The study participants were just ordinary men who were called upon by their patriotic feelings and said, you know, do you want to do your patriotic duty? That's a lot of pressure. And that's not your life. This is not something that's your career. You're being asked to do something that's just totally out of the ordinary. Back then, the term epigenetic even existed. People did not know kind of what the interaction of genes and environment is. Today, we actually know that starvation has lifelong consequences. They actually change the methylation patterns of your genes ... There's actually a lot of damage that is going to be done for your entire life.
Author, psychologist and professional poker player Maria Konnikova joins the show as Revisionist History’s first ombudsman. Maria advocates for the audience, reading letters from listeners and challenging Malcolm on matters great and small. They discuss how iodized salt is changing lives, the ethics of the Minnesota starvation experiments, and the ever-changing guidance around drinking alcohol. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.
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