberculosis how down or something. Ye had a name.
It did have a name. It was called the Framing
Him Tuberculosis Demonstration. There would be like watch this, no,
but it could be on a Saturday night. It was
the hold Down. So that, yeah, the whole town had
was not the whole town, but the town had gotten
(19:10):
behind being UM test subjects or study participants for a
whole other study about thirty years before the Heart study began.
So they were already kind of like there. Their healthcare
providers were already like aware that this stuff was going on.
And at the time, apparently healthcare providers like your general practitioner.
(19:31):
That was like the end all be all of your health.
That person was meant to know everything about you and
everything about disease and how to treat you. And that
was that. There weren't any longitudinal studies, There wasn't any
preventative medicine, There wasn't any national hard institute, there was
nothing like that. It all came down to your general practitioner.
(19:53):
So it was really important that the general practitioners and
the healthcare providers in the town of Framing Them were
on board this kind of thing, because they could very
easily have seen this as encroaching on their turf, but
they didn't. And I think the Framing Him study directors
and the people who carried this actual study out deferred
(20:13):
to the general practitioners in the town as far as
like giving advice from the findings and and keeping up
with the the like outside medical findings or even the
stuff they were finding from the study. They didn't directly
give it to the study participants. They gave it to
their doctors, and then the doctors would tell the study
parts participants, so they were kept in the loop. So
(20:35):
there was a there was a a symbiotic relationship that
was forged. Yeah. I thought that was interesting that they
just kept the research like they weren't there to offer
medical advice. They were literally just collecting research. But I
do wonder if some of the times they would say, hey, uh,
gp of Mr Donaldson, you really need to get him
(20:58):
in like next week. Yeah, like really yeah, like he
It's kind of like I guess how Churchill's doctor saw Roosevelt, right, Like,
I know we're not supposed to give advice, but my
advice to you is to call this guy up and say,
maybe you should come in a little earlier than next spring, right,
or go up your malpractice insurance. So we did say
(21:22):
that it wasn't super ethnically diverse, which um didn't phase
them too much at the time, And it really hit
home to me just how like just how white probably
every major study had been up until this point without
even like thinking it was a problem, which is being like,
(21:42):
I don't know, there's a great study. They're like, well,
you know, he didn't include any black people, and they
just it probably just didn't even occur to them at
the time. I don't know if it didn't occur to him.
I I think that it was mostly that's who their
clientele was. I think that that's probably who was being
studied because that's what America catered to at the time,
(22:04):
or who America catered to, I should say at the time.
I don't know that that much has changed these days, unfortunately,
but I think it was vastly more pronounced back then.
Well I think they I think they're way more inclusive
now and and probably have to be to get research
grants these days. I would think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(22:24):
for sure. No, I'm saying America as a whole being
like catering to Yeah, hear you, But that did change
in and framing him after World War Two. Apparently there
was an influx of a more diverse population after the
war at least, right, and I think by the Good
Lord was that the nineties when they added the new cohort.
(22:45):
Well we'll get to the cohorts, Okay, well, anyway, sure
we'll spoiler alert. They added they made the study population
more diverse. One thing that is in the credit of
the study designers is that they included women at a
about which was totally unheard of it's in any kind
of medical study at the time. Because again, not only
(23:07):
did they cater to almost exclusively white people in America
at the time. They catered almost exclusively to white men
at the time. Yeah, and I think also women. I
think heart disease probably still has a stigma of like, yeah,
men have heart disease, uh more than women do, right, Like,
(23:28):
what are you a trucker lady? How do you have
heart disease? Go back, go back home, get out of
my doctor's office. Yeah, you dummy. Yeah, which is not
the case, right, No. But the weird thing is is
what they found from the study. Just overall, they found
that the stuff that they've come up with, which we'll
talk about in a second, is really good at predicting
(23:50):
things for like white guys, for cardio vascular disease for
white guys. But even though women were very um clearly
represented in the study, they've actually found that the same
predictors don't work for women. So it's kind of led
to a separate study of women and how they suffer
from cardiovascular disease, because they definitely do, it's just under
(24:13):
different circumstances it appears than men. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
So let's talk about the beginning of the study, right, Yeah,
So they recruited people between the ages of thirty and
fifty nine initially because that is the window where you
might develop c D d UM and they they thought
by recruiting people in this range, they would also get
(24:33):
a certain amount of people that are already have this
uh appearing like these symptoms appearing right. They didn't though.
Actually it turned out that they had to actually go
recruit people who had cardiovascular disease already and put them
into this study themselves, I think, because people probably that
maybe we're on that track, don't volunteer for studies like this. Well.
(24:56):
They also it wasn't a very random sample, especial at
first because they initially got participants through um word of
mouth at like civic groups and clubs. So so the
presence of a social network or a certain type of
social network, we just kind of does away with randomness
(25:16):
right out of the gate. And they ended up recruiting
other people outside of like these groups and civic civic
clubs and all that, who initially formed a large part
of the study. UM cohort to make it a little
more random, and I guess they were successful because it
seems like the idea of it being not very random
(25:37):
or not very representative sample of the whole um isn't
really discussed any longer. So I guess they took care
of it by the inclusion of the additional I think
like seven people. Yeah, so they the idea was that
you would come in every two years to give um
your medical history updated, to get updated, to have your physical,
(25:58):
to get you all your labs done. And they thought
at the time like, there's probably they were smart enough
to know that there's probably not one thing this causing CBD.
So collecting all this history from all these people over time,
and initially it was going to be twenty years, but
as you will learn, it's still going on today, which
is amazing. Um, they can really get a robust sampling
(26:20):
of people and time from kind of all walks of
life once they started being more inclusive. Yeah, and they
can watch the disease develop or not develop. And since
they do like a really they did a phenomenal baseline
exam and Chuck, actually, I saw and the very original
inception or conception of the study was that they were
(26:41):
going to do a baseline exam and then a second
follow up three to five years later and that was it.
But luckily they had the foresight to be like, no, no no, no,
let's keep this thing going and keep a rolling. Baby,
I'm feeling hot, right. So they were by doing this
baseline exam and saying, you know, do you smoke, how
much read meet you? How much do you drink? How
much exercise do you get? How often do you go parasailing? Like? Um,
(27:05):
like how many kids do you have? What were your
parents medical histories? Like? By getting this really great baseline exam,
they had an idea of all the different factors that
could come into play when it comes to cardiovascular disease.
And then with these follow up exams every two years,
they would find people as the as they got the
disease or didn't get the disease, and then they could
(27:26):
go back and look and say, well, this person has
cardiovascular disease and they smoke and they have diabetes, and uh,
their parents had a stroke. They're dead at a stroke
and they just had a stroke. So they started to
see from all of this data, it was basically like
you know how data, big data is just enormous right now.
That's basically what the Heart Institute did in Boston University
(27:50):
just went and set up camp in this town and
they started collecting as much data as they possibly could,
and then they set about sorting through it and publishing
papers based on the finding. Yeah, and you mentioned the
cohort earlier there, and I'm just gonna go ahead and say,
each of these cohort names is a great band name.
All of them a blanket. That's a blanket, great band name. Statement.
(28:12):
So the initial you said when they went out and
got another seven forty people, who and those are the
people who had the early signs of CBD. Yeah, they
were included in there. Okay, that's the Framing Him Cohort.
That's everybody. That's the first group. Okay, all of the
first group combined was the Framing Him Cohort. That's a
that's kind of an emo folkey band. Then in seventy
(28:35):
one they said, you know what, these people are having kids.
So what would be awesome is if we started studying
these children and their lifetimes and they were known as
the Offspring Cohort. So that's like an offspring cover band. Okay,
that's terrible. I thought, it's not bad. What what was offspring?
I don't even know. Oh, remember you got to keep
(28:56):
them separated. I do remember that song that was had
a couple of good songs. Yeah, and I think the guy,
if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not thinking of Milo
from the Descendants, Um, this was the guy from Offspring
went on to get like a PhD in like biochemistry
or nuclear physics or something really impressive. Interesting, Yeah, I was.
