Mini-Episode: Cool Facts Friday #8

Welcome to another edition of Cool Facts Friday. I love doing this and if you have ideas for me, things that I should know about that you think would make a cool fact, just go to my daveasprey.com page and go to the podcast button on there and you can submit a cool fact for me and I'll probably read it at least if it's cool. This cool fact is about why butter won't spread. It turns out people throughout Canada are complaining that the butter they buy spirit stopped melting the way butter normally does. And when food scientists looked into it, they found that farmers across Canada and around the world too are upping the amount of a derivative of palm oil that they put in their cow's feed. Well, why would they do this? Butter has been flying off the shelves since the beginning of the pandemic. I like to think because of bulletproof coffee. But maybe it's just because more people are cooking at home and butter is better for you and tastes better than a lot of the crappy seed oils that you guys know not to eat. But what that meant was that farmers, industrial farmers, said, well, what if we add more palm oil, which does kill orangutans and destroys the environment, we can add that to cow's feed and that increases the amount of butter fat in milk at a very low price. Unfortunately, butter fat can be made of whatever fat the cow eats. So when cows eat grass, they make good butterfat. When they eat palm oil, they make high palm oil butter fat, but they can still sell it the same way. And more palmitic acid leads to harder butter that doesn't melt very easily, so it crumbles on your toast. Ideally gluten free toast. Right. But when compared to organic butter, it doesn't smell the same, it doesn't taste the same, and it's sort of a hollow echo of what real butter is. What does that mean for you? Well, if you live in Canada like I do, then you might notice a difference and you want to go for grass fed butter. And if you live anywhere else in the world, like the US where I'm. If your butter doesn't spread or crumble right, and it's not grass fed, well, now you know why. So switch to grass fed butter. You'll find it is affordable. You can get brands like Kerrygold and some New Zealand things as well that are about $3 a pound, so it's still very affordable, maybe $4 a pound, depending on where you live. And this is a major change in how you feel. But who would have thought that the farmers are actually tweaking what they feed the cows so they can make something that looks like butter but doesn't act like butter. This cool fact is about teenagers, sleep and Mental Health There's a significant relationship between poor sleep and mental health issues in kids. According to brand new research that came out in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, kids who don't sleep well are more likely to experience later problems with mental health, even when they're adults. And and researchers from England's University of Reading and Goldsmith University and Australia's flinders University asked 5,000 teens about depression, anxiety and quality and quantity of sleep. And the control group of teenagers got about eight hours of sleep a night on school nights and about nine and a half hours of sleep on weekends. Depressed teens got seven and a quarter hours on each school night and only a little bit over nine hours of sleep on weekends. That extra 45 minutes matters a lot of the National Sleep foundation recommends teens get between eight to 10 hours of sleep every night between 14 and 17. And what does that mean for you? Well, one of the study's lead researchers says poor sleep during adolescence is a fork in the road where a teen's mental health can deteriorate if not treated. So ask your teen about their sleep and what's keeping them up so late. Or if you're a teen, ask yourself. It could be your homework, could be too much stress on devices or hey, trying to date. And because you already know the benefits of sleep, you can prioritize your own sleep or help your kids do it as well. And this is something I do with my own kids. If your teen has trouble sleeping or there's changing hormones, sometimes cooling off sleep can help a lot. Chilly sleep water based mattress toppers are a customizable, climate controlled thing you can use with your kids. And there's lots of other sleep interventions. Teach your kids and get it in your own head that sleep is about having more power to learn and have fun. Sleep isn't a chore. Sleep is something that you do just like eating. This cool fact is about how your memories have unique fingerprints in your brain. And we finally figured it out. We really don't yet know in the field of cognitive science how memories work. But this new research shows that each person has their own signature of neurological activity, which basically are fingerprints for recalling a memory. And our broad architecture and organization in our brains is universal. And but there are really big differences between how people reimagine a common scenario and now we can quantify it in brain activity. This research comes out of the University of Rochester Medical center, and they noted that a lot of the regions that fire up with memories are the ones that decline in function as you age, and they're the ones that degenerate if you have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or something like that. So what does it mean for you? If you want to keep your memory, keep your brain's metabolism working very well and your own memory unique fingerprints will keep working, which is really important. Before this, we weren't sure that the memories were in those vulnerable areas of the brain. So if you want to be 180 like me and remember your own name, start paying attention to your brain metabolism. I would love to know more of the cool facts that got you excited. Go to daveasprey.com and click on the podcast button and send them in to me. I actually read the studies you send me. It's one of the sources of knowledge for me and I appreciate it.

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