This week on The Naked Scientists, A damning indictment of our politicians’ grasp of science emerges from the Covid Inquiry. Also, we’ll ask who is behind the high-profile cyber hacks on the British Library. And, how researchers got to the bottom of why some of us get red-wine headaches?
In this episode
00:56 - COVID inquiry reveals lack of governmental science knowledge
COVID inquiry reveals lack of governmental science knowledge
Julian Huppert, Jesus College Cambridge & Charlotte Summers, University of Cambridge
the Covid inquiry here in the UK has been hearing in recent days from some of the country’s most respected scientists - including Sir Patrick Vallance who served as the government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick told the inquiry that top scientists were often excluded from crucial meetings as the virus took hold, not listened to on key policy decisions on lockdowns and that leaders across Europe - including the then UK prime minister Boris Johnson - often had only a rudimentary grasp of science:
Patrick - I think I'm right in saying that the prime minister at the time gave up science when he was 15. And I think he'd be the first to admit it wasn't his forte and that he did struggle with some of the concepts and we did need to repeat them often. I would also say that a meeting that sticks in my mind was with fellow science advisors from across Europe when one of them, and I won't say which country, declared that the leader of that country had enormous problems with exponential curves and the entire phone call burst into laughter because it was true in every country. So I do not think that there was necessarily a unique inability to grasp some of these concepts with the Prime Minister at the time, but it was hard work sometimes.
Sir Patrick Vallance.
To explore this further is Dr Julian Huppert, a chemist and former Member of Parliament for Cambridge, and Charlotte Summers, professor of intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge. Both were key actors in various ways during the pandemic, and Charlotte’s also scheduled to give evidence to the Covid inquiry in due course. The first point of discussion was this issue of scientific literacy raised by Patrick Vallance…
Julian - We don't need civil servants or politicians or any other group like that to be expert scientists necessarily. We need them to be able to understand science, how to use it, what it can do, what it can't do, and what use that will be. And so there are people who are non-STEM graduates who I would not fault at all for their ability to think about science. But there is also a large set who really don't understand it. And for some of them they might even be sort of quite anti-science. Boris in some ways I think was a bit like that at times. But there's also a set who almost over deify science, who think that they don't understand science but it can do magic things. Though they're not interested in understanding the uncertainties that come with science, the trade-offs and, again, what science can do and what science can't do. And also more porosity where more people from a scientific or medical background spend time in government and then move back out. So there is more mutual understanding because equally some scientists don't understand the constraints of government decision making.
Chris - Why do you think there is a paucity of science and the representation of people from a science background like you? Why were you so much in the minority when you were in parliament?
Julian - Yeah, so it depends how you define it, but there were two of us with science PhDs in the Commons. I think it's partly because the way people think about politics, and what people believe politics is, puts a lot of people off who come from a STEM background. And it's definitely a problem. But there's a lovely line from the West Wing - 'decisions are made by those who show up.' And the problem is that if people who care about evidence, who care about science, who care about research, don't go into politics, don't go into government. By definition, it's the other people who get there. My own work, which I think was quite good about fascinating four stranded DNA structures. It wasn't that that I needed, it was the mindset of what science can and can't do.
Chris - In some respects then, what Rishi Sunak is trying to do, where he's trying to push maths further for longer for everyone, that's sort of founded on that principle then, isn't it?
Julian - Oh absolutely. And there are many countries, Australia for example, where they've had that for a very long time. I don't think he's wrong to try to encourage that. I think we overspecialise too early. The idea that at 15 you say 'I will do science or I will not do science' strikes me as absurd.
Chris - So what's your view of the COVID inquiry? Do you think this is a massive waste of money or do you think, and have you heard so far, things which you think are useful and pertinent, notwithstanding the fact that your co-contribution Charlotte Summers will be herself giving evidence in one of the future modules?
Julian - Well, I mean that will obviously be the thing to buy tickets for, absolutely. Look, it's important that we do an inquiry, we do it properly. I think there is an over legalistic approach to it, which I worry drags it out and we can't learn all the lessons as quickly as possible. I'm pleased we're doing it. I think there's a lot of things that we should look into about how early decisions were made. Not always with perfect hindsight, but to understand what we learn for the future. So to me it should be principally about lessons not about blame.
Chris - Would you share that sentiment Charlotte?