(29:19):
I'm so I have no idea about any of that genre,
whatever that genre is. I'm not sure what that is either.
The Offspring were kind of their own thing. Yeah, but
isn't it a part of just the whole Like what
was that tour like the Vans Warped Tour and that
all that stuff. I know nothing about any of those bands.
I'll bet they were on Warped Tour now that you
(29:40):
mentioned it. They were not definitely not a part of
what was Lilith Fair No, no, but ironically they did
go to a couple of dates just as audience member
probably so. Alright, So the Offspring cohort were the kids.
That was about fifty of them, and then they included
their spouse is um which was a big deal because,
(30:02):
like I said, adding the kids allowed to look for
hereditary functions as far as CBD goes. And then the
spouses just gave that extra layer of examination when they
weren't related, right, Yeah, so it's almost like a built
in control group as far as um looking at hereditary
stuff goes. Right. And then that was also like I've
(30:25):
seen it remarked on, man, my brain is a little
broken to day. But um, the having adding the kids
as a second cohort was was just a stroke of
genius because even before they had any idea that we
were going to be able to easily examine genes and
d n A, they they started building this this study
(30:50):
data that can be mined now for genetic stuff thanks
to these guys foresight by adding this offspring cohort. That
pretty cool. Uh. The first omni cohort first of three,
those are all three good band names. And this was
(31:10):
when they started getting that diversity. They said, hey, maybe
we should sort of officially include this and break this out.
So that was made up of about five hundred people
of Native American descent, African American descent, Hispanic, Indian, Asian,
and Pacific islander right first. And I guess second and
third omni cohorts, And that was that's surprising to me
(31:34):
that it took that long when they knew out of
the gate that it wasn't representative of America as a whole. Yeah,
I mean it's that's not to say that they didn't
have any of those people in the study, but they
officially recruited more. Isn't that right? That's my impression. Yeah, okay, Yeah,
I don't know that the original cohort was entirely white,
but I from what I understand, it was so so
(31:56):
majority white that it was not representative of of America
population wise. And by the way, Omni Cohort that's obviously
a E d M band that would probably tour with
like the Crystal Method or something like that. Uh. And
then finally the third generation Cohort or Gin three, which
is their album title, that started in two thousand two,
(32:20):
and I think they're expected to shut that one down
next year. That I thought was really weird. Why shut
any of them down? Might not be like, we're gonna
follow you to the grave, man, Yeah, we might even
dig you up in ten years after you're dead in
case we figure out something new to do with you,
you know. Yeah, And these are kids who had at
least one parent in the offspring cohort? Is that right? Okay?
(32:46):
And then there's another one called the offspring spousal cohort,
the new offspring spouse cohort. Right, that's a that's just
a weird one. Yeah, they're getting a little meta. Yeah, So, um,
the new offspring spouse cohort is made up of spouses who,
for whatever reasons, weren't part of the original offspring cohort
(33:10):
and have at least two kids in the Gen three cohort?
Is that correct? It gets a little wonky, But but
the point is is they're like adding more and more
people in the town. As the town's getting bigger and
as the town's getting more diverse, they're they're making the
study reflect this population more and more with the hopes
that it's going to reflect America more and more. And
(33:31):
they again this the study designers and and directors have
always known that this isn't just like a perfect snapshot
of America. Um, there's always been criticisms of it, and UM,
I don't know, you want to take a break before
we get into those, Okay, we will do that right
after this. Okay, so I said, we're going to get
(34:18):
into criticisms, but first we should probably talk about some
of the successes, right yeah. And like I said earlier
that so much of what we learned from this UM
today seems just so brainless. But it's important to remember
that before this, I mean, you still even though you think, like, yeah,
you smoke cigarettes, you're going to increase your risk of
heart disease. It seems like such such a second nature
(34:41):
thing to know now, But until you have actual scientific proof,
you can't say something like that. And this study gave
us a lot of these things that we take for
granted now as obvious and proved them came out of
this study in particular, And and cigarettes was a big one.
I read in this article. I can't remember where it
came from, Chuck, I sent to you where um they
(35:03):
were talking about how one of the reasons why cardiovascular
disease spiked in the forties was because they were giving
free cigarettes out to all of the g I s
during World War Two. They had like an endless supply
of free cigarettes over there, and that they think that
directly led to a rise in the in depths from
cardiovascular disease. So, but no one knew for sure. Some
(35:27):
people probably suspected. Every once in a while a newspaper
would quote them. They would be called a crack potter
and by somebody else in the in the article, and
that would be that. Right. So these guys went to
town like establishing a link between smoking and cardiovascular disease.
They tried very very hard to um connect diet in
(35:48):
cardiovascular disease and had very mixed results, so much so
that some of their early work in that realm was
just went unpublished. For the most part, they just kind
of were like, uh, we'd don't understand this, so we're
not gonna include this. But some of the other ones
were stroke. Like, um, if you have cardiovascular disease, are
at a much higher risk for stroke. Nobody knew that
(36:10):
conclusively before. Yeah, they confirmed that things like cholesterol and
blood pressure abnormalities increase your risk. UM, irregular heartbeat, atrial
fibrillation increases your risk five times menopause. Yeah, that was
a that was a big one, super big one. Um,
here's here's one, Like, seriously, this was figured out in
(36:33):
this study that um, physical activity decreases your risk for
cardiovascular disease, while lower physical activity and obesity increases your risk.
Like again, this is stuff that we're like, of course,
who doesn't know that, well, American in the world didn't
know that until Framing a Heart Study actually published its results. Yeah,
(36:54):
here's one that. Um, if you're in your forties and
you go to get a physical, there's a pretty to
get a chance. At some point after your labs, your
doctor will talk to you about your f R S score.
You're Framing Him risk score. It is still widely used
today as the standard. And that is the very sad
moment where your doctor says you have this much of
(37:17):
a percentage risk of of developing heart disease within ten
years from this state. They tell you have a hundred
and three risk. You say, well, what can it go
up to and they say a hundred Yeah, that's not good. Um,
so there's the Framing HUM risk score is based on
a bunch of different risk factors. And by the way,
(37:38):
the term risk factor was coined from the Framing Him
Heart study, So that's another thing it gave to the world. Uh.
Your risk factors are based on your age, your gender,
total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, whether you have diabetes or not,
whether you smoke or not, and your systolic blood pressure.
You put all this together, each of those gets a score.
(38:00):
You can come up with a really really good indicator
of whether you're going to come down with a cardio
of vascular disease in ten years. If you're a white guy, um,
to a lesser extent, if you're an African American guy,
to a much lesser extent, if you're a woman of
I think any um ethnicity. Do you get a piscol
(38:20):
every year? I try to. It's been Oh it hasn't
been a year yet. I'm just under a year right now,
but I need to find a new doctor. Are you.
Uh how's your cholesterol? It's great man? My family dude?
Oh yeah, is that it runs high? Well? I mean
I certainly do don't do myself any favors with my
weight in my diet, but me, my brother, and my
(38:41):
sister are all on cholesterol medication. Oh is that right? Statens?
Is that what it's called? And and my brother like
is in great shape, and so's my sister. So it's
ah yeah, I mean it's just a totally Bryant family tradition,
just naturally high cholesterol. Huh. Well, I mean my dementia
runs in my family, so I'm toast one way or another.
(39:03):
Oh yeah, I mean it's basically you look at your
family history and spin the big wheel. What's gonna kill me? Right,
It's like common medical science, finally care for mine. Let's
go with that one first. Well, thank god for statins there,
you know now my cholesterol is great. So I since
I went last went to the doctor, I've begun to
(39:23):
introduce butter into my diet way more than I ever
had before. But I love yes, of course, Um like
a really if it has like a picture of an
Amish person on the cover of the package, go with
that butter butter. Yeah, And I actually I read a
taste test on maybe rancor or something like that of
butters and apparently the ones that are like a pound
(39:48):
really don't taste much better than like Carrie gold that
you get at the grocery store just about any grocery store.
