Dr Karl sorts health fact vs. fiction

Published Oct 6, 2024, 2:00 PM

Australia's favourite science champion Dr Karl Kruszelnicki reflects on his career longevity, the importance of curiosity and luck, and shares advice on navigating health misinformation. 

 

WANT MORE FROM DR KARL?

For more on Dr Karl’s new book A Periodic Tale (Harper Collins, $36.99) see here or catch him @doctor_karl, on TikTok here or via his site here

 

WANT MORE BODY + SOUL? 

Online: Head to bodyandsoul.com.au for your daily digital dose of health and wellness.

On social: Via Instagram at @bodyandsoul_au or Facebook. Or, TikTok here. Got an idea for an episode? DM host Felicity Harley on Instagram @felicityharley

In print: Each Sunday, grab Body+Soul inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), the Sunday Herald Sun (Victoria), The Sunday Mail (Queensland), Sunday Mail (SA) and Sunday Tasmanian (Tasmania). 

Oh hey, thank you for joining us. Welcome to Extra HEALTHYI Ish, the big sister podcast Too Healthy Ish from Body and Soul. I am Felicity Harley. I am joined today by the delightful doctor Carl Kruznski. He of course is Australia's favorite science champion. We all know him and he has a new book out. It's number forty eight Wow. It is called a Periodic Tale, and today he reflects on his career longevity, how he found a job, a career that was overwhelmingly enjoyable. He talks about the importance of curiosity and like and shares his advice on navigating health misinformation. Doctor Carl, thank you for coming on Extra Healthy Ish. See I should say pleasure to have you on the podcast. I'm feel honored.

Oh doctor Filzzy, I'm honored that you've invited me on. Thank you.

If only I was a doctor. But anyway, that's for another life.

Hey, well this life, life expectency is going up by four months per year.

Okay, yeah, I'm just over halfway through, so so for.

Each extra year, So each extra year of life that you live in Australia, the life expectency goes up by four months.

Interesting, okay, And.

You're lucky not to be living in the USA, where the life expectancy in many divisions of people, especially the poor ones, is actually decreasing and the death rate among women giving birth is increasing.

Oh wow, I didn't know that. Interesting. Anyway, that's for We will talk a week of that. It could be for a whole new podcast. I want to talk about you, but before we kick off, I need to ask you a question that I ask everyone who comes on this podcast. How do you stay extra healthy? Is in your life.

Exercise, good eating? So I'm very lucky that we have people in my house who cook different food all the time and having a wide variety of foods. The motto with Michael Polanity food mostly plans, not too much. So I have a wide variety of foods and in return, I am the king of the dish washers.

Oh yes, I think you've done a few tiktoks on how to stuck a dish washer, haven't you.

Wow, don't get me started with that till another time.

No, no, yeah, we'll talk about that later. I want to talk about you. I mean, you've had an extraordinary career. I mean, before we press play, I mean, I used to listen to you twenty five years ago when I was going to university on triple J. Why do you think you've had such amazing longevity.

Firstly because people are naturally curious about science. Secondly, because I've stuck to something that somebody taught me early on, which is ignore opinions, stick to the facts. And science is just full of facts, but it's more than just a bunch of facts, in the same way that a house is more than a pile of stones. Thirdly, I've been driven by what the audience wants, not what I want. And what the audience want is answers to their questions. So for four decades I've been answering questions on the radio, and all the time I come up with questions that I have no answer to, which I say, thank you very much, I don't know. I've got some homework. I'll see if I get you an answer in the next couple of weeks or so. So answering what they the audience wants is a big part of it.

I also have to say that shows a real human humanness to you when you put your hand up and say I don't know. I don't know everything I'll try my best, but I'll find out later.

Well, it is amazing that many people think that I don't know is a sign of weakness, whereas in the scientific community it's a signal that the other person has to explain to you what they know, because we all have different areas of ignorance. Sure, you might be a physicist, but if you were a biophysicist, you would know that inside your body, the total amount of water that crosses your membranes each day back and forth is forty tons.

Yeah, that's the exacting leader.

But you wouldn't know that if you are a geophysicist, and a geophysicists would know that the heat of the Earth down to the core, where the temperature is hotter than the surface of the sun, is caused by the radioactive decay of uranium, posession and saurium. But then a metallophysicists would know that. So we all have different areas of ignorance.

Over the forty years, I mean, have we changed a lot in on what in what the audiences want from you and the things that we ask. I mean, I even think back to you know, twenty five years ago, thirty years EGLD has listened to you it was still the farts and the birds and the eating boogies. And then when I go on TikTok today, we're still kind of fascinated by those things. How is the what the audience wants changed or hasn't it?