Charlotte - I would. I am on record as having written in the national press that I am somewhat dubious about whether the history of national inquiries into all sorts of things has led to fundamental changes and how we would deal with similar events going forwards. I think one of the things that has been highlighted this last week that's come out of the inquiry that feeds on from Julian's talking about people participating in public life from science backgrounds. I've been really struck by evidence from both Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van-Tam about the downsides of them being public scientists. Always shocked to hear Professor Whitty say that actually he had to have close protection for nine months because of the response to him being involved. The concern is, in the future, people may choose not to contribute to public life because of the cost. And I think we have to find ways to improve that because otherwise whatever the next crisis, if people hesitate to come forward and provide their expertise, we're going to have a significant problem.
Chris - Julian?
Julian - I think that's absolutely right and those stories were absolutely terrifying. Actually, I was really concerned at the time by some of the excessive focus that Boris Johnson put on 'we will do what the science says.' And I think that's part of the thing is it's an unfair burden to put on scientists because there are some questions which science can answer. If we do this, what happens? What's the likely effect on spread if we do this to schools, what's the likely effect on a child's education, et cetera. But science can never tell you which policy decision is the correct one to take. So I think it's really important throughout, with the pandemic but with all sorts of other advice, what can evidence tell you and what is value judgments and the proper domain of politics and policy.
Chris - Indeed because Chris Whitty put it very well because to quote him, he said, 'you end up with spurious numbers informing more spurious numbers.' Did you find, Charlotte, that the fact that people really do struggle to understand and comprehend risk was a problem in trying to balance how you delivered the service that you had to deliver during COVID
Charlotte - Risk, and there's been huge amounts of work in all kinds of domains, is something that people struggle to understand every single day. When they're going to have a surgery, they are told there's an X percentage risk of this outcome or this outcome. And those risks don't necessarily mean anything in a way that's comprehendible. However, if you are one of the people who gets that particular complication, the risk feels very different to you on an individual basis because you've got a hundred percent of that bad outcome. Whereas the other, if it's a 1% risk, 99% of people didn't get it. It Is very hard to communicate risk and I think the other issue was that there was the idea that we were following 'the science' as though science is a single immutable thing that is in some way fixed. But of course the way science works isn't like that. Science is somewhere where we generate a hypothesis. We then try to prove that hypothesis wrong. And when we do prove it wrong with data and evidence, we make a new hypothesis and we keep going round this process because that's how science evolves over time. It is not an actual thing. You can't follow it anywhere other than it leads, but it doesn't stand still and nor do we expect it to. So sometimes those kinds of changes in the evidence base were perceived as u-turns or people not having known what they were talking about for the first time and having changed their mind, as opposed to the data just having shown us something else. So I think the whole idea of following science was really quite challenging.
Chris - Yeah, it led to a toxic U-turn situation, didn't it, Julian? Because the one thing you'd never do in politics is apparently U-turn and it was trying to get across to people that in fact this is a very valid change of direction in reaction to a change in the facts.
Julian - Absolutely. And it's a real problem with the way science is understood because changing your conclusion based on different data, new evidence is of course the right thing to do. But we have this idea that a U-turn is a bad thing that changing your mind means you are wrong. I think there's a fundamental problem that we have to address about the language that we use. We talk in a scientific community about risk, about uncertainty, about errors. In general colloquial parlance, those suggest you don't know what you're talking about. If you say I'm uncertain about the result, that's technically right. But it projects this idea of I don't know what I'm doing. I think the issue about U-turns generally is a big problem because we do penalise leaders who change their minds. I'd love to see us much more generally separated between saying, 'my values have stayed the same, but now I know more things.' The way to optimise my values is different from how I've changed my values.
Chris - So let's finish by asking both of you what you hope will change next time. What you think you've learned personally and what you think the country as a whole has, has learned so that next time this happens, we're in better shape. Let's start with Charlotte. What's on your wishlist?
Charlotte - The public communication of science and the setting in which this outbreak happened in the world of social media, real time news. It's very different handling things and one story that would start somewhere and one part of the globe had rapidly transmitted to another part and often misinformation and disinformation made large aspects of handling the pandemic much harder than they had been previously. And so I think what I would like to see is that, actually as scientists, we have an obligation to communicate better about what we do. It's really, really important that we explain science in a way that is meaningful for people so that we can ensure that the impact of this and misinformation is less substantial next time.
Chris - Julian?