So I found like that's good. I'm not really missing
out on anything. Um, I'll just eat more cheese butter
and just like a little bit of butter on some
bread is a really like delightful little treat um ten
times a day. So I'm actually really interested to see
(40:10):
what my cholesterol is like this year. I'm I'm basically
just performing a test on myself right now. Well, and
they've learned so much in the past like ten years
or so about good fats and bad fats and low
fat foods really not being all they're cracked up to be,
because then they're packed with other things that are bad
for you, especially high freak toose coins from Yeah it's good,
(40:30):
we go with a good uh local butter called banner butter.
Mm hmm, it's it's good and you know, who knows
if it tastes a better, but it's it's locally made,
so that's always nice. Is it made from those doomed
goats across the street from you know, we just fed
them yesterday though, did you did you go? I'm so
sorry for what's going to happen to you know we.
I don't think they're doomed. I think they are are
(40:53):
being raised again and sent to Jamaica. Not for food
for what for for milk and cheese to raise people's spirits. Well,
they certainly do that, those goats playing. But yeah, it's
not like every goat has to be eaten to have worth. No,
I agree. I'm just saying they're also milked in there cheese.
(41:21):
We save all our Emily is a juicing theme now.
So we have a lot of um green scraps now,
so we just save them all and then about two
times a week we'll we'll take the kid over there
and feed the goats and it's pretty fun. They bray
at us now when we leave our house. Oh yeah,
they're like, can't you bring that over here? Pretty boomed? Yeah,
they love it. So you guys have green scraps. Let
(41:42):
me give you a little piece of advice to pass
along to Emily. One word, but I'm going to pronounce
it like to Vita mix. Oh dude, we've had a
a mix for like ten years. Is that what you use? Yeah,
you should have scraps. You gotta throw all that stuff
in there so you get the fiber too. Now we
we don't throw like the butt end of the celery
stalk in there. Okay, all right, stuff like that. I
(42:04):
got to because you know there's like there's like juicers
that just extract the juice and leave all of the fiber.
I thought that's what you were talking about. No, no no, no,
we well we do two things. We have the Vita
mix for a lot of the green smoothies and stuff.
But then we are also juicing some of the stuff
and uh, we'll give those the juice scraps to the goats.
(42:25):
But we we do both like every morning now with
some sort of green juice and smoothie. Okay, so you
do have like a juice or juicer than two? Right? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
I have another piece of advice for you. You're gonna
love this one. Get yourself some good mescal it's so
hard to find these days. Juice, some cucumber, yeah, you're
(42:45):
doing that. A little bit of lime juice which you
don't need to run through the juicer, and then some
sort of sweetener and thank me later. And and then mescal. Yeah,
oh yeah, much as you like, because then we've been
drinking the vodka. Uh with her fresh juices fail. Yeah,
that goes really well with the two. This is this
is a different, This is something different. You know. The
(43:07):
mess cow really stands out with the cucumber, makes it pop. Yeah,
give it a shot. All right, are we gonna let's
bring this homeless up torturing all these poor people who
are still listening. I think we got off track with
butter and goats, so f rs is what we were
talking about. Oh, here's another one. For you. Uh, they've
(43:28):
just some little ancillary things they've learned over time, because
it's not just about CBD. They've learned about things like
um depression and stress and anxiety, sleep apnea for one,
increasing a risk of stroke. And then they gave a
really uh ingenious thing when they just said, hey, we've
got all these people over this big chunk of time,
(43:51):
so why don't we start seeing if people will give
us a little bit of brain matter upon death and
we can start looking into things like Alzheimer's and dementia. Yeah,
and they've actually found recently, at least in the framing
and population, dementia's going down, which hopefully means that it's
going down in the larger population as well. But yeah,
they have all this study data and they say, well,
(44:12):
let's start mining it for other diseases as well. And
it's becoming not just a gold standard for cardiovascular disease,
but for like other neurological diseases as well, and eventually,
almost certainly it will become the gold standard for genetic
investigations into diseases as well. Yeah, And like we've been
talking about the lack of diversity over the like, basically
(44:35):
this is really good results for white dudes. They have
since over the years included other calculators for minority groups.
For women, Uh, the f risk calculator is for British
minority groups. The Reynolds Risk score has been developed for women. Uh.
And I think a couple of others too, where they've
tried to take all this data and then tailor it
(44:57):
to a specific group. They've also found that people who
go on vacation to have lower incidences of cardiovascular disease.
So remember to vacate at least twice a year. Uh.
What else? Oh that thing about dating people who look
like you? That was interesting. Yeah, I guess they saw
that in the initial cohort, a lot of people, a
(45:20):
lot of married couples looked alike. And they think that
people were preferentially seeking out people about their height, their weight, um,
maybe their hair color, who knows, but that that's largely
gone away in the second and third cohorts. I also
read an article that UM said that they found that
human evolution is still going on. They're noticing that each
(45:41):
generation of women is slightly shorter, slightly pump plumper, and
I'm talking like a tenth of an inch shorter and
something like a half of a pound heavier, but that
they this is traditionally tied to UM being able to
easy more easily UM have live births, another way to
(46:02):
put his having kids, because a lot easier to have kids, right,
is wrong with me? Um? So they think that this
is like as they're seeing in in framing evolution still
in place, which very much contradicts what a lot of
people have long said, which is humans took ourselves out
of evolution a while back when we started intervening in
(46:23):
medicine and things like that. So that just the this
cool pictures of humanity that this is provided. It's pretty sweet,
pretty pretty great study. Actually it is, and hopefully this
will be I know they had a little trouble getting
extended funding at one point, and they had some private
institutions that stepped up, some kind of unusual ones like
(46:45):
Oscar Meyer, and I believe that one of the cigarette companies, right,
and then Nixon eventually he got out the checkbook and
wrote him a big fat check, probably probably the thing
that he's most known for his president too, I think,
so continuing the framing Him heart study, I read that
he got out the checkbook or or twisted the arm
of the National Heart Institute. Um, because one of the
(47:08):
early champions of the Heart Study was Nixon's personal doctor,
and that's how it all went down. He's like, turn
your head and cough and give us fifty million dollars.
You got anything else? Nope, Well, we could probably just
talk about framing him for days, but we're gonna stop now.
I would urge you to go read I'm not even
sure when it was written, but a CBS Sunday Morning
(47:31):
article from maybe like the early two thousand's about framing
him and the Heart Study, and it really just kind
of gives you a picture of the people there. And
then I also saw when that was critical of it
that was pretty interesting, called framing him follies on something
called protein power dot com. Um, just go read them both.
You'll enjoy it. Uh. And since I said you'll enjoy it,
it's time for listener, ma'am. I'm gonna call this follow
(47:55):
up on the beach near the Hearst Castles a couple
of week to go. We talked about the when I
went and I thought I didn't think there are Walrus's.
I just couldn't remember what they were, and they are,
in fact elephant seals. I said they were sea lions.
That was wrong. Oh that's right, you did say sea lions.
Well that's right. Um. Hey, guys, listen to the show
on Walrus's and Chuck referred to the beach near Herst Castle.
(48:18):
They call it Piedras Blanca's Elephant Seal Rock Rookery. I
think it's funny that you had mentioned that because for
our honeymoon last June, my husband and I stayed in
Oceano for a week near Pismo Beach, and one of
our activities for a day was to go to Hearst
Castle and Elephant Seal Beach. Of course, hers Castle was amazing.
I still haven't been in there. I need to check
(48:39):
that out. Uh. You know that one party scene at
in Billy Madison was filmed at Hurst Castle. Yeah, I
never saw that. Still. Um. Getting to see the architectural
history and artifacts that reside there were great. But the beach, unfortunately,
on that particularly, was pretty quiet. I think it was
a nap time by the time we got there, because
most of them are sleeping or adjusting and going back
(49:00):
to sleep. Well, it's still fun to see him. It's
not like they're out there with with the beach ball.
Like in cartoons, it's fun. It's fun to be overpowered
by their stench when you're down wind of that massive elephant.
That uh. There were a few males that started an altercation,
but that ended pretty quickly and wasn't all that noisy.