There has been a change in the sense that we've had a massive rise in conspiracy theories due to social media. Do you specifically to the iPhone three powerful enough to have the computer on a handheld device that the parents couldn't control, And that was in two thousand and nine. The iPhone one and the iPhone two they sucked the iPhone three. It worked. And the thing about conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation is that alarming stuff spreads six times faster than regular, boring stuff. And it's important that it does, because one hundred thousand years ago, on the savannahs of Africa, if you saw a flash of khaki and heard a little rustling in the long grass, if you thought that it might be a lion, you survived better than the people who thought, nah, I'll just keep walking. In that case, they get eaten. So on average, conspiracy theories and misinformation spread six times faster than real news. And in fact I've now come up with a little project to try and stop disinformation. That will do that for another time.

Tell me, are there any topics related to health and well being that have that have resonated most you know, queries and questions and things people want to know over the over the decades.

Oh yeah. What has been surprising is the amount of woo woo and rubbish that people believe. So in the old days, it used to be before two thousand and nine that people would get their health advice from a health professional like a nurse or a pharmacist or a doctor, or a respective magazine like the Reader's Digest.

To be the editor of one of those called Women's Health for nine years, so I know exactly those trust and magazines.

Yeah, Women's Health was a good one too. And then in two thousand and nine, with social media we started in access to the Internet, people started asking Google for health advice and a few months ago had switched over that in Australia. The majority of Australians as of a few months ago now get their health advice from social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Ando and on average the amount of information that is correct is two percent goodness, ninety eight percent is wrong, two percent is right, and people will go online when I say things about on tickto when I say celery water doesn't actually cause cancer, and they will start quoting things to say that it does. And part of the problem is a drop in science literacy, where on one hand, people don't know what atoms are, and at a higher level they think that merely quoting a link to a web page is the same as quoting a link to the New England Journal of Medicine or the Lancet and they really don't know the difference.

So how do we how do we learn to better? How can we trust what we see on social media? I mean, is there any because when you're scrolling through and it's popping up so fast, I mean it's hard to sometimes disseminate the fact from the fiction.

I find people that you trust, So in different fields I've found people whom I trust, and so in terms of US and general worldwide military aerospace, I follow Alex Hollings and he's got a good record of being right. But in health advice, I would follow only people who have medical training. And by the way, I do have a certificate as a trained nutritionist. It cost me forty dollars and the total amount of dietetic nutrition training I have had is eight hours as part of my medical degree. So I know nothing, whereas dietitians spend five years plus another ten years before they're really on top of it. And yet you've got people coming on line saying that celery water will cause cancer. So here's a weird thing for you. I've got a kind of theory as to why this woo woo and garbage is almost only in the bodily health Like you don't have a holistic plumber who says, look, thanks for calling me about your block sewerage pipes and the fact that feces are coming up through your toilets in the house. Luckily, last night I energized some crystals under the full moon. I'm going to lay them out in a hexagram on the sewerage line in the street and then come back every day and rotated by ten degrees and it should be okay in a couple of weeks. Give you ten thousand dollars. Now there's the people don't accept that. Yeah, but people won't full for that. Nor when you get onto an aeroplane, does a pilot say Hi, look welcome, I'm your pilot. I haven't had any training at all, but I don't need any training because really we all know everything we ever need to know. It's just there inside us. We have to bring it out. By the way, anybody who's a Pisces, please get off, because Mars is in retrogade. I'm in areas are clash, yep, and we are certified to take off in ten minutes, but I've decide to wait another hour and fifteen on top of that until a quidlin Is and Chakras line up and Jupiter lines up properly, and they will take off. So you wouldn't accept that from an airline pilot. And yet with regard to cancer and COVID, people will take advice from people who certifiably know nothing. And I have a theory which is that with an airline pilot and a plumber, the body of knowledge is relatively small, whereas with health it is relatively infinite. And so maybe they know that they can't get away with lying about being an airline pilot or a plumber, but they can get away because, for example, even though we know how aspirin and antibiotics work, on an atomic or molecular level. We do not know how anesthetics work.

Does that frustrate you as a scientist that? Or you know so many people are out there peddling woo woo and snake oil and things that will help our health when clearly from a science point of view and a proof point of view, they don't.

There's no point in getting emotionally involved. I'll just go and fix it. If I try to get emotionally involved, it'll use up on my precious processor cycles. And my job is to try myself a pointed job is to try to bring maybe not just data, but knowledge perhaps ee the information and wisdom and maybe even enlightenment. And so by getting annoyed, I'm just wasting my time.

We'll be back after this short break with more from doctor Carl. Actually, I just want to pick up on a piece of wisdom from your book, because I really enjoyed this little part where you talked about you know, your work life, and you call your work life overwhelmingly enjoyable. I mean, how do you do how? And I think this is something we all seek. We all want enjoyable work and we want longevity in our career. How did you make this happen, and what does that look like for you?