Julian - We didn't have any spare capacity. We said as long as nothing changes, we can just about cope. And obviously one of the problems then was that as soon as you have a little bit more demand, things start to fall apart. We have massively under invested for a long time in prevention and public health. At the beginning of the pandemic, Public Health England had a budget that was I think a bit less than a third of what it was supposed to have when it was set up. And it's perhaps not a surprise that when we haven't invested in public health, we don't have such good health in the public, when something goes wrong. There's a biological weapons venture which is aimed at preventing bioweapons from being developed. It's internationally funded, but has less money and fewer staff than a typical McDonald's franchise. Now that's fine as long as nothing goes wrong. But if we start to have a problem, we massively regret not having spent money in the past on this. It's about having spare capacity so we're not right at the edges. We can cope when things happen that we didn't expect. Investing much more in prevention of public health and things like the social determinants of health so that we're in a much better place when inevitably some bad happens.
13:48 - The British Library falls victim to cyber attack
The British Library falls victim to cyber attack
Ciaran Martin, University of Oxford
The British Library has said that a cyber attack is behind a major outage that is still affecting services across several locations. The website - which is used by millions of people each year - was taken out by criminals at the end October. Ciaran Martin is the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre…
Ciaran - The British Library has suffered a type of cyber attack known as a ransomware attack. It's when a bunch of criminals hack into a network and they do one of two things to the network. One is they lock you out of it, and the other is they steal some data. And if they lock you out of it, it's really hard to function. Your network, you just can't get in. They demand a ransom, that's why it's called ransomware. They say, 'pay us some money and we'll let you back into the network. We've got a key.' And if you don't pay that, then you won't get back in. Now it's clear the British library hasn't paid. So now they said, we've taken some of your data, not clear what they've got and we're gonna sell it to other criminals. So you better pay us now. And again, the library appears not to be paying. That little bit about the data is not really visible. What is visible is the fact that if you go into the British Library and obviously thousands of academics, they're important work depends on access to the British Library's network. It's not been working for several weeks.
Chris - Goodness. And is this part of a general trend or is this just one of those very unfortunate one-off things?
Ciaran - This is part of the biggest problem in cybersecurity. We talk a lot about some of the big catastrophic potential threats of advanced AI and so forth, but this stuff's been around for years and in the 2020s it's got really bad. There've been some extremely serious cases that have put people in danger. Not so much in the UK, thankfully, but next door in Ireland in 2021 there's a body, it's a bit like NHS Commissioning, it sort of organises healthcare provision in the Irish state. And it got done over by a ransomware attack. And it meant that instead of reserving books, reserving hospital appointments, cancer consultations, diagnostics, things like that. That went offline for weeks in Ireland, you can imagine the consequences of that were horrendous. A pipeline in the United States was switched off two years ago, which resulted in fuel shortages and just companies all the time are getting hit by this ransomware. It's a real scourge and it's the biggest problem we've got in cyber defence these days.
Chris - Do we know who these actors are?
Ciaran - Yes, we do. Broadly speaking, it's all about money and it's mostly about Russia, but not necessarily about Putin. Russia is a country with lots of skilled hackers, it's a struggling economy and it doesn't really have the rule of law in the same way that we would have. They're businesses, they really, really are businesses. They research some of their targets. They work out what they can charge in these ransoms. They sell things to each other, they hire each other's services, they're well run businesses. But if you set up a criminal business of this type in the UK or in the US or somewhere in the EU, the police would just come and kick the door down. Now in Russia, whilst there's no real evidence that Putin directs these thugs, for example it would've been pretty serious if Putin had been seen to have ordered a hit on the Irish healthcare system or an American pipeline. The Russian state tolerates them. It appears that the Russian state says, 'look, don't attack Russian business, don't attack Russian citizens. Leave us alone and you won't have any trouble from the police.' And so there's this real problem where there's a safe haven. The Russian constitution prohibits the extradition, they arrest and transfer to other countries of any Russian citizen. So we've got these people, they don't have to set foot in the UK or the EU or North America or wherever to harm us, but we can't send the police after them, which is what we normally do with criminals.
Chris - So what is the remedy? How can we defend ourselves better?