I think the most interesting thing on that day, besides
seeing them up close, he was watching them sleep in
(49:23):
the water. First, I got a little nervous because I
wasn't sure if they were alive, but after several minutes
of watching one of them, it moved once the waves
pushed it close enough to the rocks. However, if you
do suggest people to go there, please tell them to
be aware there are no feeding of the squirrel signs.
There was a group of preteens that didn't regard the
sign and literally got chased by a big, fat squirrel.
(49:45):
It was hilarious to watch, but a little scary. Thanks
for the show. I hope you're doing well. Keep up
the work. And that is Morrigan body and Morgan actually
just emailed back when I told her she was going
to be on and said, o MG, no way for exclamations.
Thanks smiley face emoji, and then she inserted I guess
(50:07):
her or previous surname Morgan Meyer's body. Okay, way to go, Morgan.
Thanks for the emojis and the exclamation points to all
for it. If you have a story you want to
straighten us out with, you can tweet to us at
josh um Clark or at s Y s K podcast.
You can also go on to Facebook dot com slash
(50:29):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can also visit Facebook dot
com slash stuff you Should Know. Send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and
join us at our home on the web, stuff you
should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com
Hello, Colorado. The States so nice. We're playing there twice,
two days in a row. Chuck, we added a second
show to our Gothic Theater tour. That's right, we're gonna
be there June seventh and June now sold out, but
one of those weird cases where you go see the
first show you were actually late buying tickets. Right. We're
(00:21):
also going to be in Boston April four, d C
April five. We're gonna be in St. Louis on May,
in Cleveland one, and then of course we're gonna wrap
this summer up on June at the Gothic Theater in Colorado.
So go to s Y s K live dot com
for all of your information and ticket needs. Welcome to
(00:43):
Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, There's guest producer Noel all of Nature, Wild
and Free. This is where you long to be. Stuff
(01:04):
you should know. So let's go ahead and admit that
we just did a rare retake of like the first
four minutes of the show. Yeah, and I still reused
the Madonna lyric joke. That's fine, but we have to
recreate the rest of the previous four minutes. No, I
don't think so. I think we should just kind of
let it flow. I was just I was saying to myself,
By God, that Madonna jokes getting in there. All right, Well,
(01:27):
maybe just a quick recap. Noel's dressed up and looks great.
He's it's because he's a snappy dresser. Uh. We mispronounced
words in the UK and got laughed at. And now
we're talking about the Framing Him heart Study. That's right,
which we h. I don't know what podcast it was on,
but years ago we called it the Farmington hard Study. Um,
(01:48):
every time we said it, we said Farmington's did we really? Yeah,
you don't remember that. No, I mean that definitely sounds
like us, but I don't remember it. Yeah. Yeah, that's
why I made that joke when you first came in
about the Farmington Heart Study. Okay, yeah, we said it
was years ago. It was one of our earlier couple
of years and we said the Farmingtons Hearts Study probably
(02:11):
twelve times. Yeah. Back in the day, the standards used
to be its head lower. Yeah, because we were low
hanging Fruit podcast. It was us Zyberglass was Ricky Gervais
and Jesse Thorn, and then Adam Curry was out there
somewhere and probably Adam Corolla. Sure, yeah no, but no
one else we had. There were eight podcasts. That was it.
(02:33):
That was all you had to choose from, So you
better like at least one of them. Do you know
how many there are? Now? I just saw today? Uh no,
do you like you have an actual number? Well, I
mean it's a it's an even number, so it's probably
not exact. But the latest hot pod newsletter said that
there are roughly three podcasts. Oh my god, that's nuts.
(02:55):
I know, man alive. That's pretty impressive, and probably only
like five of those are good. Well, we we went
from that was mean, we went from eight to three
fifty thousand and how many years? Ten? We're still hanging strong,
we are. That's great. That's what happens when you say
(03:15):
things like Farmington ten twelve times. He's long gone. Yeah,
he pronounced everything perfectly like guys washed up now yea,
So the reason we're talking about framing him, which, by
the way, yeah, yeah, it's gonna be tough to say
it the same way every time, but it's framing Ham
(03:39):
is the city of Massachusetts. I don't get the Framingham
as opposed to framing him Yeah, ok, yeah, the h
is a hard age or soft aged like, Whereas if
this were in Scotland they would just say you're right,
which is again why we were laughed at Manchester that
(04:01):
it's Germany sorry, right, which is landlocked. So again we're
talking about Framingham, Massachusetts, a very small town these days.
In two thousand and seventeen, I think the census, well
that the population estimate was something like seventy residents, not
a not a huge town. I think that qualifies as
(04:23):
a small, dinky town. Still. Yeah, but it's a suburb
of Boston, which is a huge metropolis. Sure it is, um,
but it is aside from being a suburb of Boston,
it is in its own right, uh, an internationally renowned
tiny town. Not because it's like a place where the
circus used to hang out during the winter, or because um,
(04:47):
they have some amazing kind of fudge. Right, Farmingham, Massachusetts
is on the map because that town back in the day,
actually two times over that town. Just I did that
they were going to present themselves as as test subjects,
(05:07):
study participants, for some of the most important studies ever
carried out in the history of medicine. Yeah. What one
of the largest and certainly most influential longitudinal studies ever
performed in medicine. Yeah, it's called the Farming hum Or
farming Ham Heart Study, the Framingham Oh my god, was
(05:29):
that an accident? Yes, Oh boy, The Framing hum Heart Study. Yeah,
which you know, we've we've had challenges, as has the
medical community in research community throughout study history, of being
frustrated with like bad studies and poor sample sizes. This
one is really set the standard. Yeah, it's it's the
(05:52):
gold standard for anything that has anything to do is
studying cardiovascular disease. And as we'll see it basically is
everything we you and I, just Joe Schmo walking around
on the street know about cardiovascular disease basically came out
of this study. Um. And even before that, there was
another study that the town participated in that helped lick tuberculosis,
(06:15):
which was which was appropriate because you know, framing framing him. Yeah,
I got it right. Is in Massachusetts, which is part
of New England, which was part of the vampire panic area, which,
as you remember, was the result of tuberculosis. So it's
it was appropriate that that little town contributed to humanity
in that way as well. Yes, so should we hop
(06:38):
in the way back machine? Oh yes, all right, let's
set the dial. Let's load up the flux capacitor with
Miller heavy beer and banana peals. Miller heavy. Yeah that's
what he used, nice, I think so, yeah, okay, that's
that's at the end with the more modern version right
(07:00):
right of the Dolorean. Yeah. I think he used some
sort of plasma waist incenterator. Yeah. Uh so, let's let's
set the dials for um, the World War two era.
We're not gonna be super specific here, No, sometimes we
(07:23):
rolled the dice in the way back machine. Let's see
what happened. Just say, spit us out anytime in the
nineteen forties, not in Europe or the South Pacific, that's right.
So in the nineteen UM here was a scene in
the USA, and I guess all over the world is
we did not know a lot about and all this
stuff seems so second nature now and like duh about
(07:45):
heart disease, But we didn't know a lot about heart
disease back then, and it was sort of just accepted
that once you reach a certain age, like, yeah, your
heart just may take you out. Nothing we can do
about it. Might as well not research it. And there's
certainly no preventative medicines for your to ensure that health. No,
certainly not like they could try to treat it or whatever.
(08:08):
But most of the time, once you came down with UM,
one of the cardiovascular diseases, you UM, you were a goner.
YEA of us deaths we're due to CBD, right, And
so there was a confounding factor that led to this
huge increase. There are actually two of them. One is
(08:31):
as far as percentages go. The cardiovascular disease deaths lurched
forward in the mid early mid twentieth century because what
used to be the big killers, which were infectious diseases
which we now consider highly treatable. They used to kill everybody, right,
And as we started to treat them thanks to the
(08:52):
discovery and use of penicillin and antibiotics, those things fell
into the background and and by by extend mention or
by proxy, cardiovascular disease was basically bear naked out there
statistics wise. Suddenly something that was just kind of like
a secondary problem was now that the leading cause of
(09:14):
death in the United States and in the West. I believe, yeah,
because I guess people were living routinely, living into their
fifties and sixties, maybe for the first time, I don't know, Yeah,
and they were saying, my god, I'm so glad I
get these extra couple of decades of eating raw steak
and smoking cigarettes at the dinner table. Grass. That is
(09:36):
so nasty. It's a it's a true story, though. I
saw my grandpa do it with my own eyes, smoke
at the table. Now. Actually, my grandpa was one of
the He went the other way. He was like like
subscriber number three to Prevention magazine and yeah, into like
coffee animas and all sorts of weird st He was
big time healthy guy. Is that what led your dad
(09:58):
to become the herbal Elviots? I think that that had
some had to have had something to do with it,
for sure. Luckily my dad didn't carry on the family
tradition of coffee animos down to me. So um alright,
So by of death or cardiovascular everyone's dying now from
their heart because they're living longer because they're not dying
(10:20):
of TV and their thirties and forties and then the
second big thing that happened that you teased was President Roosevelt.
