Hey everyone. Welcome back to Lifespan. The team and I went down many different investigative rabbit holes for this episode. One of the most interesting was food marketing and bad nutrition science. And it really made me realize how much of our struggle to keep our weight down is due to marketing, some of which goes back to the early 20th century. So we're going to talk about that in this show. And during the filming of this episode, I showed one of my most valued books from my collection, and I also shared something that really fascinates me—how a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal toe bone fragment about the size of a large pea from a cave in Siberia might actually help explain why some of us gain weight so easily, myself included.
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I once held this bone in my hand at our Harvard Genetics Department faculty meeting. Professor David Reich, the scientist who sequenced the DNA out of that bone, has a lab just down the hall from mine, and I see his clean lab all the time. Of course, I'm not allowed in there—it would contaminate everything. In this episode, there was so much to cover that I couldn't finish it all in one sitting. It actually took a lot of work. So see if you can spot any cuts in the episode where I have suddenly longer hair. As always, of course, we really appreciate you hitting that subscribe button and joining us at www.lifespan.com.