Ciaran - There are two partial remedies. There's no complete remedy, sadly. So one is for governments to put pressure on the criminals and on the Russian state. So before the war in Ukraine, Joe Biden went to meet Vladimir Putin in Geneva and one of his top three agenda items for that summit was taking action against Russian cyber criminals. Now with the war, attention slightly moved on to other things understandably, but western intelligence agencies who have their own cyber operators do their best to take down the digital infrastructure that these criminals are using. And every so often some of these people make stupid mistakes. They either contract with people in the west or they go on holiday in the west and then we try to arrest them. That's a bit whack-a-mole, but we do our best. The solution I'm afraid for organisations is just to try and strengthen two things. One is our own cybersecurity. A lot of these attacks are not the most sophisticated, they're not the sort of Hollywood things that you would imagine the top cyber hackers in the world doing. They're quite simple attacks, exploiting outdated software, some mistakes in the way systems are brought together, all that sort of stuff. So improving that sort of basic cybersecurity is important, and so is what we would call resilience. And resilience essentially means if you do get hit, can you mostly keep going? Can you operate at 50% for a week and then recover within a week? And we need to get better at that too. You know, there is in this first part of so-called ransomware, which is the most serious part, it's the part that's really hitting the British library. The data thing's really a bit of a bluff in my opinion. But the bit where the system isn't working, if you can get a backup system up and running really quickly, then the ransom doesn't really work.
Chris - The fact that the British Library has had problems for a period of time argues that they aren't able to deploy a backup or that they're worried that they're immediately going to get penetrated again because they can't find how these people got in. So what do you think they should do? Should they pay up?
Ciaran - So first of all, they shouldn't pay up and the government tends not to allow public bodies to pay up. There's no law against paying ransoms but the British library is a public authority. And if you do pay up, it's obvious what will happen. They'll come back for more. Britain will be seen as a soft touch and all the British institutions will get whacked by this scourge of criminality.
20:30 - Triple star systems could re-write the cosmic playbook
Triple star systems could re-write the cosmic playbook
René Oudmaijer, University of Leeds
A team of researchers at the University of Leeds say they have made a discovery that may change our understanding of some of the biggest stars in the Universe, so-called “B” stars…
René - My name is René Oudmaijer and I'm currently the head of astrophysics here at the University of Leeds. Since about a hundred years we know that stars coming all kinds of colours and sizes. The heavier, the more massive the stars are, the rarer they are as well. And the particular type of stars that we've been looking at are B stars that are quite massive stars. They're three to ten times the mass of the song. And since 150 years ago, people found that quite a big proportion of them are quite special. They have some sort of emission line from hot gas around it. And basically ever since then, people have been trying to work out what it was and people found that the gas surrounding the star in a kind of a disc. But theories that we have to form the disc have been very few and far between. One of the things that we know, it probably has to do with the fact that these stars rotate very rapidly. But what we still don't know is why would these 'BE' stars, The E stands emission, rotate so rapidly. And that was basically the underlying problem that we wanted to solve.
Chris - When one looks up in the night sky, what proportion of the stars that we're seeing would fall into this category of being these so-called 'BE' stars.
René - The B stars that I'm talking about are perhaps less than 1% of all the stars that we know of. But when I'm looking up in the sky, many more of them are B stars and that's because they're so much brighter than the sun. So we can look at them much further away. So if you want me to make a guesstimate, I think about 10 to 20% of all the stars that we can see with our own eyes might be B stars.
Chris - The quandary then is why they've got this glowing disc of gas around these stars. So how did you try and probe that then? What have you done that people have scratched their heads about for a hundred years plus to try and solve?
René - People have been thinking about how a star can rotate so rapidly. And sometimes stars can just be born that way, but what people have found over the last couple of decades is that a lot of stars are formed in binary stars or double stars. And if these stars are very close to each other, they can actually interact with each other. One star can actually steal material from the other one and in. The process, it'll speed up itself as well. That would be a nice explanation for stars to actually spin up and because they rotate so much quicker can form that disc around them.
Chris - I suppose it's a bit like a couple of ballroom dancers twirling round the dance floor, isn't it? That's what you're saying. And you might have one bigger partner and one smaller partner with one feeding off the other almost. That doesn't go on in Strictly Come Dancing, thank goodness, but that's the sort of concept, isn't it? It's a pair twirling round together.
René - It's a pair twirling around together. And yeah, it depends whether you're doing the jive or the chacha, where you're a bit further away from each other, or whether you're doing the Argentine tango, when you're closer to each other, because you want to be closer to each other for these stars to interact.
Chris - Why stop at two though? Why not have more stars than two? Or does that happen?