Uh started to get really he got cardiovascular disease. He
started to get really high blood pressure. Uh. This was
compounded by UM. Now we understand that stress and anxiety
(10:40):
can compound these things, and he certainly had no shortage
of that UM as president. And you know Winston Churchill
of all people, when he says he seems to be
a very tired man. If Winston Churchill was saying that,
then you're in trouble. Yeah, because he wasn't the picture
of health. No, he certainly wasn't. But apparently f D
made him look like he was fresh as a daisy.
(11:03):
So FDR had high blood pressure when he went into
the White House to begin with. But by the time
rolls around right after the Yalta UM conference where they
divided Europe up between what Great Britain, the United States
in UM, Russia the Soviet Union, right. Um. He died
(11:25):
a couple of weeks after that, at age sixty three.
He had a stroke from hypertension, which is another word
for high blood pressure. And boy, oh boy, did he
have high blood pressure like off the charts. Chuck, Yeah,
three hundred, when when he died he had three hundred
over one. One more time, three hundred over one. So
(11:49):
I went and look that up. I'm like, even without
looking it up, I know that's high, but how high
is it? So? Ideal is between ninety over sixty and
one over eighty. That's how deal blood pressure. Anything over
one eighty over one twenty is what's called a hypertensive crisis.
And the chart tells you to go to your doctor
(12:09):
immediately for that if you have anything over one eight over.
FDR had three over one. Yeah, and I mean his
doctor said, I predict he's a very sick man. I
predicted will be dead within a few months. And he
was running the money, right Churchill's doctor. Yeah, FDR Zone
doctor was like, here, take this digitalis You'll love that.
Churchill's guy, Yeah, okay, yeah. At the y'all take conference.
(12:33):
I guess he just travels with I would think, so,
I thought, I mean, I would imagine all those guys
would travel with their doctors, you know, just just for fun,
like what kind of pills you got today? Yeah, and
again I'm watching The Crown now. I talked about that
in the TV h well, in the episode but when
we talked about it and John listcal As Winston, Churchill
is grow great. What he's awesome? When he and FDR
(12:58):
like half two part ways after the y'all to conference,
does he punch FDR in the face and say O,
FDR hasn't actually he hasn't been in it. Okay, well
look for that scene coming up. Yeah, but it's crazy.
Churchill's all over the place. He had the Gary Oldman
movie and then there were dual Churchill movies. Brian Cox
was on another one. Oh, he's in it's quality. He's great,
although his Hannibal lecture was it was fine until Anthony
(13:23):
Hopkins got his hands on that role. Yeah. The rare
case where the second actor totally owns the role usually
like the first actor. Will you know, just probably by
the fact that the first Although I liked Um, What's
the to Live In Diane l A's guy's name who
was the lead guy in Manhunter? William Peterson. Yeah, I
(13:45):
liked William Peterson's character. That's a great movie more than
Um Edward Norton's version. Oh, in Red Dragon, because Red
Dragon and Manhunter they're based on the same book. Yeah, yeah,
it's the same thing. Yeah, yeah, you're really right. William
Peterson a way better than Edward Norton in that role,
but Jodie Foster better than all of them, is closed, Yes, yeah,
(14:06):
all of them put together. Man. I just watched the
end of that again the other day, and oh, you're
gonna appreciate this. Uh. Emily was in the other room, um,
in the bathroom or something, I can't remember, and she
didn't know what. I turned it on and I passed
it right at the moment of the Penis Tuck Buffalo
Bill when he had his arms out in the Jesus
(14:28):
Christ post and Emily came in and just got in
bed and looked up and was like, oh my god,
what a great movie that was. Had everything, the perfect
race Rain did everything, had Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and
a Penis Tuck scene. We should probably take a break,
all right, We're off the rails here, are you ready? Yes?
(14:50):
Break starting now? Okay, Chuck. So we were talking about
(15:23):
Penis tux right. FDR famously did that at the Yalta conference.
Oh my god, so he you know the reason the
reason FDR's death from hypertension really factors into the stories
because it was extremely public, okay, And what FDR basically
did without using these last words, he basically said he
(15:48):
pointed at at modern medicine and said, I beseech you,
and then keeled over right, So modern medicine was like,
who us, we don't know what we're doing when it
comes to cardiovascular disease ease. And shortly thereafter, the framing
him heart study was born. No, you can almost coming.
(16:09):
The framing of heart study was born because Harry Truman
signed the National Heart Act, which is probably the thing
that he's most famous for. Its president. Yeah, and that
included and that included five thousand dollars in the form
of a grant for this study for twenty years to
cover twenty years for the study. And um, I think
(16:32):
initially Public Health service physician Uh Gilson or Gilkin Metters
uh said, it sounds like you messed that up, but
you didn't. I think you hit it right on the head.
Gilson Metters. It matters sounds like a weird you think
it'd be meadows or something. It sounds like you're drunk
and saying meadows. Uh. And this was the original quote,
(16:55):
which is actually a pretty good mission statement for the study.
Their mission was to study the express and of coronary
artery disease and a normal or unselected population, and to
determine the factors predisposing to the development of the disease
through clinical and laboratory examined long term follow up. So
there you have it. Not bad, it's got a clinical ring,
(17:16):
it's got a it's concise. You can dance to it. Yeah, exactly.
So this this framing Him heart study was a heart
study before it was set in framing him. And they
went to framing him for a number of reasons. One
they said, well, this is a pretty pretty standard UM
middle America, middle class UM community, at least of the
(17:40):
kind that we pay attention to in this day and age, right,
meaning it was almost entirely white people, which will see
as a huge criticism of this study that UM the
study directors over time have tried to work on. But um,
they said, aside from the the the complete and almost
complete and utter of UM diversity. Yes, in this study,
(18:04):
it's a pretty good slice of America. It's a small town,
most of the people their middle income. It's it's got
a big enough population. At the time, this is the
nineteen forties or something like twenty eight thousand people that
we could get a pretty decent, like random sample of
the population going. But the town itself is small enough.
There's only like two hospitals and in time there would
(18:26):
only be one hospital that we can actually easily keep
track of the people in this town. And it's not
too far from Boston University, which would win the contrast
to UM carrying out the study on behalf of the
National Heart Institute. Well, yeah, and they had also, like
you said, earlier, proven that their game for this kind
of thing by participating in that uh to what was
(18:49):
called tuberculosis how down or something. Ye had a name.
It did have a name. It was called the Framing
Him Tuberculosis Demonstration. There would be like watch this, no,
but it could be on a Saturday night. It was
the hold Down. So that, yeah, the whole town had
was not the whole town, but the town had gotten
(19:10):
behind being UM test subjects or study participants for a
whole other study about thirty years before the Heart study began.
So they were already kind of like there. Their healthcare
providers were already like aware that this stuff was going on.
And at the time, apparently healthcare providers like your general practitioner.
(19:31):
That was like the end all be all of your health.
That person was meant to know everything about you and
everything about disease and how to treat you. And that
was that. There weren't any longitudinal studies, There wasn't any
preventative medicine, There wasn't any national hard institute, there was
nothing like that. It all came down to your general practitioner.