Pure random luck of the universe. So I just drifted my way, and I describe it in my book a periodic kale and periodic because I had periods of going this way and that way, like the pendulum swinging this way and that way. And I did spend time working for the forces of evil. And I highly recommend that everybody should do that at least once in their life. Also another bit of advice, never have sex with anybody has more problems than you do. Sex is great, but you'll pay for it, And I describe that. So how do you get longevity? Just a combination of luck and curiosity and optimism and other people being generous to me and being prepared to give things to go and luck. Luck counts for an awful lot. So, for example, so many times I travel around in a taxi or an uber and the driver turns out to be somebody who has high qualifications in a field that Australias should be investing in, and yet Australia is so stupid it doesn't I was lucky to be educated. Oh. Part of the reason I've got this longevity thing is because I was lucky enough to grow at a time when the Australian government saw education as a worthwhile investment in the future, whereas now it sees it as a short term way of making a small amount of money and crippling our future. Already crippled to the extent that we have to import plumbers, car mechanics and psychologists because we can't train them in Australia. On the other hand, here's a question for you, without notice, Why do you think the world's biggest explosive factory is within ten kilometers of where I live?

No answer? And now I know exactly where you live, but well around about what's the answer?

Because Australia is better at blowing up dirt with explosives and putting it onto trucks and then trains and ships than any other in the world, which is why Australia has the biggest explosive factory. Can we make computer chips? Can we blow up dirt?

Yep, yeah, exactly. Now, just changing tac for a bit, I've got to ask you about your dressing. I mean, you are the original of dopamine dressing. Have you heard of this term?

So no, but I'll probably disagree with it on the grounds that it will be able to simplistic, but it does have a liberation, so I'll go with it.

Okay, okay, let me tell you. It's basically dressing yourself in bright colors to boost your mood and you know, make you feel better and have a better day. Do you think this could be a thing? Could be? Could there be some science behind this?

There might be, But I like dressing in brighter colors because it makes me feel better and it brings pleasure to those around me. The science behind it is much too hard to understand, given that we don't even know how anesthetics work. And have you heard people talk about the endorphin high you get from running?

Oh, experience that all the time. I'm training for half marathon right now.

You can, you can do half a marathon.

I'm about to do one in the week after next, so I know exactly about the runners ry. Thank you. I haven't done it yet, Just wait till I do it.

And you know, there's nothing to do with endorphins.

What what's it to do with?

Then marijuana?

There we go.

You see endorphins The word stands for endogenous morphine. Yes, and you get rid of the gymus and morph and you lend with left with endorphin endogenous means from within endo from within genus generated morphine, and you just get rid of the midle one so and let them do with somethings. But it turns out that the runner is high is due to a family of chemicals called cannabinoids, which is several hundred and a turner simple simplfy and say, oh, the runner is high is due to an endorphin or dopamine or serotonin. People who are just about most people who visited the three or two. There several hundred neurotransmitters and it's much more complicated than that. So I am very impressive. You can do a half marathon. Good on you, so.

Should what should we call it? Then? Instead we just still call it the runners high. But it's just a number of chemicals pumping through our body to make us feel Because you feel so amazing after you go.

For a run, you do just say cannabinoids, okay or endo cannabinoids endo meaning from within cannabinoids as related to marijuana, because if you think about it, how come morphine or marijuana, which come from plants affect us who are made of meat and then you go into the whole pharmacology thing and we won't go into that because we haven't got time. But anyway, do you enjoy your natural morphine natural marijuana as why you go running?

I will, I'll tell that to my husband. I don't think you're very impressed, but just going out for my little cannabis cannabis run just before we go. You're at book four. I mean that is phenomenal. Well done. Do you have a favorite one?

Is this?

Because this one's a little bit different from the rest.

I did like it because it gave me some insights into myself. After reading it back, I realized that what was important was curiosity, optimism, and generosity in that I have been so lucky that many people have been generous to me, occasionally with money, but more often with their time and their effort and their support intellectual and emotional. So they're big things and that's why I liked writing it. So at the moment, it's my favorite book. And until I start working on number forty.

Nine, well, I think, well, thank you for being so generous with all your wisdom and knowledge you know over the decades, because you know you've touched so many Australians with what you know and the sharing of your wisdom. So thank you for coming on Extra Healthy.

Oh, doctor Felicity, thank you so much.

Have you read Michael Pollin's book called In Defense of Food. It's a good one. It's got some really excellent nutrition wisdom in there, and I, like doctor Carl, do believe in the tagline eat plants well, eat food mostly plants is his famous mantra. If you do want to read more about Karl and He's fascinating life, grab his book. It is called a Periodic Tale and it is out now. If you did enjoy this podcast, tell us rate and review it, or of course you can subscribe anything else. Head to Body and Soul dot com dot you follow us on socials. Grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow, stakes you Healthy.