René - Oh well Chris, that's actually quite an interesting question because what happened so far is that people have been thinking about the fact that double stars, binary stars, could explain this phenomenon of the BE stars because if they're very close to each other then they can interact and the star can spin up and therefore get you a nice disc. But no one had been looking at many stars and at the difference between normal B stars and BE stars, whether that might be the case. We managed to be able to do that by using the results of a fantastic new satellite called GAIA. We looked at more than a thousand objects and what we found was that there was really something different between B stars and BE stars, when you look very up close. For all distances between the stars, the number of double stars that we found was basically the same. But very close in, there was a big difference between the B stars and the BE stars. And we found that that's probably accounting for the fact that indeed stars are eating up their companion star and they become so dim that you don't detect them as a binary. That was a very counterintuitive result. And then we started thinking about what needs to be done for a binary companion to be eaten up. It needs to be close to the main star, the BE star. And it turns out that if you have a third star in the neighbourhood, then the chances of two stars moving towards each other are so large that interaction almost becomes inevitable. So what we found is that at first there were ideas that binary stars might explain the idea that you can have B star, BE star with a disc around it. And we confirm that, but it turns out it's necessary, almost, to get a third star to make that happen. So in the idea of dancing, you probably need a dancing teacher to tell you what to do a little bit further away and looking at you.
Chris - And how does this change, apart from accounting for the observation and giving us a neat explanation for why we see what we see, how does this change the big picture of what we understand about the evolution of stars and so on?
René - I think it changes the picture big time to be honest Chris, because one of the main things that has come out of astrophysics in the last 10 years is the detection of gravitational waves. Huge explosions that actually make the space time continuum vibrate a little bit and nowadays we are able to actually detect these very tiny vibrations in the fabric of space. These gravitational waves are now found to be the result of double neutron stars or even double black holes. Well also dancing together, getting very close to each other and merging. So now we're at the stage where we know that these gravitational waves are due to binary stars, the remnants of stellar revolutions, and neutron stars, the result of a supernova for example. But if we want to understand how we got there, we need to understand the formation of double stars and the evolution, the life cycle, of a double star. And I think finding now that these BE stars that could become neutron stars at the end of their lives are due to the interaction with the third star. It means that we now not only need to take into go binary star evolution, but probably triple star evolution to understand, for example, these gravitational waves.
27:17 - The reason for 'red wine headaches' is revealed
The reason for 'red wine headaches' is revealed
Andrew Waterhouse, University of California Davis
Researchers in the United States say they may have cracked why some people get a headache after just one small glass of red wine, even though they are fine drinking other types of alcohol. It’s all down to a natural “sunscreen” molecule made by red grapes called “quercetin”. Professor Andrew Waterhouse is from the University of California Davis.
Andrew - So I was talking to a winemaker in Napa Valley and he was having trouble with wine headaches and I said, 'you know, I think one possibility is there's a compound in wine that causes vasorelaxation and that's known to cause some headaches.' And he said, 'oh, that doesn't cause real serious headaches. It's an inflammatory response that gives serious headaches.' That was a bit deflating, but after thinking about how we get inflammation when people drink wine, I thought of this situation where some people, mostly East Asians, when they drink they get a flushing reaction and that's inflammatory. Their skin turns red. And so I started looking into whether those folks get headaches? And it turns out they do. Then I looked into how this happened? How do these people get this inflammatory response and this flushing? And it turns out they have an enzyme used to clear acid aldehyde, which is a normal metabolite of alcohol. So when you consume alcohol, it's broken down in two steps. First is acetaldehyde, which is somewhat toxic. And then we have a second enzyme that quickly clears it. Problem is for those folks who get flushing, the second enzyme does not work well. So is it possible that something in wine could be blocking that second enzyme?
Chris - Does that mean then that something in the wine can inhibit the removal of the acetaldehyde, which is the first thing that alcohol gets broken down to in the body, so that that builds up to a level that would be higher than normal. And that's what gives people a bright red face and a tendency or preponderance to get a headache in the aftermath with some red wine?
Andrew - Exactly. The approach I took was to say, okay, since I've worked on wine chemistry for 30 years, I have, in the back of my head, a pretty good inventory of what's in red wine that's different from white wine. So I started looking through that list of compounds to see if any of them have been reported to inhibit the enzyme. And that's when I stumbled upon quercetin. Quercetin is much higher in red wine than in white wine. Levels are tenfold or greater.
Chris - It's in the skin, isn't it?
Andrew - Yes, the grapes produce it in response to sunlight. It's like sunscreen for grapes. It just happens to block the metabolic process and lead to accumulation of acetaldehyde. So what we did actually for our experiment was we simply got this enzyme and tested a series of wine phenolics to see if they would inhibit the enzyme. And it turns out a specific metabolite of quercetin inhibits it very well.