(19:53):
So it was really important that the general practitioners and
the healthcare providers in the town of Framing Them were
on board this kind of thing, because they could very
easily have seen this as encroaching on their turf, but
they didn't. And I think the Framing Him study directors
and the people who carried this actual study out deferred
(20:13):
to the general practitioners in the town as far as
like giving advice from the findings and and keeping up
with the the like outside medical findings or even the
stuff they were finding from the study. They didn't directly
give it to the study participants. They gave it to
their doctors, and then the doctors would tell the study
parts participants, so they were kept in the loop. So
(20:35):
there was a there was a a symbiotic relationship that
was forged. Yeah. I thought that was interesting that they
just kept the research like they weren't there to offer
medical advice. They were literally just collecting research. But I
do wonder if some of the times they would say, hey, uh,
gp of Mr Donaldson, you really need to get him
(20:58):
in like next week. Yeah, like really yeah, like he
It's kind of like I guess how Churchill's doctor saw Roosevelt, right, Like,
I know we're not supposed to give advice, but my
advice to you is to call this guy up and say,
maybe you should come in a little earlier than next spring, right,
or go up your malpractice insurance. So we did say
(21:22):
that it wasn't super ethnically diverse, which um didn't phase
them too much at the time, And it really hit
home to me just how like just how white probably
every major study had been up until this point without
even like thinking it was a problem, which is being like,
(21:42):
I don't know, there's a great study. They're like, well,
you know, he didn't include any black people, and they
just it probably just didn't even occur to them at
the time. I don't know if it didn't occur to him.
I I think that it was mostly that's who their
clientele was. I think that that's probably who was being
studied because that's what America catered to at the time,
(22:04):
or who America catered to, I should say at the time.
I don't know that that much has changed these days, unfortunately,
but I think it was vastly more pronounced back then.
Well I think they I think they're way more inclusive
now and and probably have to be to get research
grants these days. I would think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(22:24):
for sure. No, I'm saying America as a whole being
like catering to Yeah, hear you, But that did change
in and framing him after World War Two. Apparently there
was an influx of a more diverse population after the
war at least, right, and I think by the Good
Lord was that the nineties when they added the new cohort.
(22:45):
Well we'll get to the cohorts, Okay, well, anyway, sure
we'll spoiler alert. They added they made the study population
more diverse. One thing that is in the credit of
the study designers is that they included women at a
about which was totally unheard of it's in any kind
of medical study at the time. Because again, not only
(23:07):
did they cater to almost exclusively white people in America
at the time. They catered almost exclusively to white men
at the time. Yeah, and I think also women. I
think heart disease probably still has a stigma of like, yeah,
men have heart disease, uh more than women do, right, Like,
(23:28):
what are you a trucker lady? How do you have
heart disease? Go back, go back home, get out of
my doctor's office. Yeah, you dummy. Yeah, which is not
the case, right, No. But the weird thing is is
what they found from the study. Just overall, they found
that the stuff that they've come up with, which we'll
talk about in a second, is really good at predicting
(23:50):
things for like white guys, for cardio vascular disease for
white guys. But even though women were very um clearly
represented in the study, they've actually found that the same
predictors don't work for women. So it's kind of led
to a separate study of women and how they suffer
from cardiovascular disease, because they definitely do, it's just under
(24:13):
different circumstances it appears than men. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
So let's talk about the beginning of the study, right, Yeah,
So they recruited people between the ages of thirty and
fifty nine initially because that is the window where you
might develop c D d UM and they they thought
by recruiting people in this range, they would also get
(24:33):
a certain amount of people that are already have this
uh appearing like these symptoms appearing right. They didn't though.
Actually it turned out that they had to actually go
recruit people who had cardiovascular disease already and put them
into this study themselves, I think, because people probably that
maybe we're on that track, don't volunteer for studies like this. Well.
(24:56):
They also it wasn't a very random sample, especial at
first because they initially got participants through um word of
mouth at like civic groups and clubs. So so the
presence of a social network or a certain type of
social network, we just kind of does away with randomness
(25:16):
right out of the gate. And they ended up recruiting
other people outside of like these groups and civic civic
clubs and all that, who initially formed a large part
of the study. UM cohort to make it a little
more random, and I guess they were successful because it
seems like the idea of it being not very random
(25:37):
or not very representative sample of the whole um isn't
really discussed any longer. So I guess they took care
of it by the inclusion of the additional I think
like seven people. Yeah, so they the idea was that
you would come in every two years to give um
your medical history updated, to get updated, to have your physical,
(25:58):
to get you all your labs done. And they thought
at the time like, there's probably they were smart enough
to know that there's probably not one thing this causing CBD.
So collecting all this history from all these people over time,
and initially it was going to be twenty years, but
as you will learn, it's still going on today, which
is amazing. Um, they can really get a robust sampling
(26:20):
of people and time from kind of all walks of
life once they started being more inclusive. Yeah, and they
can watch the disease develop or not develop. And since
they do like a really they did a phenomenal baseline
exam and Chuck, actually, I saw and the very original
inception or conception of the study was that they were
(26:41):
going to do a baseline exam and then a second
follow up three to five years later and that was it.
But luckily they had the foresight to be like, no, no no, no,
let's keep this thing going and keep a rolling. Baby,
I'm feeling hot, right. So they were by doing this
baseline exam and saying, you know, do you smoke, how
much read meet you? How much do you drink? How
much exercise do you get? How often do you go parasailing? Like? Um,
(27:05):
like how many kids do you have? What were your
parents medical histories? Like? By getting this really great baseline exam,
they had an idea of all the different factors that
could come into play when it comes to cardiovascular disease.
And then with these follow up exams every two years,
they would find people as the as they got the
disease or didn't get the disease, and then they could
(27:26):
go back and look and say, well, this person has
cardiovascular disease and they smoke and they have diabetes, and uh,
their parents had a stroke. They're dead at a stroke
and they just had a stroke. So they started to
see from all of this data, it was basically like
you know how data, big data is just enormous right now.
That's basically what the Heart Institute did in Boston University
(27:50):
just went and set up camp in this town and
they started collecting as much data as they possibly could,
and then they set about sorting through it and publishing
papers based on the finding. Yeah, and you mentioned the
cohort earlier there, and I'm just gonna go ahead and say,
each of these cohort names is a great band name.
All of them a blanket. That's a blanket, great band name. Statement.
(28:12):
So the initial you said when they went out and
got another seven forty people, who and those are the
people who had the early signs of CBD. Yeah, they
were included in there. Okay, that's the Framing Him Cohort.
That's everybody. That's the first group. Okay, all of the
first group combined was the Framing Him Cohort. That's a
that's kind of an emo folkey band. Then in seventy
(28:35):
one they said, you know what, these people are having kids.
So what would be awesome is if we started studying
these children and their lifetimes and they were known as
the Offspring Cohort. So that's like an offspring cover band. Okay,
that's terrible. I thought, it's not bad. What what was offspring?
I don't even know. Oh, remember you got to keep
(28:56):
them separated. I do remember that song that was had
a couple of good songs. Yeah, and I think the guy,
if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not thinking of Milo
from the Descendants, Um, this was the guy from Offspring
went on to get like a PhD in like biochemistry
or nuclear physics or something really impressive. Interesting, Yeah, I was.
(29:19):
I'm so I have no idea about any of that genre,
whatever that genre is. I'm not sure what that is either.
The Offspring were kind of their own thing. Yeah, but
isn't it a part of just the whole Like what
was that tour like the Vans Warped Tour and that
all that stuff. I know nothing about any of those bands.
I'll bet they were on Warped Tour now that you
(29:40):
mentioned it. They were not definitely not a part of
what was Lilith Fair No, no, but ironically they did
go to a couple of dates just as audience member
probably so. Alright, So the Offspring cohort were the kids.
That was about fifty of them, and then they included
their spouse is um which was a big deal because,
(30:02):
like I said, adding the kids allowed to look for
hereditary functions as far as CBD goes. And then the
spouses just gave that extra layer of examination when they
weren't related, right, Yeah, so it's almost like a built
in control group as far as um looking at hereditary
stuff goes. Right. And then that was also like I've
(30:25):
seen it remarked on, man, my brain is a little
broken to day. But um, the having adding the kids
as a second cohort was was just a stroke of
genius because even before they had any idea that we
were going to be able to easily examine genes and
d n A, they they started building this this study
(30:50):
data that can be mined now for genetic stuff thanks
to these guys foresight by adding this offspring cohort. That
pretty cool. Uh. The first omni cohort first of three,
those are all three good band names. And this was
(31:10):
when they started getting that diversity. They said, hey, maybe
we should sort of officially include this and break this out.
So that was made up of about five hundred people
of Native American descent, African American descent, Hispanic, Indian, Asian,
and Pacific islander right first. And I guess second and
third omni cohorts, And that was that's surprising to me
(31:34):
that it took that long when they knew out of
the gate that it wasn't representative of America as a whole. Yeah,
I mean it's that's not to say that they didn't
have any of those people in the study, but they
officially recruited more. Isn't that right? That's my impression. Yeah, okay, Yeah,
I don't know that the original cohort was entirely white,
but I from what I understand, it was so so
(31:56):
majority white that it was not representative of of America
population wise. And by the way, Omni Cohort that's obviously
a E d M band that would probably tour with
like the Crystal Method or something like that. Uh. And
then finally the third generation Cohort or Gin three, which
is their album title, that started in two thousand two,
(32:20):
and I think they're expected to shut that one down
next year. That I thought was really weird. Why shut
any of them down? Might not be like, we're gonna
follow you to the grave, man, Yeah, we might even
dig you up in ten years after you're dead in
case we figure out something new to do with you,
you know. Yeah, And these are kids who had at
least one parent in the offspring cohort? Is that right? Okay?
(32:46):
And then there's another one called the offspring spousal cohort,
the new offspring spouse cohort. Right, that's a that's just
a weird one. Yeah, they're getting a little meta. Yeah, So, um,
the new offspring spouse cohort is made up of spouses who,
for whatever reasons, weren't part of the original offspring cohort
(33:10):
and have at least two kids in the Gen three cohort?
Is that correct? It gets a little wonky, But but
the point is is they're like adding more and more
people in the town. As the town's getting bigger and
as the town's getting more diverse, they're they're making the
study reflect this population more and more with the hopes
that it's going to reflect America more and more. And
(33:31):
they again this the study designers and and directors have
always known that this isn't just like a perfect snapshot
of America. Um, there's always been criticisms of it, and UM,
I don't know, you want to take a break before
we get into those, Okay, we will do that right
after this. Okay, so I said, we're going to get
(34:18):
into criticisms, but first we should probably talk about some
of the successes, right yeah. And like I said earlier
that so much of what we learned from this UM
today seems just so brainless. But it's important to remember
that before this, I mean, you still even though you think, like, yeah,
you smoke cigarettes, you're going to increase your risk of
heart disease. It seems like such such a second nature
(34:41):
thing to know now, But until you have actual scientific proof,
you can't say something like that. And this study gave
us a lot of these things that we take for
granted now as obvious and proved them came out of
this study in particular, And and cigarettes was a big one.
I read in this article. I can't remember where it
came from, Chuck, I sent to you where um they
(35:03):
were talking about how one of the reasons why cardiovascular
disease spiked in the forties was because they were giving
free cigarettes out to all of the g I s
during World War Two. They had like an endless supply
of free cigarettes over there, and that they think that
directly led to a rise in the in depths from
cardiovascular disease. So, but no one knew for sure. Some
(35:27):
people probably suspected. Every once in a while a newspaper
would quote them. They would be called a crack potter
and by somebody else in the in the article, and
that would be that. Right. So these guys went to
town like establishing a link between smoking and cardiovascular disease.
They tried very very hard to um connect diet in
(35:48):
cardiovascular disease and had very mixed results, so much so
that some of their early work in that realm was
just went unpublished. For the most part, they just kind
of were like, uh, we'd don't understand this, so we're
not gonna include this. But some of the other ones
were stroke. Like, um, if you have cardiovascular disease, are
at a much higher risk for stroke. Nobody knew that
(36:10):
conclusively before. Yeah, they confirmed that things like cholesterol and
blood pressure abnormalities increase your risk. UM, irregular heartbeat, atrial
fibrillation increases your risk five times menopause. Yeah, that was
a that was a big one, super big one. Um,
here's here's one, Like, seriously, this was figured out in
(36:33):
this study that um, physical activity decreases your risk for
cardiovascular disease, while lower physical activity and obesity increases your risk.
Like again, this is stuff that we're like, of course,
who doesn't know that, well, American in the world didn't
know that until Framing a Heart Study actually published its results. Yeah,
(36:54):
here's one that. Um, if you're in your forties and
you go to get a physical, there's a pretty to
get a chance. At some point after your labs, your
doctor will talk to you about your f R S score.
You're Framing Him risk score. It is still widely used
today as the standard. And that is the very sad
moment where your doctor says you have this much of
(37:17):
a percentage risk of of developing heart disease within ten
years from this state. They tell you have a hundred
and three risk. You say, well, what can it go
up to and they say a hundred Yeah, that's not good. Um,
so there's the Framing HUM risk score is based on
a bunch of different risk factors. And by the way,
(37:38):
the term risk factor was coined from the Framing Him
Heart study, So that's another thing it gave to the world. Uh.
Your risk factors are based on your age, your gender,
total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, whether you have diabetes or not,
whether you smoke or not, and your systolic blood pressure.
You put all this together, each of those gets a score.
(38:00):
You can come up with a really really good indicator
of whether you're going to come down with a cardio
of vascular disease in ten years. If you're a white guy, um,
to a lesser extent, if you're an African American guy,
to a much lesser extent, if you're a woman of
I think any um ethnicity. Do you get a piscol
(38:20):
every year? I try to. It's been Oh it hasn't
been a year yet. I'm just under a year right now,
but I need to find a new doctor. Are you.
Uh how's your cholesterol? It's great man? My family dude?
Oh yeah, is that it runs high? Well? I mean
I certainly do don't do myself any favors with my
weight in my diet, but me, my brother, and my
(38:41):
sister are all on cholesterol medication. Oh is that right? Statens?
Is that what it's called? And and my brother like
is in great shape, and so's my sister. So it's
ah yeah, I mean it's just a totally Bryant family tradition,
just naturally high cholesterol. Huh. Well, I mean my dementia
runs in my family, so I'm toast one way or another.
(39:03):
Oh yeah, I mean it's basically you look at your
family history and spin the big wheel. What's gonna kill me? Right,
It's like common medical science, finally care for mine. Let's
go with that one first. Well, thank god for statins there,
you know now my cholesterol is great. So I since
I went last went to the doctor, I've begun to
(39:23):
introduce butter into my diet way more than I ever
had before. But I love yes, of course, Um like
a really if it has like a picture of an
Amish person on the cover of the package, go with
that butter butter. Yeah, And I actually I read a
taste test on maybe rancor or something like that of
butters and apparently the ones that are like a pound
(39:48):
really don't taste much better than like Carrie gold that
you get at the grocery store just about any grocery store.
So I found like that's good. I'm not really missing
out on anything. Um, I'll just eat more cheese butter
and just like a little bit of butter on some
bread is a really like delightful little treat um ten
times a day. So I'm actually really interested to see
(40:10):
what my cholesterol is like this year. I'm I'm basically
just performing a test on myself right now. Well, and
they've learned so much in the past like ten years
or so about good fats and bad fats and low
fat foods really not being all they're cracked up to be,
because then they're packed with other things that are bad
for you, especially high freak toose coins from Yeah it's good,
(40:30):
we go with a good uh local butter called banner butter.
Mm hmm, it's it's good and you know, who knows
if it tastes a better, but it's it's locally made,
so that's always nice. Is it made from those doomed
goats across the street from you know, we just fed
them yesterday though, did you did you go? I'm so
sorry for what's going to happen to you know we.
I don't think they're doomed. I think they are are
(40:53):
being raised again and sent to Jamaica. Not for food
for what for for milk and cheese to raise people's spirits. Well,
they certainly do that, those goats playing. But yeah, it's
not like every goat has to be eaten to have worth. No,
I agree. I'm just saying they're also milked in there cheese.
(41:21):
We save all our Emily is a juicing theme now.