Chris - Does that mean then you drink this stuff, it gets metabolised in your body into the thing that inhibits the enzyme? Or does it just do it without any further metabolism in the body? Is it a direct inhibitor there from the get-go?
Andrew - There's a little bit of a nuance here. When you consume quercetin into your body, your body converts most of it to quercetin glucuronide. It's a metabolite form that helps your body clear it from your system.
Chris - And in the process of trying to clear it, you actually effectively activate or enhance the inhibitory effects. So you need a little while to metabolise your red wine. And then it starts to become more potent as a way of making you have a headache. So does that mean then that the more red wine I drink, the more likely I am to get a headache, but not just because I'm boozing, but because I'm building up this metabolite and any alcohol I've then consumed is gonna contribute to this mix?
Andrew - Well I don't recommend drinking a lot, but the occurrence of a headache, everyone doesn't experience that. So some people get a headache as soon as they start drinking red wine and some never do. So we're not sure how to explain that. I mean we presume that there's obviously a difference in their metabolic systems, but the details of course are going to take more research
Chris - Given that you've identified and you can point the finger at at least one causative molecule that does this. I'm staring at a cheeky little French Côtes du Rhône. Is that as bad as say one of your Napa Valley wines or are all red wines made equal? How are you going to take this forward?
Andrew - Well, it turns out that because the grapes produce this in response to sunlight, winemakers can actually modify the levels by adjusting the amount of sun the grapes experience. One of the problems with reducing sun exposure is that a certain amount in fact enhances the quality of red wine. And if you look in famous vineyards, you'll see that the vines are relatively small and often, or most of the time, you can see the grapes. And since you can see the grapes, the sun can see the grapes and the grapes get exposed directly to some sunlight. On the other hand, very inexpensive wine generally comes from very large vines, which have a lot of shade over the fruit. They need all that, all those leaves, to produce enough sugar to ripen the fruit because they usually have a large crop. So the only advice I can give you today is that less expensive wines are most likely going to have less of the quercetin in its various forms.
Chris - So can you share with us your favourite tipple as a wine chemist? You must have one that you are prepared to put your name behind, either extremely worth the headache or one that definitely doesn't go headache positive.
Andrew - Oh boy. In California there's a wine company that makes some very nice Zinfandels. And I like Zinfandel because it's sort of the iconic California grape. And there's a company called Ridge that has been making very good Zinfandels for about 50 years. And so if I was going to recommend one wine, I would say a California Zinfandel and I believe you might even be able to find that brand in UK wine shops.
Are dietary seeds digested?
Thanks to King's College London's Sarah Berry for the answer!
James - I'm delighted to be joined by nutritionist Sarah Berry who's going to help us answer this question. Fraser is right, isn't he? Seeds can pass through our digestive system without actually being digested.
Sarah - It's a double-edged sword. In one respect, by them passing through our system, it means that they actually have a lower energy content and the back of pack labelling would show. So for people that are wanting to control their weight, they might be a great choice, but it does mean that you are not extracting all of the wonderful nutrients that are within many seeds.
James - Fraser mentions the scientists who crunch, grind, dissolve, and whatever else they do. And I think he's referring to you when he says that. What do your tests reveal about the nutritional benefits of seeds, particularly, as he mentions, in support of our healthy microbiome?
Sarah - Yeah, so I think first it would be good to quantify a little bit about how much actually reaches our large intestine. And this is something that I've been particularly interested in during my research at King's. And we've been using the almond nut to illustrate this. And the almond nut actually is a seed. Many nuts are actually seeds and we've done some work where we feed people whole nuts or we feed people really finely ground nuts. And what we see is if you feed people whole nuts, a large proportion, as you've said actually, is excreted, comes out in the poo. But the advantage of this as well as its meaning that for those that are wanting to lose weight, it's a lower calorie food, is that you are feeding, instead of yourself, you are feeding all of these trillions of gut microbes. So species that are associated with lower inflammation, lower body fat, lower blood cholesterol, lower blood pressure, and so forth. And we think this is because all of this fibre and other parts of the seeds reach the large intestine, allowing healthy gut species to grow and then have their favourable impacts on our health.
James - So you heard it here, Fraser, a big thumbs up to lots of different seeds in your diet. Thanks for sending that question in. And thanks to you, Sarah, for helping us find the answer.
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