So we have a lot of um green scraps now,
so we just save them all and then about two
times a week we'll we'll take the kid over there
and feed the goats and it's pretty fun. They bray
at us now when we leave our house. Oh yeah,
they're like, can't you bring that over here? Pretty boomed? Yeah,
they love it. So you guys have green scraps. Let
(41:42):
me give you a little piece of advice to pass
along to Emily. One word, but I'm going to pronounce
it like to Vita mix. Oh dude, we've had a
a mix for like ten years. Is that what you use? Yeah,
you should have scraps. You gotta throw all that stuff
in there so you get the fiber too. Now we
we don't throw like the butt end of the celery
stalk in there. Okay, all right, stuff like that. I
(42:04):
got to because you know there's like there's like juicers
that just extract the juice and leave all of the fiber.
I thought that's what you were talking about. No, no no, no,
we well we do two things. We have the Vita
mix for a lot of the green smoothies and stuff.
But then we are also juicing some of the stuff
and uh, we'll give those the juice scraps to the goats.
(42:25):
But we we do both like every morning now with
some sort of green juice and smoothie. Okay, so you
do have like a juice or juicer than two? Right? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
I have another piece of advice for you. You're gonna
love this one. Get yourself some good mescal it's so
hard to find these days. Juice, some cucumber, yeah, you're
(42:45):
doing that. A little bit of lime juice which you
don't need to run through the juicer, and then some
sort of sweetener and thank me later. And and then mescal. Yeah,
oh yeah, much as you like, because then we've been
drinking the vodka. Uh with her fresh juices fail. Yeah,
that goes really well with the two. This is this
is a different, This is something different. You know. The
(43:07):
mess cow really stands out with the cucumber, makes it pop. Yeah,
give it a shot. All right, are we gonna let's
bring this homeless up torturing all these poor people who
are still listening. I think we got off track with
butter and goats, so f rs is what we were
talking about. Oh, here's another one. For you. Uh, they've
(43:28):
just some little ancillary things they've learned over time, because
it's not just about CBD. They've learned about things like
um depression and stress and anxiety, sleep apnea for one,
increasing a risk of stroke. And then they gave a
really uh ingenious thing when they just said, hey, we've
got all these people over this big chunk of time,
(43:51):
so why don't we start seeing if people will give
us a little bit of brain matter upon death and
we can start looking into things like Alzheimer's and dementia. Yeah,
and they've actually found recently, at least in the framing
and population, dementia's going down, which hopefully means that it's
going down in the larger population as well. But yeah,
they have all this study data and they say, well,
(44:12):
let's start mining it for other diseases as well. And
it's becoming not just a gold standard for cardiovascular disease,
but for like other neurological diseases as well, and eventually,
almost certainly it will become the gold standard for genetic
investigations into diseases as well. Yeah, And like we've been
talking about the lack of diversity over the like, basically
(44:35):
this is really good results for white dudes. They have
since over the years included other calculators for minority groups.
For women, Uh, the f risk calculator is for British
minority groups. The Reynolds Risk score has been developed for women. Uh.
And I think a couple of others too, where they've
tried to take all this data and then tailor it
(44:57):
to a specific group. They've also found that people who
go on vacation to have lower incidences of cardiovascular disease.
So remember to vacate at least twice a year. Uh.
What else? Oh that thing about dating people who look
like you? That was interesting. Yeah, I guess they saw
that in the initial cohort, a lot of people, a
(45:20):
lot of married couples looked alike. And they think that
people were preferentially seeking out people about their height, their weight, um,
maybe their hair color, who knows, but that that's largely
gone away in the second and third cohorts. I also
read an article that UM said that they found that
human evolution is still going on. They're noticing that each
(45:41):
generation of women is slightly shorter, slightly pump plumper, and
I'm talking like a tenth of an inch shorter and
something like a half of a pound heavier, but that
they this is traditionally tied to UM being able to
easy more easily UM have live births, another way to
(46:02):
put his having kids, because a lot easier to have kids, right,
is wrong with me? Um? So they think that this
is like as they're seeing in in framing evolution still
in place, which very much contradicts what a lot of
people have long said, which is humans took ourselves out
of evolution a while back when we started intervening in
(46:23):
medicine and things like that. So that just the this
cool pictures of humanity that this is provided. It's pretty sweet,
pretty pretty great study. Actually it is, and hopefully this
will be I know they had a little trouble getting
extended funding at one point, and they had some private
institutions that stepped up, some kind of unusual ones like
(46:45):
Oscar Meyer, and I believe that one of the cigarette companies, right,
and then Nixon eventually he got out the checkbook and
wrote him a big fat check, probably probably the thing
that he's most known for his president too, I think,
so continuing the framing Him heart study, I read that
he got out the checkbook or or twisted the arm
of the National Heart Institute. Um, because one of the
(47:08):
early champions of the Heart Study was Nixon's personal doctor,
and that's how it all went down. He's like, turn
your head and cough and give us fifty million dollars.
You got anything else? Nope, Well, we could probably just
talk about framing him for days, but we're gonna stop now.
I would urge you to go read I'm not even
sure when it was written, but a CBS Sunday Morning
(47:31):
article from maybe like the early two thousand's about framing
him and the Heart Study, and it really just kind
of gives you a picture of the people there. And
then I also saw when that was critical of it
that was pretty interesting, called framing him follies on something
called protein power dot com. Um, just go read them both.
You'll enjoy it. Uh. And since I said you'll enjoy it,
it's time for listener, ma'am. I'm gonna call this follow
(47:55):
up on the beach near the Hearst Castles a couple
of week to go. We talked about the when I
went and I thought I didn't think there are Walrus's.
I just couldn't remember what they were, and they are,
in fact elephant seals. I said they were sea lions.
That was wrong. Oh that's right, you did say sea lions.
Well that's right. Um. Hey, guys, listen to the show
on Walrus's and Chuck referred to the beach near Herst Castle.
(48:18):
They call it Piedras Blanca's Elephant Seal Rock Rookery. I
think it's funny that you had mentioned that because for
our honeymoon last June, my husband and I stayed in
Oceano for a week near Pismo Beach, and one of
our activities for a day was to go to Hearst
Castle and Elephant Seal Beach. Of course, hers Castle was amazing.
I still haven't been in there. I need to check
(48:39):
that out. Uh. You know that one party scene at
in Billy Madison was filmed at Hurst Castle. Yeah, I
never saw that. Still. Um. Getting to see the architectural
history and artifacts that reside there were great. But the beach, unfortunately,
on that particularly, was pretty quiet. I think it was
a nap time by the time we got there, because
most of them are sleeping or adjusting and going back
(49:00):
to sleep. Well, it's still fun to see him. It's
not like they're out there with with the beach ball.
Like in cartoons, it's fun. It's fun to be overpowered
by their stench when you're down wind of that massive elephant.
That uh. There were a few males that started an altercation,
but that ended pretty quickly and wasn't all that noisy.
I think the most interesting thing on that day, besides
seeing them up close, he was watching them sleep in
(49:23):
the water. First, I got a little nervous because I
wasn't sure if they were alive, but after several minutes
of watching one of them, it moved once the waves
pushed it close enough to the rocks. However, if you
do suggest people to go there, please tell them to
be aware there are no feeding of the squirrel signs.
There was a group of preteens that didn't regard the
sign and literally got chased by a big, fat squirrel.
(49:45):
It was hilarious to watch, but a little scary. Thanks
for the show. I hope you're doing well. Keep up
the work. And that is Morrigan body and Morgan actually
just emailed back when I told her she was going
to be on and said, o MG, no way for exclamations.
Thanks smiley face emoji, and then she inserted I guess
(50:07):
her or previous surname Morgan Meyer's body. Okay, way to go, Morgan.
Thanks for the emojis and the exclamation points to all
for it. If you have a story you want to
straighten us out with, you can tweet to us at
josh um Clark or at s Y s K podcast.
You can also go on to Facebook dot com slash
(50:29):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can also visit Facebook dot
com slash stuff you Should Know. Send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and
join us at our home on the web, stuff you
should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com
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